Natural Lighting Artificial lighting Lighting Angles How many lights do you need? Lighting Ratios Photography is the art of illusion, tricking the viewer into thinking an image reproduced on a two-dimensional piece of paper or a comput ...

Outdoor portraits can offer a sense a drama or romance that can be hard to achieve in a studio setting. The early morning or evening sky can serve as a stunning backdrop for a portrait. The trick is in lighting your subject properly. T ...

So, we already know that direct flash from your built-in flash gives unflattering results, to say the least. Using your speedlight in the same way won’t change much. I did mention that you can redirect the light by rotating the head of your f ...

Inside each lens is a diaphragm that can open and close, the size of the opening at any given setting is what we refer to as the aperture setting. On our cameras we refer to specific size settings as f-stops such as f/2.8, f/5.6, f/11, etc. W ...

"The physical law of light states that "the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence". The angle of incidence is the angle that light is striking a surface. The angle of reflection is the angle that the light is reflected, or bo ...

How to create the high key image outdoors 1. Set up a white diffuser or diffusion panel behind your subject like a backdrop. (Make sure the sun is behind diffuser but not necessarily low in the sky) 2. Set up a second diffuser above you ...

This lesson shows a very effective method for shooting a full-length fashion shot in the studio using strobe lights and large soft boxes. This shot was lit with a 5-foot OctoDome3 and strobe as the main light, a large LiteDome and strob ...

While shooting portraits at the beach can be great fun, harsh lighting from the direct sunlight can result in blown-out highlights, distracting shadows, or squinting from your model. This lesson will show a technique that we like to use fo ...

By now, most of you have read many times as I have walked through the process of balancing my flashes and ambient. I want to get past that. Today, I want to accomplish two things: 1. To set you up with a way of quickly understanding and ...

"This is a DIY project I have had in mind for a while now. When I purchased my studio flash heads, they came with a couple of small softboxes. Although I prefer to use translucent umbrellas whenever I can (small, light, easy to transport), th ...

An important concept to understand when dealing with studio lighting for portrait photography is contrast. Contrast is the difference in the amount of light that falls on the dark areas of a scene and the amount of light that falls on the hig ...

"Typical indoor ambient light, for instance, might be about 1/60th at 4/f at ISO 400. So If I shoot you in that light, available only, you are going to be properly exposed. You'll still probably look pretty bad -- we nailed the quantity, but ...

Metering systems are calibrated to a certain light value in order to gurantee constant exposure settings: 18% gray is commonly accepted because a typical scene seems reflect the same amount of light as this gray value. As a framework for c ...

I have always loved using off-camera camera flashes and want to extend my arsenal of different flash modifiers. In this first round I will concentrate on the type you can mount directly on the flash. I may return to umbrellas, softboxes, diff ...

The first thing you have to ask yourself before choosing the flash setting for your umbrella is, how big do you want your light source to be? But before we get to that, let's make sure we all know what we mean by "zoom setting." Re ...