My Journey: Practice Your Passion and Never Hold Back
I wanted to share with you a little about how I got to where I am, in hopes that it may help you get to where you’re going a little faster.
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Hardware Studio: equipment that will make your photo studio hum!
Everyone has a light stand, even make up artists. Some photographers have boom arms but when you really want to refine your work, or make your life easier in the studio easier you’ll need an arsenal of hardware. And for the most part I am not talking about the durable goods you can pick up at Home Depot or Lowe’s.
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Fashion Photography: DIY Light Saver
Adapting the look of LED or Fluorescent tube backgrounds for still photography with a DIY approach using softboxes, a v-flat, a knife and three Profoto lights.
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Fill is not a person, but he is your friend
As photographers we might obsess about this modifier or that one, believe me I have, but often times we fall short when it comes to shadow detail. This is something I struggle with from time to time when shooting in a new room and every shoot poses its own set of problems, so the purpose of this post is to share some basic concepts that I hope will help you maximize dynamic range and develop more details in your depictions.
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Chicago Magazine Photographer: Cover photoshoot for Positively Aware
On a snowy winter day, we crammed 18 people into a Chicago barbershop built for a dozen, so we could shoot the foldout magazine cover of Positively Aware’s annual HIV Drug Guide. It is always a challenge when you have to work with 13 subjects and have them all engaged, while maintaining the identity of the space and leaving room for the magazine logo, text, and the fold.
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A garbage can full of modifiers, that’s perfectly normal right?
Let’s pretend for a moment I am sitting inside a reality show confession booth. Instead of disparaging the other characters on the show, I’m going to disparage myself (not really, actually. In my garage I have a garbage can full of modifiers. It looks like an episode of Hoarders in miniature, only instead of holding on to teddy bears and half-full beer cans, I collect things that make hard light look soft and in turn, make me look good.
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What ARE those lights I keep putting in my photos…
One of the most popular questions I am asked is: what are those lights in the background of my portraits? Aside from the one time that I used a Profoto Monolight unsuccessfully, every other occurrence I can recall featured a vintage light designed by Mole-Richardson.
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Making a custom Cucoloris to create dramatic portraits
After being inspired by Sophie Palmer’s portrait depicting boredom with a Catholic priest inside the confession booth, below, I decided to try my hand at projecting divine patterns on model Alex Mitchell’s face by making a custom Cucoloris.
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Powering a Canon C200 with Gold Mount Brick Batteries
After picking myself up off the floor following my discovery of the sticker price for Canon’s C200 batteries, I decided to look at other options. I have seen people using V-Mount and Anton Bauer Gold Mount batteries for while, but they remained a mystery to me until push came to shove once my new camera was on its way.
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Annual Report Photography for Above & Beyond
Thanks to a referral from graphic designer Dan Paterno, to account executive John Healy, the Above and Beyond Family Recovery Center hired me to photograph their clients for their annual report.
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