Back In My Day, We Used Cardboard

Photojournalist David Honl is marketing a store-bought snoot for those of you who feel funny shooting a Fortune 500 CEO with a cereal box stuck on your flash.

He also has a velcro'd bounce-card/gobo thingie, too.

I'm sure they work fine, and all. But my last box of Frosted Flakes came with a free pedometer inside.

I'm just saying.
________________________

(Via Digital Rangefinder, a blog run by a real, live college photojournalism prof.)

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Speedlighting the Runway

Local photog (20 miles down the street in DC) and Strobist reader Larry Dortch has got himself a spiffy lil' video photo blog, where he talks on camera about shooting and whatnot.

He just put up a Quicktime movie detailing how he approached a high school fashion show with a coupla Canon speedlights and some Pocket Wizards.

It's all good. But the best thing is, I think I found my new exit line for the next two weeks.

L,P and HG,
DH

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Flickr and You, Part 3: Case Study - Sara Lando

This is the third part of a four-part series. It begins here


In each of the final two parts in the Flickr series, we'll be looking at a photographer who is also a Strobist reader and using them as an example to explore some specific ways they could be better use Flickr to reach the people who may be interested in their work.

Milan-based, up-and-coming photographer Sara Lando is quickly developing into a one-woman force of nature. If you don't recognize the name from the Flickr Strobist group, she may be better known to you as rent-a-moose, one of a half-dozen or so people in our group who choose the moose as their mascot for a Flickr name.

Sara publishes several websites - including one under the Moose Rental identity. She also blogs in both English and Italian.

As if that's not enough, Sara has just published a book via Lulu.com, entitled "Faceless." She is getting noticed in the photo world, too. Her work is part of this display at VisualContest07.

With all of these irons in the fire, the goal I would suggest for her would be to use Flickr to unify her different exposure venues. But, more important, to better use metadata on Flickr to introduce more of the right kinds of people to her work. By "right kinds of people," I mean the people that will either buy the rights to reproduce her pre-existing work, of commission her to create new images.

There are two steps to this process.

1. Use tags to funnel people to her work.

2. Use her Flickr profile to establish her strengths to prospective clients.


Funnel is a Verb

Let's back up for a moment.

Flickr has millions and millions of photos in its library. Many of them are very high-quality images - certainly worthy of sales and/or publication. It is inevitable that some sort of monetization scheme will develop around them. There is too much at stake for Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo) not to do it.

But how will people search for these images, and what determines which pictures they will find? More than anything else, the pictures that appear will be determined by proper tag selection and "interestingness."

To illustrate a point, let's look at this photo from Sara's stream as an example. When I choose the photo on Sunday afternoon, it had 517 page views, and the following six tags:

Mask
Self
Color
Word
Couch
Photoshop


All appropriate tags, of course. But would they lead a photo researcher to Sara's work? Probably not.

To improve Sara's position in Flickr's search results, I would suggest adding the following tags. The parenthetical comments are my reasons for adding a given tag. Note that quotes are used for multi-word tags.


"Sara Lando" (Don't ever want to forget that one)
"Lando" (In case researcher could not remember, or misspelled, Sara's first name.)
Milan (Sara's location - very important for local assignment work.)
Italy (See above)
Portraiture (Sara's specialty)
Portrait (See above)
People (variant on the portrait theme)
Sofa (Content previously tagged above, expressed differently.)
Stripes (Theme)
Animals (Content)
Self-portrait (Theme)
Woman (Content)
Masks (Do not limit yourself to singular nouns.)
Brunette (Theme)
Identity (Conceptual theme)
"Conceptual Photography" (Genre)
Chicken (Mask-related content - you never know.)
Dog
Wolf
Frog
Toad
Cat
Goat
Donkey
Mule
Animals
Disguise
Pink (Theme)
"Sun Dress" (Content)
Dress (Content)
"Pink Dress" (Content)

Starting to get the idea? Structuring your tags to respond to varied - or specific - and complex - or simple - searches help people to find your photos. Leave bread crumbs so they can find you.

And it is critical to have your name as a tag in your photos. This allows people to branch out laterally to see other images in your file.

So, given all of these terms, who is going to come out on top of the searches?

