Studio Lighting

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.

Four Cameras, One Performance: How to Build Cinematic Studio Lighting When You Can't Call Action Twice
Video Tutorials

Four Cameras, One Performance: How to Build Cinematic Studio Lighting When You Can't Call Action Twice

There’s a specific kind of shoot that breaks the one-camera workflow entirely. Performance work – dancers, acrobats, martial artists – is physically punishing, and asking a performer to run a full routine six times so you can capture six different angles is not a reasonable request. It’s also not a great way to get authentic, high-energy footage on take three. I’ve run into this problem more than once shooting editorial work in Los Angeles, where the talent budget rarely includes “unlimited repeats.

Three Ways to Set Strobe Power in Daylight (And Which One I Actually Use)
Video Tutorials

Three Ways to Set Strobe Power in Daylight (And Which One I Actually Use)

Every few months I get a call for an editorial shoot that has to happen outside, usually in harsh midday sun, usually with a client standing nearby expecting miracles. For years, the part that slowed me down was not the creative decisions. It was the mechanical one: how do I get my strobe dialed in fast enough that it looks like I know exactly what I’m doing? Too hot and the subject looks like they’re being interrogated.

Stop Pointing Your Flash at Your Subject: Hot Shoe Bounce Technique Explained
Video Tutorials

Stop Pointing Your Flash at Your Subject: Hot Shoe Bounce Technique Explained

Most photographers who own a hot shoe flash are using it wrong. Not recklessly wrong, just… wastefully wrong. They mount it, leave the head aimed straight forward, and wonder why their subjects look like they got caught in a police spotlight. I spent years doing the same thing before I genuinely understood what that swivel head was for. It is not decorative. It is the entire point. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube

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.

Faking the Sun: Three Studio Setups That Actually Convince
Video Tutorials

Faking the Sun: Three Studio Setups That Actually Convince

Every studio photographer eventually gets the brief that reads something like “warm, early morning, light pouring through the window.” The client has a mood board full of golden hour frames shot on location, and your job is to deliver that in a controlled environment on a Tuesday. I’ve been chasing convincing artificial sunlight for most of my commercial career, and I’ll tell you straight: most attempts fail the same way. They’re either too flat, too theatrical, or they nail the highlight but leave shadows so dense the whole scene collapses.

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 to Build a Headshot Lighting Setup That Works Every Time — A Tutorial Breakdown
Video Tutorials

How to Build a Headshot Lighting Setup That Works Every Time — A Tutorial Breakdown

There’s a particular kind of client who walks into my studio and immediately goes stiff. Shoulders square to the camera, chin slightly raised, arms rigid at their sides. They’ve decided, somewhere between parking the car and stepping onto my seamless, that “professional” means “motionless and symmetrical.” Getting them out of that posture without making them feel self-conscious is half the job of a headshot session. The other half is making sure the light is already dialed in before they sit down, so I’m not fiddling with power packs while they lose whatever momentum we built in the first five minutes.

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.

One Light, Done Right: How a Single Strobe Can Outperform a Full Studio Rig
Lighting Techniques

One Light, Done Right: How a Single Strobe Can Outperform a Full Studio Rig

One Light, Done Right: How a Single Strobe Can Outperform a Full Studio Rig I keep a lighting journal. Every shoot, every setup, sketched out in a dedicated notebook I’ve been filling since my second year shooting professionally. Flipping back through early entries, what strikes me isn’t how complicated the rigs were. It’s how simple the best ones looked. A single head. An octabox. A white wall. Some of my cleanest commercial work came from setups that would embarrass a photographer who equates gear quantity with output quality.

How to Build a Three-Light Superhero Setup with Cookie Effects and Smoke — A Working Breakdown
Video Tutorials

How to Build a Three-Light Superhero Setup with Cookie Effects and Smoke — A Working Breakdown

There’s a category of commercial photography problem that I call the “button shot” problem. The client needs a punchy, cinematic closing image, something that reads instantly as heroic or dramatic, and they need it built inside a studio with a modest rig. No motion picture budget, no art department, just you and your lights and whatever foam core you can find. These are exactly the shots that separate photographers who understand light from photographers who just point it.

Why Your Phone's Portrait Lighting Is Lying to You (And What Real Studio Light Actually Does)
Video Tutorials

Why Your Phone's Portrait Lighting Is Lying to You (And What Real Studio Light Actually Does)

I’ve been shooting commercial portraits in my Los Angeles studio long enough to know that the word “revolutionary” gets thrown around the moment any company wants to charge you more for something. So when Apple rolled out the iPhone X’s Portrait Lighting mode and started using phrases like “studio lighting” to describe what their software was doing, I had questions. Fortunately, Karl Taylor had already asked them louder than I would have.