Photography Blogs & Tutorials

One thing that can bedifficult to get across when taking pictures is a true sense of how large something is in real life. A skyscraperthat appears towering and imposing in person, can come across as unimpressive, or stripped of its majesty when photographed. Natural formations that inspire awe and self-reflection, often seem puny and insignificant when we go through our photos later at home or on our phones.

This is something I have had happen many times in my own journey as a... more

Chromatic aberration (CA) can be a pain, especially in high contrast situations. It’s also calledcolour fringing. It’s most common in inexpensive consumer lenses, but pro glassis not immune. Shooting at extreme wide or tiny apertures can introduce it quickly even with the best gear. You can take care of most chromatic aberrationwithin Lightroom or ACR. [...]

The post 5 ways... more

Ultrawide angle lenses are practical and fun. Almost every landscape, architectural, wedding or event photographer has one, as do many filmmakers. I have one, too. The problem with most of them, though, is barrel distortion. Usually, the wider the lens, the more of it you get. You can fix Barrel distortion in Lightroom, but it’s [...]

The post The new Laowa 12mm... more

Hey folks,

Thank you for your patience as we worked to fold the newly revised Lighting 102 module into the site, with all of the requisite cross-linking, etc. I know this probably resulted in a flurry of emails and RSS notifications to the site's subscribers. Apologies.

The all-new Lighting 102 is up and running. I hope you find it helpful.


Thanks,
David Hobby
... more
In Lighting 102, we have learned some of the basic physical controls that we can apply to light: angle, distance, size, restriction.

We've also learned how to identify and control the zones of light that fall onto our subjects: diffused highlight, specular highlight, diffused shadow, diffused highlight to shadow transfer.

But there is another control lever that is more complex, more powerful and more evocative than all of the ones listed above.... more


Restricting light is a powerful control. By taking light away, we can evoke character or drama or mystery or any number of other things. My friend Joe McNally goes as far as to distill it down to this:Read more
Let's jump off this train for a minute and think about our different lighting controls in context with each other. More specifically, let's look at size and distance.Read more


We have all had to deal with specular highlights, even if we did not know what they were called.

Think about portraits of people you have made in direct sunlight. Remember that glaring spot on their face or forehead? That was the specular highlight of the sun. And if the person was sweating or had oily skin it only made matters worse, as that... more
Photo by Kenneth Lau

When you light any three-dimensional object, you create four zones of light. It doesn't matter if it is a face or a tomato. So today let's learn from this tomato, photographed by Strobist reader Kenneth... more


So what is it that actually makes a light soft? And why is it a function of both size and distance?

In the portrait above, Dean is being bathed in soft umbrella light from camera right. But let's zoom in a little closer and place some waypoints on his forehead...... more

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