Mark Duffy Archives - DIY Photography

This beginner’s guide to using strobes will help you decide what to buy and how to use it

March 15, 2021 by John Aldred 2 Comments

Speedlights and strobes can be quite intimidating to new photographers who’ve never had personal experience with them before. Particularly strobes. They’re really not all that difficult to get to grips with. There is a learning curve, for sure, but it’s a fairly short one to get going with the basics.

Photographer Mark Duffy recently gave a tutorial on the basics of strobes in a live stream for UK gear distributor, Transcontinenta. Not wanting to limit the information contained within to just the live stream viewers, Mark’s also shared a copy of the stream to his YouTube channel for everybody else to enjoy, too.

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Here’s how you can light product photography using small LED light sources

October 27, 2020 by John Aldred Leave a Comment

Lighting products is a lot of fun, but it can be quite tricky. Most lights we use in the studio for shooting products are huge. They’re often big strobes or LED panels, but sometimes you just need something small. Something you can fit into a small space and light up just a small section of a product, or indeed the whole of a small product.

In this video, photographer Mark Duffy shows us how he uses Spiffy Gear’s new KYU-6 LED lights to light up an Xbox controller for a little bit of small product photography.

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Watch and learn how light paint your product photography with LED lights and strobes

September 12, 2020 by John Aldred Leave a Comment

Product photography can be a lot of fun, especially when you start to experiment with light painting. In this video, photographer Mark Duffy shows us how he does his long exposure product photography using the new KYU 6 LED lights and Godox MS300 strobes in the studio on a pair of trainers (or “sneakers”, for those of you in the US).

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This perfect day-to-night shot took over 18 months to make

August 12, 2020 by Dunja Djudjic 1 Comment

The beauty is in simplicity, but even simplicity takes a whole lot of effort and planning. Mark Duffy’s fantastic day-to-night image of a sundial is the perfect example of this. While it was composed from two photos only, it took Mark over 18 months to get it exactly as he imagined. So how did he do it? He shared a bit of the information about the photo with DIYP and revealed why it took so long to make it.

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How I shot the Gnarbox getting loaded in the speed of light

August 8, 2020 by Mark Duffy 1 Comment

I wanted to shoot a conceptual photo using long exposure to show the SD card flying out of my camera and into the Gnarbox*. I used the cool Spiffy Gear Lumee RGB light to achieve this.

Here is a quick breakthrough on how the show was made including the BTS, lighting, and gear used.

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Check out this beginner’s guide to layer masks in Photoshop

June 8, 2020 by John Aldred Leave a Comment

Layer masks are one of the most wonderful and powerful tools that have ever been added to Photoshop’s repertoire. Trying to imagine what life was like before them just seems kind of light a nightmare. I use them almost daily in my work with Photoshop, whether it be for photography projects or images to illustrate articles here on DIYP.

But they’re a little confusing for those still learning Photoshop, and there’s a lot more to them than most people think, too. Fortunately, landscape and commercial photographer Mark Duffy has put together this handy 17-minute guide going over everything you ever needed to know to get started with layer masks.

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