Well, that depends on how the researcher organize the results. You can choose "most relevant," which will return (on a quality basis) a pile of unranked crap. Which is why a professional would not be using those parameters.

They would more likely rather see the results ranked by "interestingness," a nebulous term that partially depends on how many times the photo has been viewed. Flickr very smartly uses you - its members - to help create a hierarchical ranking for its photos.

Which is why how many times a photo has been viewed matters greatly. And that, as you can probably now guess, is why I linked to the Sara's photo rather than just display it. By looking at it, you gave Sara a "view," which moved her up in her search results.

You want to funnel people to a selection of your best photos by whatever means possible to improve your placement in the search results. This may mean linking to them on your website, if you have one. Or submitting your best photos to as many appropriate groups as possible.

If Sara had a more sophisticated tag structure on the photo, this exposure could work for her in a big way. Appearing in a search result means someone is one click away from learning about Sara and seeing her photo stream.

If you do not believe me, consider this. How many photos do you think have been tagged as "Mountain Dew" in Flickr?

Thousands, actually. Yet click here to do a search on Mountain Dew and see who comes up on the front page. It's yours truly, with my beverage of choice.

Is that the best photo on Flickr of a Mountain Dew can? Certainly not.

But the exposure and page views that it has previously gotten means that it gets displayed on page one of the search results.

Bear in mind that you do not have to generate huge page views with all of your photos. But you do want to concentrate page views on a few of your best photos. This makes it easy for people to find your photos, which will lead profile to your profile and Flickr stream and contact info. You can see why you would especially want to carefully and completely tag your most-viewed photos.

Fortunately, it is easy to retroactively add tags to your photos. And because of the interestingness thing, re-tag your most-viewed photos before the others. Always go for the low-hanging fruit first.


Your Profile, Your Doorstep


Okay, now that you have gotten them to your Flickr page, what's next?

You want to establish your name and your availablility to shoot photos for other people. Beyond that, you should highlight your strengths and the qualities that separate you from other shooters.

In Sara's case, her intimate portraits and her whimsical illustrative style make her a strong candidate for many kinds of editorial and advertising assignments. Her unique style is her greatest asset. But just as important is her Milan location.

Why Milan? No reason, actually. She could be anyplace and her location would still be an asset.

Now obviously, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a photographer in a fashion center like Milan. And I am sure that there is fierce competition for local assignments in that market. But that is not what Sara should be going for at this point.

Her goal should be to be as many out-of-town companies' person in Milan as possible. Because then, she is not competing with all of the locals. She is competing with the out-of-town photographers who will be adding travel-related fees to do a job in Milan.

Advantage: Lando.

Hopefully, you are starting to at least see why you should have geographic terms in your tags. With proper use of tags, Sara instantly vaults ahead of every Milan-based photog on Flickr who does not use geographically based tagging.

She may want to consider "geotagging," too. This is just a graphical representation of the word-based version.

Back to the profile.

At the time of this printing, Sara's profile offers two fact about her: She is female, and taken. Other than breaking hearts all over Flickr, the profile accomplishes very little.

Consider this alternative:

My name is Sara Lando. I am a Milan-based photographer specializing in people and conceptual illustration.

I was recently chosen as an exhibitor in VisualContest07. You can learn more about me on my other sites, either in English, or Italian.

I can be reached at (contact info.)

Then, directly under that, I would place the same text in Italian.

(UPDATE: While photographers are clearly hooking up with clients on Flickr - including the widely publicized Toyota campaign - it is technically against the current TOS. The wording of the TOS seems to be more tuned to yard sales and the World's Oldest Profession.

So, while you can clearly identitfy yourself as a pro, you may wish to not be explicit about availability and pricing in your profile or captions.)

Sara might choose to include or exclude some of her websites. The blogs were used as an example.

But the important thing is that in a brief summary she establishes herself as a professional who is available for assignment or stock. She demonstrates that she is bilingual - a very important asset for foreign clients, with English being the new Esperanto of the internet. She points to objective and positive assessment of her work. Finally, she provides contact info.

By simply restructuring her tags and profile, she has jumped to the head of the Flickr class for potential clients looking for a Milan-based photographer.


