Today is Veterans Day in the US, and I wanted to take a moment to honor and thank the men and women who have served in our country’s military, and who fought to defend the very freedoms we enjoy each day.
America owes you a debt of gratitude for your service and sacrifice, and I just wanted to join in with a heartfelt thanks.
Best,
-Scott
Hey everyone. Good to see you here again!
A big hug goes to Scott and Brad for inviting me back to be a guest blogger. It’s not only quite an honor to post here, but it’s also great fun to share photo how-to info – and photo inspiration – on Scott’s popular blog.
I call this post, Transforming Your Home into a Professional Photo Studio, which coincidentally is the title of my newest class on KelbyOne, releasing tomorrow!
In this new class (which was shot in a home near the KelbyOne studios in Oldsmar, Florida) I share tips, tricks and techniques for shooting in your home with speedlites, constant lights, Ice Lights and even a small flashlight. The main idea of the class is that you don’t necessarily need to spend thousands of dollars a month on a studio rental, as well as thousands of dollars on lighting gear, to get good portraits.
Let’s start by taking a look at some of the end-result photographs, as well as some of the behind-the-scenes photos, from the class. For each photo I’ll share a quick tip.
After sharing some photos from the class, I’ll share some of my “home studio” images that were taken closer to home, actually in my home in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.
Let’s go! (more…)
Yesterday I announced the 10 finalists and the Grand Prize Winner from this year’s Worldwide Photo Walk, but there are some other images that, while they didn’t wind up winning a prize, were still so good that I thought they needed some special recognition, so each year I do a “Honorable Mention” post here to celebrate this images totally worth celebrating.
By the way — you could make a case for any of these to have been chosen as a finalist (in fact, all of these images were in the running and on my short list at one point which gives you an idea of how hard it is making the final decisions. There’s just so many amazing images).
Each year, it’s one of the toughest things I do — looking at images that have already been chosen as “local winners” (by the walk leaders themselves), and then going through the best shots from nearly 1,000 walks around the world and narrowing it down to just 10-finalists and one Grand Prize Winner.
How Peter Hurley Made a Headshot Photographer Out of Me
I was totally dejected and felt like I had failed my friend. I stared at the headshot I took of him trying to figure it out. He had a cool little mustache and looked handsome in his Army uniform, but Peter Hurley had just told me that he looked constipated.
My friend had joined the United States Army right after 9/11. It has not been the easiest life for him, and I am very proud of him. I so wanted to do a good job on his headshot, and it was tough to hear that, in the opinion of arguably the best headshot photographer in the world, I had failed. Hard as it was to hear, it was lessons like this from Peter that took me from a bad amateur with no ability to make people look good in headshots to a working headshot photographer. You may not like my work or you may find it too derivative, which is certainly okay. My purpose here is to praise Peter for his teaching ability and to strongly recommend the information contained in his new book The Headshot: The Secrets to Creating Amazing Headshot Portraits. (more…)
Hi Gang: Last week we released a new class I did on location lighting, in this case using the Elinchrom ELB 400 battery pack and heads, but even if you don’t have this awesome little kit, I think you’ll still get a ton out of the class.
Below I pulled out a little two-minute and 16-second clip — it’s an idea of what to do when you get stuck in a situation where you don’t have a great shooting location or you have a challenging one. It’s a simple tip, but it works like a charm (it’s not the first shot you see me take in this clip — wait for the second shot — that’s the keeper!). Check it out below: