Well, this one took a while, but was worth the wait. My new training video titled Introduction to Professional Lighting is finally available. As a photographer I believe you must understand light to truly understand photography. Light is the main tool photographers have to create a three dimensional world on a flat piece of photographic paper.

In this video, you will learn what is meant by quality of light - and how it defines our subjects form, shape, texture, and creates the desired mood of the portrait.

In the first section we will explain what makes light hard or soft, and the importance of specular highlights to create depth in the photograph.

Next, we will take a look at studio lights and all the light modifiers available - such as soft boxes, Mono Spots, umbrellas, grid spots, barn doors, gobo’s, parabolic,. beauty dishes, You will learn the light characteristics and applications of each modifier and what results you can expect from each.

In the next section you will watch as we build a four light set step by step. We will explain the importance of the Main light, it’s proper placement, and a couple tips that will dramatically improve you portraits.

Next, we will look at the fill light and using reflectors as a fill light, background lights, hair lights, and accent lights. You will watch and learn proper positioning of each light for the best results as we photograph our model.

We will also demonstrate a more advanced technique I frequently use to create impact and variety in the session and add extra dollars to the final order.

In the last section you will learn proper light placement as we demonstrate different lighting patterns. We will take a look at Loop Lighting, Short Lighting, Split Lighting, Broad Lighting, Rembrant Lighting, and Butterfly Lighting. We will demonstrate the effect different lighting patterns have on your subjects. For example, which lighting pattern should you choose to slenderize a subject face? In this video tutorial you will learn the answers to all these question and more.

 

 Introduction to Professional Lighting [1:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I had an e-mail yesterday I thought was worth sharing here.

Here’s the question from the e-mail. “I just stumbled across this site when searching for Greeen screen info on Google and am very impressed with what you are doing here. Ok, I’ll get to the point. How did you retouch the senior you posted on August 31st? The skin is just so soft and perfect”

Here was my answer.

Hi Jack,

While most people think I spend lots of time retouching my images, the truth is I don’t. I have a very simple automated procedure that makes use of Photoshop actions that I have written as well as a Photoshop plug-in that smoothes out the skin and softens the skin.

If you are as busy as we are this time of year anything that will speed up your production and making your images look better and is very affordable is a no brainer. We have found that in a new Photoshop plug-in called Portraiture.

The really cool thing about the Portraiture plug-in is that it will automatically create a mask and only apply the skin smoothing and softening to the skin and not the background, eyes etc… The key to being able to automate this is the auto mask feature. In the past (before portraiture) we would run a skin softening action in Photoshop and since it applied it to the whole image we would have to go back and remove the effect from the areas that we didn’t want softened.

Since I shoot in Raw format in the studio, all images are color and density corrected in LightRoom. Therefore, when they get exported all that needs to happen is to have all the images automatically run through the workflow. The only thing I will do is go back and clean up any blemishes the filter did not get and whiten the eyes (that’s also an action). I also have an action for the Portraiture filter that set the filter to the settings I have determined that work best for me. I even have the filter add some warmth to all my images.

We have even automated this process through batch processing… I will cover that in more detail in a up coming video for our online training section of this site.

You can find the Portraiture plug-in and even download a free trail at:

http://www.imagenomic.com

Hope this helps,

Mike

If you have always wanted a smoke machine for your studio NOW is the time to pick one up for a steal. I have seen these adverstised from Halloween speciality stores anywhere from $25 to $100. While it might not be the same quite quality as the commercial models made specifically for studios, it also isn’t nearly as expensive.

So if you have always wanted one but just didn’t want to spend the $600 plus from the photo stores, grab one quick - because after Halloween they will be gone.

A quick Google search returns 1000’s of links.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Halloween+Fog+machine&btnG=Google+Search

Here’s a recent shot taken using our smoke machine.