Lighting Technique

Shoot It Right the First Time: What Jared Platt Taught Me About Efficient Lighting
Video Tutorials

Shoot It Right the First Time: What Jared Platt Taught Me About Efficient Lighting

Every editorial shoot I do lives or dies in the first twenty minutes. Not because of the model, not because of the concept, and not because of which strobe head I pull off the shelf. It lives or dies based on whether I made smart decisions before I ever fired a test shot. I learned that the hard way years ago when I delivered a beauty spread where half the selects had a color temperature mismatch I didn’t catch on set.

What Brian's Rose Shot Taught Me About the One Lighting Mistake That Kills Still Life Photos
Video Tutorials

What Brian's Rose Shot Taught Me About the One Lighting Mistake That Kills Still Life Photos

Still life photography looks forgiving on paper. Your subject holds still. You control the environment. There’s no client pacing behind you, no model losing energy between frames. And yet, in my years shooting commercial product work, I’ve watched more photographers stumble on still life lighting than almost any other discipline. The subject sits there quietly while the light does all the damage. I came across this tutorial by Adam from First Man Photography — Watch the full tutorial on YouTube — and what struck me immediately was the format.

Why the Modifier You Reach For First Is Probably the Wrong One
Studio Lighting

Why the Modifier You Reach For First Is Probably the Wrong One

I had a beauty client last spring who kept requesting “soft, glowy skin.” I’d heard it a hundred times. I reached for my 4x6 Westcott Scrim Jim out of habit, set it about three feet from the model’s face, and fired a test shot. The client loved it. I hated it. The light was soft, yes, but it was also directionless. The cheekbones disappeared. The eyes had no depth. The image looked like it was lit by a very large, very expensive cloud.

How to Balance Strobes with a Setting Sun (A Three-Variable Formula That Actually Works)
Video Tutorials

How to Balance Strobes with a Setting Sun (A Three-Variable Formula That Actually Works)

There’s a specific kind of panic that sets in when you’re on location, the sun is dropping fast, and your strobes and the sky refuse to cooperate. I’ve had shoots where the background went completely nuclear orange while my subject looked like she was lit by a hospital fluorescent. Other times I’ve crushed the ambient into near-darkness trying to control it, and the whole image looks like a bad composite. For years I treated sunset shooting as a guessing game, adjusting everything at once and hoping something clicked.

How to Light a Complex 8-Light Product Studio Shoot (And Why Simpler Setups Won't Cut It)
Video Tutorials

How to Light a Complex 8-Light Product Studio Shoot (And Why Simpler Setups Won't Cut It)

There’s a ceiling you hit with product photography when the product itself is the problem. Reflective surfaces, deep recesses, matte textures sitting right next to polished chrome, irregular geometry that swallows light from one angle and blows out from another. I’ve been in that position more times than I’d like to admit, standing in my studio at midnight with a setup that looks reasonable on paper and terrible on a monitor.

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
Video Tutorials

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Taming Chrome: The Curved Perspex Method That Finally Makes Mirror Surfaces Behave
Video Tutorials

Taming Chrome: The Curved Perspex Method That Finally Makes Mirror Surfaces Behave

Every few months a product lands on my shooting table that makes me quietly dread the next few hours. Chrome is at the top of that list. Not because it’s impossible, but because it’s unforgiving in a way that exposes every shortcut. A polished metal surface doesn’t just reflect your lights, it reflects your ceiling, your camera, your clothing, the gap under the studio door. It behaves like a fisheye lens bolted to the object, compressing the entire room into a convex mirror and handing it back to you in your final frame.

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.

Low-Key Portraiture Explained: How to Use Darkness as a Design Tool
Video Tutorials

Low-Key Portraiture Explained: How to Use Darkness as a Design Tool

Every few months I pull up a tutorial that reframes something I thought I already understood. Low-key portraiture was one of those things I had been doing intuitively for years before I could actually articulate what separates a deliberately dark image from a simply underexposed one. I keep a lighting journal, and I’ve sketched probably a hundred low-key setups over my career, but I still found myself writing notes while watching this breakdown by Chris Knight for CreativeLive.