Next: Part 4 - Case Study: John Dohrn

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The Coolest Free White Background Ever

Need a super-quick white-ish background to photograph that little thingamajig you are selling on eBay?

(No off-camera flash ia actually needed for this one, but I couldn't resist. It is too good of an idea.)

Just go downstairs to the closet where you keep your Igloo/Coleman/no-name-brand cooler, open it up and turn it on its side. Stick your item in there, put the whole thing in some shady area outside and shoot away.

So goofy, it's genius.

In case you need the whole concept spelled out for you, here's the money shot.

But again, this can be a much more low-rent (no-rent, actually) operation, as this setup would work just fine (better, actually) outside in the shade. The tones should be smoother on the background that way.

Hey, what could be cooler than a cooler?

And it gets better: This post is a two-fer-one special, as the top photo above also shows you how to make a DIY, Two-Headed Clamp Snake. Just slide some rubber tubing around a thick wire and zip-tie it to two small clamps.

The two, self-supporting clamps can be adjusted to hold still just about any two small items still. Gobos, reflectors, etc., when working in a macro environment.

If you have any ideas for those items, please put them in the comments. Because two small, identical items which could be (painfully) clamped by this pink and orange contraption just popped into my head and I cannot get the mental image to go away...

(Thanks to mmikee for the idea.)

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On Assignment: Hero Fan

Basically, my job is to travel all around the Baltimore/Washington area at my leisure, with people just waiting in beautiful environments for me to show up and spend hours trying out new lighting schemes.

Not.

My days are tight, just like yours likely are if you are a shooter. And I get handed some primo environments, if you are into mixed light and backlit, cluttered backgrounds. As for time, well, suffice to say that these days I am happy if the assignment doesn't have an "XMIT ASAP" notice, so they can throw it out on the web before the 1's and 0's are dry.

So today, I am gonna walk you through a quickie portrait for the features section. It was in the middle of a four-assignment, 150-mile day.

The assignment said:

JOHN SMITH (not his real name) IS A BIG FAN OF THE TV SHOW, "HEROES." HE BLOGS ABOUT IT AND USES THE WEB TO WATCH MISSED EPISODES. PLEASE SHOOT HIM AT HIS COMPUTER BLOGGING THE SHOW.

What I am now thinking:

Well then, my busy day is looking up. I wonder if he is an "A-list" blogger? Wonder if I can learn something from him? Wonder what platform he uses?

Well, turns out he is not really a blogger (he has a MySpace page) but he does at least use a computer to learn about the show. There's a new experience. A photo of guy at his computer.

Environment: Computer on a cluttered desk, right in front of a window. Guy's back is to window when he sits at the desk.

Lighting: Something for everyone. By that I mean window light, tungsten and fluorescent, all mixed together. (What, no sodium vapors?) Thank you so much Mr. or Ms. Lighting Designer. No, really.

First things first: I kill the fluorescents. Next, I close the window blinds. This gets me from three light colors down to one in 15 seconds. I can nuke the tungsten with flash. If it bleeds through, no problem. (With the green, it'd look like sh a weird, greenish tint.)

So I stick a flash on a stand in front of the guy's desk and set it to 1/4 power.

At this point, I grab a test shot with a 24mm lens to start to zero in on the exposure. Not in focus, not even bringing the camera up to my eye. Just working quickly to grab my working f-stop. It's already close. I have done this a couple of times before.

I start to shoot the Guy At His Computer shot.

(Sigh.) Even with added light, this is what it has come to. A guy sitting at desk with "Heroes" web page up on his screen, talking to me. I shoot it, capturing the moment for all eternity.

(Has a reader has actually ever been bored to death by a photo? Would the paper be liable? Would I be personally held responsable?)

My standards as to what will make an acceptable photo from this assignment start to dip noticeably. We'll do better next time.

(I wonder what I should get to eat for lun - OMG! He's pointing at the screen! - click - We're saved! He pointed at the screen and I got it! )

See what I mean about the standards thing? Don't lie to me, either. I know you play those games with yourself, too. We all do.

Then a horrible thought pops into my head:

This is for features. What if they need it as a lead photo?

And another:

What if they need a separate photo for the jump?

Crap. Welcome to my life.

