Golden Hour

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.

How to Make Strobe Lighting Look Like It Actually Belongs in the Scene
Video Tutorials

How to Make Strobe Lighting Look Like It Actually Belongs in the Scene

I’ve shot enough location work to know that “it looks strobe lit” is one of the worst things a client can say about a finished image. The subject is sharp, the exposure is right, and somehow the whole thing still looks fake. The light sits on top of the scene instead of inside it. For years I treated this as an ambient light problem, something to fix in post or avoid by shooting faster at dusk.