Posts

How Creative Gels Changed the Way I Think About Studio Color
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.

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

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

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

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

Three Ways to Use Studio Lights Outdoors Without Blowing Your Sky
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.

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

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

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

How to Pose Men for Portraits and Headshots: A Studio Photographer's Breakdown
Video Tutorials

How to Pose Men for Portraits and Headshots: A Studio Photographer's Breakdown

Male subjects are, without question, the harder posing problem. Not because men are difficult to work with, but because the margin for error is smaller. A slightly hunched shoulder reads as insecure. A stiff jaw reads as uncomfortable. A flat, straight-on stance reads as a passport photo. I’ve shot enough corporate headshots and editorial work to know that most photographers who struggle with male portraits aren’t making lighting mistakes. They’re making posing mistakes and blaming the light.

What Anne Geddes Actually Does in the Studio (And What Working Photographers Can Steal From It)
Video Tutorials

What Anne Geddes Actually Does in the Studio (And What Working Photographers Can Steal From It)

There’s a particular kind of photographer I pay close attention to: the ones who built their entire visual language from scratch, without a formal framework to lean on. Anne Geddes is exactly that. Self-taught, starting at 25, working out of a converted bedroom in Australia before she ever had a proper studio, she developed one of the most recognizable bodies of work in photography history. When CreativeLive gave her a platform to open her studio doors, I watched the resulting tutorial more than once.

Why Studio Photographers Should Care About Apple's Mac Studio Evolution
News

Why Studio Photographers Should Care About Apple's Mac Studio Evolution

The Workstation That Changed Studio Post-Production When Apple released the Mac Studio, I paid attention—not as a tech enthusiast, but as someone who spends half their day color grading images in Lightroom and Capture One. Over the years, I’ve watched this machine evolve in ways that directly impact how we light, shoot, and process in the studio. Let me be blunt: your hardware matters. Not in a “buy the newest thing” way, but in a practical, workflow-efficiency way.