DIY Photography

Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time

  • News
  • Inspiration
  • Reviews
  • Tutorials
  • DIY
  • Gear
Search

Submit A Story

How to balance your strobes with ambient light on location

Jul 2, 2019 by John Aldred Leave a Comment
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Many users of flash feel quite comfortable with it in the studio. The studio makes things fairly straightforward. You expose to eliminate all the ambient light and then you add it back where you want it with your strobes or speedlights. But when many newer flash users struggle when they get out on location, where you can’t or don’t want to completely kill the ambient light, but need to add flash.

In this video, Jay P Morgan at The Slanted Lens looks at how to mix strobes with the ambient light and how to balance them outdoors to achieve a good exposure.

[Read More…]

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

How to build your own DIY floating balloon LED light using a few shower curtains

Jun 19, 2019 by John Aldred 4 Comments
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Balloon lights are an uncommon light source for most of us. But such lights are often used in TV and movie production. They’re essentially huge light sources that are overhead of your subjects using very bright bulbs. The balloon part of it acts like a big diffuser to help soften and spread the light out more evenly. They’re not cheap, though.

But this DIY option from Todd Blankenship at Shutterstock shows us a way to make one fairly easily using some shower curtains, LED strips and helium.

[Read More…]

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Elinchrom launches the ELB 500 TTL – Their most powerful portable TTL strobe ever

Mar 5, 2018 by John Aldred 10 Comments
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

TTL seems to have become all the rage for big strobes the last few years. There are now TTL strobe options from Godox, Profoto and even Cactus, amongst others. Now Elinchrom up their game with the new ELB 500 TTL; A 500Ws pack & head system offering TTL, High Speed Sync all the way up to 1/8000sec, and 400 full power flashes on a single charge for use both on location and in the studio.

[Read More…]

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

How this portrait was made from concept to completion

Nov 22, 2017 by John Aldred 1 Comment
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

It’s not often that a behind the scenes or tutorial video goes over the entire process of an image’s creation. Usually, they cover only a specific aspect of it. Often that’s just the gear used, just the lighting set, or just the post work. Great if you want help with a particular element of a shoot, but they don’t really provide the entire picture (no pun intended).

In this video, portrait photographer Francisco Hernandez goes over his entire process for creating this shot. He covers everything from how he found the model to picking the location through to actually shooting & post-processing the final shot.

[Read More…]

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Trending Quizzes

DIYP Quiz: AI or photo?

DIYP Quiz: Phone or a camera?

quiz phone or a camera

DIYP Quiz: Can you tell who took this photo?

more quizzes

See the pros and cons of using natural light and off camera flash outdoors

Sep 16, 2017 by John Aldred 7 Comments
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Before the proliferation of speedlights and portable strobes over the last few years, people always asked me why I’d take flash out in the daytime. It was often difficult to formulate an answer that they’d accept. They never really “got it” unless I took them on a shoot with me so they could see first hand.

This video from photographer Manny Ortiz embodies the answer in my head, though. Essentially it’s about having options. Sometimes the natural light will give me exactly what I want, and sometimes it won’t. In the horrible British weather, for me it’s more often won’t. So, I take flash with me.

[Read More…]

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Submit A Story

Get our FREE Lighting Book

DIYP lighting book cover

* download requires newsletter signup
DIYPhotography

Recent Comments

Free Resources

Advanced lighting book

Recent Posts

  • The best photo-video April’s fools jokes for 2023
  • Clay Cook’s trippy portraits are the perfect combination of AI and real photography
  • Canon is starting to let 3rd parties make RF mount lenses
  • Canon recalls some EOS R10 bodies over “loud noises”
  • Netflix sued for using unauthorized drone footage in advertisement

Alex Baker is a portrait and lifestyle driven photographer based in Valencia, Spain. She works on a range of projects from commercial to fine art and has had work featured in publications such as The Daily Mail, Conde Nast Traveller and El Mundo, and has exhibited work across Europe

Dave Williams is an accomplished travel photographer, writer, and best-selling author from the UK. He is also a photography educator and published Aurora expert. Dave has traveled extensively in recent years, capturing stunning images from around the world in a modified van. His work has been featured in various publications and he has worked with notable brands such as Skoda, EE, Boeing, Huawei, Microsoft, BMW, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Discovery, BBC, The Guardian, ESPN, NBC, and many others.

John Aldred is a photographer with over 20 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter - and occasional beta tester - of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.

Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.

Copyright © DIYPhotography 2006 - 2023 | About | Contact | Advertise | Write for DIYP | Full Disclosure | Privacy Policy