During this time, no fewer than two of the guy's managers wander by. They are not giving him the "This is exciting! Take all the time you want!' look, either. I make eye contact with the subject and the exchange is basically a nonverbal, "Uh, let's hurry this thing up, okay?"

So I move the flash over to my left - same setting, same exposure - and shoot it, bare, up into the ceiling. Same as in the first shot. I pull the monitor up to the counter to shoot a portrait of him next to it. (Hey, it was easier than getting him to lay up the desk, okay.)

Alright, this is a little better. Or maybe a little less bad. I dunno.

As long as I am doing this, I figure I should grab an ambient-only shot to choose the shutter speed for the monitor to burn it in correctly. Even though my soft strobe-off-the-ceiling light will glare on it pretty badly.

Bingo. Now, we're talking.

This photo never occurred to me. I was just grabbing frames to check various exposures - flash and ambient - just like I always do. I find this method to be quicker (and more serendipitous) than using a flash meter, and this image is a good example of how you can benefit from this technique.

We now have a photo that is lit by only the two ambient sources - the monitor's glow and the tungsten flood falling on the wall. The guy is in total shadow.

If I can get light on his face without it contaminating the wall or the monitor, then I'll have a pretty neat photo.

(PAUSE BUTTON: How can we do this? Think about it a sec before going on.)

If you said "snoot," you were close. Right idea, but still too much light spill. A gridspot, however, will do the trick just fine, thank you.

I slip a grid on the flash and aim it at the guy's face.

One quick shot, taken from the light's position, confirms my aim and gets me in the ballpark on exposure. I am hurrying now, so as not to get the guy in too much trouble with the bosses. Close is good enough. I can fine tune the exposure in Photoshop.


And here is the shot from next to the monitor. I should have probably cranked up the flash power to buy myself some more aperture to bring the monitor more into focus. (I would have had to lengthen the shutter speed to balance the available light, remember.)

But I was already stretching the guy out, and I did not want to cause trouble.

Here is the setup from behind the flash. I was just to the right of the monitor when I shot the actual photo.

The point is not that this is a great picture, because it ain't. The point is the difference between where I started and where I ended up - with bad ambient, a cluttered environment and short working time.

That, and to clue you into some of the weird crap the pops into my mind during the daily grind.

Oh, and after this small, hurried, relative, moral victory, the shot ran about three inches across inside the section, in black and white. Next time, maybe I just pop the guy with an available light shot.

Nah...


NEXT: Spring Desserts

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Pocket Wizard Christmas in April

Moishe just called from MPEX to let me know that he got a big shipment of Pocket Wizards Plus II's in for a series of camera shows, and he is running a special: $169.00 each. They show on the search results as $186.00 each, but when you put them in your shopping cart they drop to $169.00.

Three things to remember:

1. You need two units. These are the newest switch-hitter models, playing transmitter or receiver depending on what they are hooked up to. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

2. MPEX is shipping to other countries, but these are North American frequency models. So additional units would need to be the same kind.

3. Last September (the last time he ran a special like this) they went quickly.


Phone orders are okay, and they will honor the $169.00 price. Just don't call Moishe at home at 3:00am US time if you are reading this during the daytime in Asia...

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Flickr and You, Part 2: The World's Window on You

This is the second installment in a four-part series on Flickr and the future of commercial photography. Part one is here.

In many ways, Flickr has leveled the playing field between professional and amateur photographers. Today's article will feature ways to better present yourself and help photo buyers find you if you are still a babe in the woods.

All of the photos in this post are by Strobist readers. Please click on them to find out more info, or see more interesting work in the Strobist Flickr Faves Gallery.


Flickr Now vs. Flickr Soon

It would be a mistake to think of Flickr as a static environment. Presently, it is the center of gravity for still photography when it comes to user-generated content. There is much debate in the industry about how Flickr will evolve, but almost no one is questioning the fact that its next iteration will involve the monetization of that content. As we talked about in part one, buyers are already hooking up with content - and photographers. It won't be long before Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo!, yields to the temptation of collecting transactional fees on that market.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. It all depends on the business model that they introduce. Flickr has built something of great value - a community of motivated photographers who generates gobs of new content every day. Hopefully the company will take the long view, and build something that will be a benefit for photographers as well as the suits.

