Video Tutorials

Four Principles Behind George Hurrell's Hollywood Light (And How to Recreate Them with LEDs)
Video Tutorials

Four Principles Behind George Hurrell's Hollywood Light (And How to Recreate Them with LEDs)

Every so often I watch a tutorial and think: I wish I’d had this five years ago. This is one of those. In this The Slanted Lens tutorial, JP Morgan walks through how to recreate the George Hurrell Hollywood portrait look using LED panel lights instead of the massive, studio-era tungsten setups Hurrell famously worked with. The result is moody, sculpted, deeply cinematic — and far more achievable than most photographers assume.

Lighting Shiny Metal for Product Photography: What Golf Clubs Taught Me About Reflection Control
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Lighting Shiny Metal for Product Photography: What Golf Clubs Taught Me About Reflection Control

Every product photographer hits the same wall eventually. You’re asked to shoot something with a mirror-like surface, you point a softbox at it, and the image comes back looking like a light bulb advertisement. The product disappears. What you’re actually photographing is your own gear staring back at you. Golf clubs are one of the more brutal examples of this problem. Curved metal shafts, polished club heads, chrome ferrules, all of them acting like tiny fisheye lenses reflecting your entire studio.

Four Cameras, One Performance: How to Build Cinematic Studio Lighting When You Can't Call Action Twice
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Four Cameras, One Performance: How to Build Cinematic Studio Lighting When You Can't Call Action Twice

There’s a specific kind of shoot that breaks the one-camera workflow entirely. Performance work – dancers, acrobats, martial artists – is physically punishing, and asking a performer to run a full routine six times so you can capture six different angles is not a reasonable request. It’s also not a great way to get authentic, high-energy footage on take three. I’ve run into this problem more than once shooting editorial work in Los Angeles, where the talent budget rarely includes “unlimited repeats.

How Reflectors Actually Work: A Studio Photographer's Breakdown of Light Control
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How Reflectors Actually Work: A Studio Photographer's Breakdown of Light Control

Every time I take on a new commercial client, I run into the same quiet problem: the difference between a polished result and a mediocre one often comes down to fill light. Not the key, not the background, not even the modifier on my main source. The fill. Reflectors are the tool most photographers grab without thinking, bounce something back at the subject, and call it done. That’s a mistake that costs you dimension, costs you skin texture, and costs you that sense of depth that separates a editorial-quality image from a decent snapshot.

Six Posing Fundamentals Every Studio Photographer Should Understand Before They Pick Up a Camera
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Six Posing Fundamentals Every Studio Photographer Should Understand Before They Pick Up a Camera

Posing is the part of studio work I underestimated the longest. I spent years obsessing over light ratios, modifier choices, and color calibration, and then I’d get a family or a new mother in front of my camera and suddenly everything I’d built felt wobbly. The light was right. The exposure was right. The image still didn’t land. What I was missing wasn’t technical. It was structural. I didn’t have a posing framework.

Fake Light That Looks Real: A Photoshop Layering Method for Portrait Photographers
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Fake Light That Looks Real: A Photoshop Layering Method for Portrait Photographers

There’s a gap I see constantly between photographers who light well in the studio and photographers who finish well in post. I’ve been on both sides of it. When I was coming up, I treated Photoshop like a cleanup tool, something you used to fix mistakes rather than build atmosphere. What changed my thinking was realizing that the best retouchers work with the light that’s already in the frame, they don’t invent it from scratch.

What a Beat-Up Backdrop and a Dumpster Light Taught Me About Studio Photography
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What a Beat-Up Backdrop and a Dumpster Light Taught Me About Studio Photography

There’s a moment every studio photographer knows. The client walks in, looks around at the wrinkled backdrop, the gaffer tape, the light stands held together with wishful thinking, and their face does something complicated. You can see them calculating whether they’ve made a mistake. Then you show them the back of the camera, and the whole room shifts. That gap between what the studio looks like and what the camera sees is, frankly, the entire job.

Three Ways to Set Strobe Power in Daylight (And Which One I Actually Use)
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Three Ways to Set Strobe Power in Daylight (And Which One I Actually Use)

Every few months I get a call for an editorial shoot that has to happen outside, usually in harsh midday sun, usually with a client standing nearby expecting miracles. For years, the part that slowed me down was not the creative decisions. It was the mechanical one: how do I get my strobe dialed in fast enough that it looks like I know exactly what I’m doing? Too hot and the subject looks like they’re being interrogated.

Stop Pointing Your Flash at Your Subject: Hot Shoe Bounce Technique Explained
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Stop Pointing Your Flash at Your Subject: Hot Shoe Bounce Technique Explained

Most photographers who own a hot shoe flash are using it wrong. Not recklessly wrong, just… wastefully wrong. They mount it, leave the head aimed straight forward, and wonder why their subjects look like they got caught in a police spotlight. I spent years doing the same thing before I genuinely understood what that swivel head was for. It is not decorative. It is the entire point. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube

Ditch the Softbox: How Tracing Paper Unlocks Better Product Highlights on a Budget
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Ditch the Softbox: How Tracing Paper Unlocks Better Product Highlights on a Budget

Every few years, a technique crosses your desk that makes you feel like you’ve been overcomplicating things. Tracing paper was that technique for me. I’d been stacking softboxes, fighting ceiling height in my smaller studio space, and still chasing that seamless, scalable highlight on reflective surfaces — shoes, bottles, jewelry. The kind of highlight that wraps around an edge cleanly and doesn’t blow out. Then I watched this tutorial from Jay P.

High-Speed Sync Explained: How to Take Control of Bright-Light Strobe Photography
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High-Speed Sync Explained: How to Take Control of Bright-Light Strobe Photography

There is a specific kind of frustration that comes from standing in bright midday sun with a strobe, a great subject, and a camera that refuses to cooperate. You want to shoot wide open to separate your subject from a busy background. You want the shutter fast enough to darken that background down to something dramatic. But the moment you push past your sync speed, you get that ugly black bar creeping across the bottom of the frame.

Faking the Sun: Three Studio Setups That Actually Convince
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Faking the Sun: Three Studio Setups That Actually Convince

Every studio photographer eventually gets the brief that reads something like “warm, early morning, light pouring through the window.” The client has a mood board full of golden hour frames shot on location, and your job is to deliver that in a controlled environment on a Tuesday. I’ve been chasing convincing artificial sunlight for most of my commercial career, and I’ll tell you straight: most attempts fail the same way. They’re either too flat, too theatrical, or they nail the highlight but leave shadows so dense the whole scene collapses.