Strobe Setup

Studio Lighting

Rim Lighting: The One Light That Separates Your Subject From Everything Else

When Your Subject Disappears Into the Background I had a corporate client a few years back, a tech company that wanted environmental portraits of their executive team against a dark charcoal backdrop. Clean, modern, serious. I had a beautiful key light dialed in, a 47-inch octabox at 45 degrees, proper exposure, great catchlights. The images looked competent. They did not look good. The executives were merging into the background. Not dramatically, not in a way that made the client throw the photos back at me, but enough that the images felt flat.

August 3, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Stop Your Strobe from Spinning on a Boom Arm (Joel Grimes' Two-Minute Fix)

There is a specific kind of frustration that only studio photographers know: you have your boom arm positioned perfectly over your subject, the modifier is angled exactly where you want it, and then you watch the whole thing slowly rotate south while you’re mid-shoot. The strobe drifts. The softbox tilts. You crank the knob tighter and it still creeps. I have been shooting commercial work in Los Angeles for long enough that I label every piece of gear in my studio with masking tape, and I still spent embarrassingly long dealing with this problem before I found a fix that actually held.

July 13, 2026