Done well, the result could be a huge, current relevant and dynamic photo library that instantly changes the landscape of the commercial photography scene. Done poorly, it could devolve into yet another predatory model that takes advantage of the fact that many photographers will all but give their photos away in exchange for the thrill of being published.

However they choose to do it, there will almost certainly be an "opt-in" ability. So you probably won't have to play if you do not want to. But given the quality of work being produced by the readers of this site, there are many dollars - and perhaps more than a few careers - at stake. So some pre-planning is warranted for those who are interested in a different sort of future on Flickr.

The important thing for photographers who are interesting in being a part of the new paradigm is to begin to position themselves in such a way as to be as visible as possible in both the present and future models.


A Few Words About Money

We have talked about the predatory pricing models before, and there will be plenty of time to discuss that later if and when changes roll out in Flickr. But this series is more about understanding - and positioning youself for - the changes that are on the horizon, be it on Flickr or anyplace else.

Long story short, please don't sleep with the first picture editor that tells you how great your photos are (and if you just let them slip by for free this time there is lots of work in store for you in the future.) That said, there is great value to be had for transitional "pro-ams" in exposure. But only if it works for you and points many, many people to your stuff. And you still have to be careful about that slippery slope thing.

For the True North compass point on these kinds of issues, there is no better source than John Harrington's photo biz blog. He wrote the book on the subject. Literally.

John's book and blog are aimed at the full-time, professional types. I would submit that the guidelines for you, as a (likely) transitional amateur-to-pro, selling a shot of your cute little kid to Parenting Magazine are a little more flexible. But if you are thinking of becoming a full-blown pro, you will want to use John's info as a compass point. It is good info.



See and Be Seen

So, since you are already on Flickr, you have a seat on the train. Right?

Not so fast there, Bucko. What you probably have is a dumping ground for all of your favorite photos from the last year, a spiffy Flickr name and not much else. While this is great for the photo water-cooler side of Flickr, it won't work very well for what we are talking about today. Not to worry, though. It is a fairly easy thing to reinvent yourself on Flickr, no matter what photos your sordid past might contain.

First, it makes a lot of sense to upgrade to a pro account. I am not selling them, and I do not benefit in any way if you upgrade. But where else can you get the word "pro" attached to your photos for USD $25 a year?

Okay, I'm being flippant. But the benefits of a "pro" membership on Flickr are a steal for the price. You get unlimited storage, uploads, bandwidth, sets, permanent archiving of hi-res pix, etc.

(You get the feeling they are trying to encourage people to build a hi-res archive, or what?)

Also, not that the "pro" thingie by your name makes you a pro. But not having it relegates you to the psychological B Stack in comparison.

Here's a thought: You might want to maintain a personal, free account for the unedited fun stuff and buy a pro account for your Serious Photographer side. After all you don't want stuff like this popping up when the Director of Photography at Wired Magazine is searching through your images.

I'm just saying.

And you will want to upgrade the language you use on that profile, too. These will likely be the first words potential client read about you. We'll be talking about that in more detail Parts 3 and 4 of this series.

Use care in choosing your screen name, too. You will want to try to snag "Your Name," or "Your Name Photographer," or something to that effect. Okay, if your name is John Smith, you are probably already screwed. But make sure your name reinforces your name and/or what you do. For instance, "John Smith Food Shots" is probably available.

The important thing is to present your profile page to be informative and reasonably professional. While I might buy usage rights to a cool, pre-existing photo from a goofball, I would probably not send a photo assignment to one.

As a side note, if you are totally clueless about the art of the photographer's portfolio, an excellent resource is Photo Portfolio Success, by Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photographer John Kaplan. It has supplanted the classic book, "The Perfect Portfolio," by Henrietta Brackman, which is a dated (but still useful) resource.


Help Them Find You: Captions and Metadata

Clearly, your photos will be your strongest selling point. But now that your profile is up-to-snuff and you have deleted the self-timered photo of yourself demonstrating advanced beer bong technique, you will want to make your text-based info work harder for you, too.

We will be talking in more detail on this in the final two articles in this series, but the point is that you want to (a) lead people to your photos, and (b) connote your professionalism when they get there.

Good captions are incredibly valuable to photo researchers. They can describe what is being shown, give geographic info, note whether a person is model released, give specific contact info for the photographer - just about anything.

