Cristian Berges: Night sky time lapse movies

A deep blue sky with red and orange clouds running over it, getting darker and darker – until finally, the stars appear and draw their circles. That’s what you get if you are lucky – a night sky time lapse movie reveals the movement of the earth, it becomes perceptible. This example movie has been [...]

Jose Antunes: How to photograph mushrooms with flash

Photographing mushrooms is fascinating to many people, but few go beyond the snapshot. Flashes and radio triggers can help you explore a new world. Patience also helps, but don’t wait for tomorrow… Mushrooms prefer Autumn and Winter and dark places, moist forests, and old tree trunks, but can also grow on the grass of the [...]

Christian Berges: Portrait Lighting Basics, Part 3: The Rim Light

The rim light – also called back light or highlight – completes the classic three-point lighting scheme. From the camera’s point of view, the rim light comes from the opposite direction. Thus, instead of illuminating the subject, it causes reflections on it’s silhouette. Function While the key light determines the lighting direction and the fill [...]

Christian Berges: Portrait Lighting Basics – Part 2: The Fill Light

The fill light is the second light you should be concerned with after you have set up your key light. Function It’s main purpose is to control the contrast within your composition by filling the shadows with a certain amount of brightness – depending on your visual intentions. When you have established your key light [...]

Stacy Pearsall: Shooting product shots

When shooting product shots, there’s an element of problem solving. The Charleston Center for Photography (CCforP) handles all product placements for Skirt Magazine Charleston. This spring, they wanted to feature outfits without the model. This posed one particular problem. How do we find an area big enough to lay the clothes out and style them? [...]

Michael Freeman: Soft and Smooth Light

This is the third tutorial on light, and I’m getting a lot of these in early in this course, because thinking clearly about light solves many of photography’s potential problems before they even happen. Here, let’s look at a quality that’s sought after for its efficiency, pleasantness and just general ease of working with. Soft [...]

Christian Berges: Portrait Lighting Basics. Part 1 – The Key Light

The key light is the most important light. It’s the key to your lighting setup. It can be your only light. It should be the first light you’re concerned with. Perhaps it’s already there – just look around. Is it the sun shining through a window into the room? Or is it a desk lamp [...]

Berges Christian: Negative Fill – Controlling Contrast

Don’t take the term too literal… negative fill can be a quite positive technique if you want to control the lighting contrast on a subject. First, let’s recall the general function of a fill when shooting a face or an object: It affects the proportion between key light and shadows. While a ‘normal’ or ‘positive’  [...]

Nicolai Brix – Radiopopper

Try to sync your small flash units wirelessly with 1 / 8000 sec. infrared flash control at 200 meters distance or in bright sunshine … No it can not be done quite easily. But now there are several possibilities to overcome several challenges through 2 different systems – Radio Poppers or Pocket Wizards. Both work [...]

Roberto Bigano – How to shoot cars and big reflecting objects on location

For this first lesson I will present you two different works on Bugattis. The first one of 1991 for “Divina Bugatti”, a book for the refined italian publisher Franco Maria Ricci in 1991 using film and a second one, in 2009 at the International Bugatti Meeting in Castiglione della Pescaia, Tuscany. Here I shot in [...]