Outdoor Flash

The Three-Variable Formula for Balancing Strobe and Ambient Light (And Why Most Photographers Get the Order Wrong)
Video Tutorials

The Three-Variable Formula for Balancing Strobe and Ambient Light (And Why Most Photographers Get the Order Wrong)

Every commercial shooter eventually faces the same problem: you have a subject who needs clean, controlled light, and a background that needs to look like the world they actually live in. Studio strobes give you the former. Ambient light gives you the latter. Getting both in the same frame without one wrecking the other is a skill that took me longer to learn than I’d like to admit. My early editorial work was littered with shots where the subject looked beautifully lit and the background looked like a blackout curtain.

How to Light a Subject 100 Feet Long When Your Strobes Are Built for a Studio
Video Tutorials

How to Light a Subject 100 Feet Long When Your Strobes Are Built for a Studio

Most of the lighting problems I solve happen within four walls. My studio in Los Angeles is a controlled environment, and I’ve spent years learning how to predict exactly what a modifier will do at a given distance. Then a shoot comes along that strips all of that away, and you remember what lighting fundamentals actually look like when the subject is a 50-foot fighter jet baking on a tarmac at 105 degrees.