Bad:

One for ma BOYZ!!! Skeeter grindin some rails at the mall just before the cops came!"

Better:

MAY 29, 2006 -- LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA, USA -- Skateboarder John Smith, 19, (model released) of Long Beach, California (USA) performs a (whatever the name of the maneuver is) in Long Beach, California on May 29, 2006. Smith is riding a skateboard by (brand of skateboard). -- PHOTO BY PHIL PHLASHEM

This photo is available for publication. Please contact me via Flickr Mail or at www.philphlashem.com.


But how do they even get to your photo to begin with? By searching your metadata. Flickr calls them tags, but they are essentially words that describe your photos for search engines. Or don't, as the case may be.

This is the funnel that will help researchers get to your images. Tags can be a roadmap, a joke, or non-existant. Take a good, long look at your tags. Are you using them to your best advantage?

For our fictitious photo above, you might use the following:


SKATEBOARD
SKATING
SKATEBOARDING
(name of the technique)
(brand of skateboard)
"PHIL PHLASHEM"
CALIFORNIA
"LONG BEACH"
TEEN
RECREATION
"JOHN SMITH"


This is just a starter list, but you get the idea how you can better position your photos to end up in searches. If you are going to be hitting the field in the commercial (or quasi-commercial) game on Flickr, learn to think like a picture researcher. Tag your photos in such a way as to lead them to you.

In the final two part of this series, I will be doing more detailed case studies on the specific changes two Strobist readers employ to better position themselves for selling photos and getting assignments via Flickr.

(And no, they do not know who they are yet.)


Next: Part Three - Case Study: Sara Lando

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Weekend Tidbits: 4/21/07

I Can See You Typing

Yeah, don't think I'm not watchin' you guys out there, 'cause I am. The Technorati trackbacks are pulling up some interesting stuff.

Cool finds, just from the last few days:

:: Concerning Photography ::
:: Photography for Real Estate ::
:: Malaysia Wedding Photographer ::
:: Get Rich Slowly ::

UPDATE, adds:

:: Hibi no Hanashi :: (Damn near incomprehensible. But couldn't stop reading it...)

Keep 'em coming - I love seeing your sites. And for the other readers, those inbound Technorati links are always worth checking out. I do it at least once a day.


In a Well-Lit Van, Down By the River

I'll admit that I am kind of a "seat-of-the-pants" guy when it comes to lighting and exposure. But if you want to know how to use a (Sekonic) flash meter in excruciating detail, ShootSmarter has a 20-minute, 47-meg video you can watch here, on the site of TMRDesign.com.

But is it me, or is host Will Crockett channeling the late Chris Farley on this one?

(Thanks to tpuerzer for the heads-up.


Four Minutes of Creepy Fun

I stuck this up on the sidebar a couple of days ago, but I wanna make sure you don't miss it. If you have ever worked in an office, you'll identify with it. It has nothing to do with photography, but it's the latest project from MediaStorm.org. (That is the place to go to study state-of-the-art multimedia storytelling, BTW.)

It's a wonderfully depressing animated video to the Radiohead song, "Creep." Essentially a music video, the animation was done as a side project by a creative worker bee who was toiling away at a day job that was slowly sucking away his soul. If you are an office worker drone yourself, you'll end up watching it more than once. Or emailing it to a friend. Or both. See it here.

Oh, and I am totally lusting after that iPoddish-project-carousel thingie MediaStorm has working on the bottom of the page. That thing rocks. Or maybe rolls. Not sure...

"Flickr and You, Part 2" is in the on-deck circle, provided I don't get hit by a train between now and then. Have a great weekend.

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Flickr and You, Part 1: Rebekka's Experience

EDITOR'S NOTE: We are taking a little field trip from flash for a few days to talk about something that will be of interest to many who read this site. What follows is the first of a four-part series on the blurring lines between professional and amateur photographers, and how your presence on Flickr automatically puts you in the game.

-DH
________________________________________

When They Come for You, Will You Be Ready?

A couple of years ago, photographer Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, a first-year visual arts student, began posting her stark, evocative photographs on Flickr. Soon they were gaining a large following among the site's other users.

