Master lighting, posing & studio photography

Video Tutorials

How to Balance TTL Flash with a Setting Sun (Without Gluing Your Strobe to the Hot Shoe)

There is a specific kind of frustration that comes from standing in golden hour light with a subject who looks incredible and realizing your on-camera flash is about to ruin everything. The light is directional, warm, and dramatic. Your strobe is flat and about eight inches from your lens. I have been there more times than I want to admit, and it is the reason I started treating off-camera TTL as a non-negotiable part of my location kit.

October 7, 2026

Video Tutorials

Home Studio Setup Decisions That Actually Matter: Lessons from Mike Metlay's Q&A

I spend a lot of time thinking about studio infrastructure. Not the glamorous part of the job, but the decisions that determine whether a shoot runs smoothly or falls apart before the first frame. What computer controls my tethering rig. Whether my audio playback for client presentations drops out mid-meeting. How I spec a workspace so it serves the work instead of fighting it. These are the unglamorous fundamentals, and getting them wrong costs you money and credibility.

October 7, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Blend Strobes With Daylight Without Making Your Shot Look Like a Lighting Test

Shooting on location in bright daylight is where a lot of photographers quietly abandon their strobes. The ambient is overpowering, the math feels backwards, and half the time you fire your flash and can’t even tell it’s doing anything. I’ve been there. I’ve also stood on a sun-baked location with a client waiting and a strobe that might as well have been a paperweight for all I could see it contributing.

October 7, 2026

Studio Lighting

How Creative Gels Changed the Way I Think About Studio Color

I used to treat gels as a corrective tool only. CTB to cool a tungsten source, CTO to warm a strobe, half-green to match a fluorescent ceiling. Correction work. Necessary, unglamorous, done. Then I booked a beauty editorial for a skincare brand that wanted something they described as “otherworldly but warm,” and I realized my gel drawer had been sitting mostly untouched for reasons that had nothing to do with the gels themselves.

October 7, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Build V-Flats and Polyboard Reflectors for Under $50 (Sue Bryce's Method, Explained)

Every few months I get an email from a photographer asking what those big white panels are in my studio shots. I used to point people toward commercial V-flat vendors and watch their eyes glaze over at the price tags. Then I came across this CreativeLive tutorial featuring Sue Bryce and her collaborators Tiffany and Mark, and the answer turned out to be sitting in the building materials aisle of a home improvement store the whole time.

October 6, 2026

Video Tutorials

The 3-Foot Octa and Grid Combo That Changed How I Light Portraits

Every studio photographer eventually lands on a workhorse setup. The light they reach for first, the one they’d build a whole shoot around if they had to. For me, the 3-foot octabox has been that modifier for years. It wraps light without going too soft, it’s manageable in tight spaces, and it produces a falloff that flatters almost every subject I put in front of it. But I’ll be honest: I was slow to experiment with adding a grid to it.

October 6, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Nail Outdoor Corporate Portraits: Lens Choice, Aperture, and Light That Actually Works

Corporate portrait work has quietly become one of the more technically demanding things I do on a regular basis. Clients want that outdoor, organic feel - the kind of background that melts into soft color behind a sharp, confident face. Sounds simple until you’re standing in a courtyard with 30 feet of usable space, a sun that’s about to crest the wrong roofline, and someone’s CEO in a blazer waiting for you to look like you know exactly what you’re doing.

October 6, 2026

News

Why Apple's M5 Ultra Mac Studio Remains the Studio Photographer's Powerhouse

The Mac Pro Chapter Closes, But Professional Photography Workflows Live On Apple made a quiet but significant decision earlier this year: retiring the Mac Pro. What seemed like it might be devastating news for studio professionals turned out to be something else entirely. The company’s brief experiment pairing Mac Studio internals with that iconic tower housing has ended, but the real workhorse—the M5 Ultra Mac Studio itself—remains stronger than ever.

October 6, 2026

Video Tutorials

Three Ways to Use Studio Lights Outdoors Without Blowing Your Sky

Most of my work happens indoors, where I control every variable. I know exactly what my key light is doing, I know where the shadows fall, and if something looks wrong, I can fix it in thirty seconds. Take me outside at magic hour with a strobe and a subject, and for a long time I made a mess of it. The sky would blow out the moment I exposed for my subject’s face, or I’d pull down the exposure to save the background and end up with a subject who looked like a silhouette cut from black paper.

October 5, 2026

Video Tutorials

Posing Is Half the Picture — Why Expression Makes or Breaks Your Wedding Shots

Most of my work happens in a controlled environment. I label every light in my studio with masking tape. I sketch every setup in a journal before I fire a single test shot. Control is the whole game when you shoot fashion and beauty. Wedding photography is the opposite of that, which is exactly why I keep studying it. The chaos forces photographers to solve problems I never face under studio conditions, and the solutions almost always teach me something I can bring back to my editorial work.

October 5, 2026

Video Tutorials

Inside KL Taylor's Studio: What a Purpose-Built Photography Workshop Space Actually Needs

Every few months I get a message from someone asking what they should look for in a photography workshop. My answer has always been the same: look at the space before you look at the curriculum. A bad room with great instruction is still a bad workshop. I learned that the hard way after attending a “professional lighting” seminar held in what was essentially a carpeted conference room with nine-foot ceilings.

October 5, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Choose the Right Lighting Modifier Before You Ever Plug It In

Every modifier I own has a strip of masking tape on it with its name and a one-word descriptor: “wrap,” “punch,” “scatter,” “focus.” That habit came from years of working backwards, trying to diagnose why a shot looked wrong after the fact rather than predicting what a modifier would do before I fired a single frame. Early in my career I was rebuilding setups on the fly between shots, burning time and losing the client’s confidence.

October 4, 2026