Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
This has to be one of the silliest things I’ve seen for a while. Not the product itself, but how it’s being marketed. Iris claims to offer professional automated headshots in a booth for $20. Your $20 gets you a “photo session” including half a dozen shots, “helpful posing tips”, and one free high res digital file (the other 5 cost an extra $5 each).
When you watch the promo video, don’t worry, your speakers aren’t broken, there’s just no audio to go with it.
Sometimes even in the crappiest conditions you can make great photos. Although, I thought this was impossible in the part of the city where I live. However, this video from Jordan Matter helped me change my point of view. It shows you how to choose great locations for your headshots even when you’re limited to a very ugly neighborhood.
Jordan wanders around the neighborhood he says to be the ugliest in New York City (I don’t know which one it is, though). Only one block around his studio, he and his model Juliette Garrett managed to find five locations to make excellent portraits.
Working with minimal equipment can be a fun challenge. If you’re just starting out and have only limited gear, it can be your only choice. But what can you do to help make that one light produce more interesting results? Well, with the help of some flags and reflectors, you can do quite a bit.
This video from Morgan Cooper of Cooper Films shows us how it’s all set up and what task each component achieves. He is demonstrating the setup in relation to film, and he is using a rather expensive Arri SkyPanel LED light. But, the techniques can be used with much less expensive lights, such as the Aputure Amaran AL-HR672W. You can also apply the same principles to stills photography using a speedlight in a small softbox.
Really quick and dirty article for you this week on a handy little tip I found myself having to find for a solution to a problem.
I was doing a photoshoot with this subject when I noticed how awesome the decking looked, I decided that I wanted to get a shot of him led down on the decking but still wanted that jawline / chin to pop. He didn’t feel comfortable forcing his chin towards the camera while laying down due it being difficult as hell because your head is heavy!
One question that I see coming up daily in various photography groups on Facebook is “What’s the best portrait lens?”, and the simple truth is that there isn’t one. It depends on the camera system you’re using, the look you’re trying to achieve, and a bunch of other factors.
In this video, Joe Edelman shares his wisdom and offers some advice on choosing a lens that will give you the look you want in your portraits.
Originally from Ghana, photographer DextDee Livingstone had to travel all the way to China to discover his passion for shooting portraits, but we’re sure glad that he did.
Now back in Ghana, DIYP got in touch with DextDee to find out more about him, and to get some insight into how one particularly striking portrait of Doris was made.
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