As a complement to my previous posts on beauty photography (part 1, part 2), I thought I'd further elaborate by going over a real life example from a shoot I did last week. This one is also made a little bit more interesting by virtue of the fact that I got to work with a dark skin model, which has subtle impacts on both the lighting and retouching processes.
T[...]
Category archives: lighting
Shallow Depth of Field in Studio Portraits
Who doesn't love a portrait with a nice, creamy shallow depth of field? It's certainly a look that I love and use often. While its application is fairly straightforward outdoors under natural light, in the studio things become a bit more tricky. Typically when shooting in the studio with strobes, we'll close down our f-stop to around f/11 to cancel out the ambient[...]
Beauty Photography – Lighting and Retouching
In part 1 of this two part post on beauty photography we covered the details of organizing and budgeting for shoot day. In this part we'll be focused more on concrete techniques such as common lighting configurations, camera settings and briefly discuss some important retouching techniques and steps.
In Camera Technique
As far as camera settings go it's pretty s[...]
Elinchrom Ranger Quadra Review
Having used the Elinchrom Ranger Quadra for nearly a month now, I thought I'd share some thoughts on the product and offer up some suggestions on use and who it's best suited for. For those that may be unfamiliar with it, the Quadra is a portable battery powered strobe with an available flash output of 400ws. The Ranger Quadra is the little brother of the full blown R[...]
Getting Started with Dance Photography
Having recently done an in studio dance shoot, I can say without hesitation that dance photography will test your creativity and lighting prowess. If photographing on location, dance photography can be done with great success using little more than one light or no lights at all. The location allows you to juxtapose the softness or edginess of a pose against the dancer[...]