Yesterday I shot a wedding at 11:30 AM, for all intents and purposes, "high noon." I needed to figure out a way to capture the wedding party without horrible shadows on their faces, yet I wanted to keep the dramatic sky, and beautiful trees that were in the background. So, here's exactly what I did: First of all, let's look at the image exactly as it came out of the camera. I wanted to make sure there were no harsh shadows on their faces from the overhead sun. I set my exp

This is my daughter, Violet. I love the pose, the look, and all the little details. As soon as I took this, I thought, "This is my daughter's movie poster for her starring role in an action film." Here's how I got the photo. The Set-Up I took this photo in my kitchen. Every now and then, I'll set up my lights for a few days and just practice, hoping for some good photos of my kids. For this experiment, I used gaffers tape to attach a roll of gray 54-inch gray seamless paper t

I’m always looking for new ways to streamline my process for assembling my gear, especially my lighting equipment. I’ve become acutely aware that if I don’t get things together quickly, I could miss a moment at a wedding (or other event), leave my clients waiting, or simply just wasting my own time. One thing that has always annoyed me when attaching a speedlight to a light stand is that it felt like I only had a couple of options. One is the typical cold shoe adapter that mo

For many years I considered myself to be a "natural light" photographer. In reality, what that meant was that I simply had not spent the necessary time to get the results I desired from my lighting equipment. A couple of years ago I decided that it was long past time to learn off-camera flash. The image above came out of a practice session with an aspiring model. We decided to meet up and spend some time working on creating different looks. Finding enthusiastic (and pati

"For school portraits, I use a blue and white multicolored mulsin backdrop. It is impossible to iron out all of the wrinkles. Most certainly impossible for me since I honestly don’t know where my iron is and don’t even own an ironing board. I don’t even bother. The backdrop stays balled up in a corner in my at-home studio (aka a small corner in my basement). Here’s why…. with the right lighting and setup, you don’t need to do anything to get the wrinkles out of the backgr