This is Gary. Gary is a snail. And he's beautifully lit by my friend Sara Lando. While babysitting Gary for a friend, Sara decided to actually build a miniature set and then photograph the snail in the style of Irving Penn. Because this is what creative people do in their spare time.
By using a second light to ensure legibility in the shadows, we can place a "floor" on how low the tones will go on our subject. But we can also combine this with the fast falloff of a closely placed key light to get total control of a subject with an inherently tough dynamic range.... more
For this layer of control, we are going to look at two different pictures. Everything will be the same except for one thing: The distance from our light to our subject will change. Nothing else. In particular, the subject-to-background distance will not change.
Any kind of light is a must for photography. You just cannot photograph without light. There are various types of light that no doubt you are familiar with:
Natural light from the sun
Ambient light (could be natural or manmade)
Artificial light such as strobes, incandescent or tungsten, fluorescent, flash and LED lights
Infrared light
This article will give you tips for using two LED lights to achieve moody portraits.
This little procedure just saved me over 20 gigs (yes, this is right, gigs!!) of space on my hard drive. It has to do with how Lightroom updates, read on or watch the video. Here is something I was quite surprised to realize. With each catalog, you can set how long it would keep 1:1: [...]
The legibility from our fill light doesn't call attention to itself. It just makes your other light look that much better. It introduces a balance; a range; a relationship between the two lights.
Think of it like a backup band behind a soloist: the band is there to fill in the gaps, add background and make the... more
This simple concept, which I learned from photographer Jim Richardson about 25 years ago, forever changed the way that I thought about lighting. It's like a switch was turned on inside of my brain. Read more
If you are workng with one light, you already know that a single light can create many possibilities but also can force compromises. Do you place the light for the best modeling on someone's face? Or do you cheat it a bit to minimize those deep shadows you just created?... more
Welcome to the all-new, completely revised Lighting 102. If you are here, you should already have read through Lighting 101, and have a good understanding of its concepts. __________
In lighting 101 you learned the basics of getting your... more
Things may have appeared rather quiet around here, but there is a lot going on under the hood. You'll remember that in 2014 Strobist transformed from a 2x/week blog to more of a knowledge bank. This was done to create the time and space to develop other projects.