Unbeknownst to her, one of her fans worked in the marketing department for Toyota's headquarters in her native Iceland. He contacted Rebekka, 28, to ask if she might be interested in shooting an ad campaign for the company's hybrid model, the Prius. He did not yet have the go-ahead from his higher-ups. That, hopefully, would come later.

He wanted her to shoot in her usual style, but to include the Prius in the photos. Many of her images combined elements from more than one photo. The concept seemed like a good fit for the hybrid car, which uses both gas and electric power.

'It was incredibly intimidating," she said, of the thought of creating photos to help sell the hottest car being offered by the world's most successful car manufacturer.

"The photos were only going to be used in Iceland," said Rebekka, who is prone to attacks of modesty. The images were to be used large, and without branding, in the city as posters for bus stops.

She went into creative overdrive and set out to produce the same types of photographs for Toyota that had made her such a sensation on Flickr. Soon, she had her first set of photographs ready to be reviewed by the marketing department for Toyota of Iceland.

"They just flipped through them, with a deadpan expression," she said of the gut-wrenching experience. She remembers sitting beside them in silence. Then they turned to her.

"They looked at me and said, 'They're horrible,'" she recalls.

(Pause button: Put yourself in her shoes: Amateur. Student. Single mother of two. Internet sensation. How would you have felt at that moment?)

Then they smiled and said, "Just kidding!"

On a personal note, I would have probably been tempted to do the same thing. But dang, that's cold.

They went on to tell her what they thought worked - and to try to develop those themes. She went back out several more times before the campaign was completed. Soon her photos were seemingly everywhere, setting the scene for the trendy, gas-sipping car.

While Rebekka's experience is certainly the most famous Cinderella Story of the Flickr world to date, it is by no means unique. The explosion of digital photography - and legions of talented new photographers - is combining with the leveled playing field of ubiquitous access to photographs via sites like Flickr. Professional photo buyers are combing through thousands of photos in search of new photographers like you.

Why? Several reasons.

First, you are new blood. Fresh meat, as it were. And that is always a draw in the creative world.

Second, the economic model of searching out a talented amateur is wonderfully beneficial to the buyer. With luck, the photographer might accept very little money - or none at all - for photography that has significant value.

How do you present yourself in such as way as to maximize your chances of being discovered? What do you do if you get discovered?

These are some of the issues that will be addressed in this series.

The Flickr movement has exploded onto the photo scene, and is certainly influencing photography, and the people who hire photographers. Some of the readers of this site - both professional and amateur - are producing stunning photographs, and will be right in the crosshairs as the Flickr economic model continues to develop.

Flickr offers you the ability to craft your professional image as you learn to better craft your photographic images. Careers will be launched. But opportunities certainly will be lost, too.


A Life-Changing Experience

With page views counting in the millions, Rebekka's opportunities now far outstrip those of the average visual arts student. Assignments, print sales, commissions, workshops - many choices await her as she works to bring her education level up to her present level of success.

She is slightly uncomfortable with her new-found fame.

"What is fame?" She asked by phone from her home in Iceland as her two sock-clad boys ran around outside, past their bedtime. "Who is famous? What does that mean?"

She is aware that she is a little off-beat, which she wears as a badge of honor. She thinks it is important to establish herself early as a "little bit of an eccentric," which she thinks plays an important role in the artistic process.

She considers herself somewhat of a loner, and prefers to go out shooting by herself. She said that a friend teases her by threatening to follow her around with a video camera as she shoots.

Her success isn't going to her head. It hasn't left her swimming in new gear, either. She feels it is important to grow her creative and photographic tools slowly, to better understand each technique she adds to her repertoire. She believes this approach is far more valuable than getting a full bag of photo gear at once and just diving in.

But hers is not the path of the typical Flickr amateur, either.


Imagine what it must feel like, as a student, to see your photographs displayed as part of a national ad campaign. How would that change the way you create photographs? What would your future hold? How would you plan to capitalize on your early success?

Right now, every day, people with the power to pluck you out of obscurity are cruising Flickr. They are looking at photographs and at photographers.

And beyond that, Flickr will not always be the happy-go-lucky, no-money-involved place that it is today. There is too much at stake. The archive - your archive - has grown far too valuable for them to to ignore the commercial potential. Especially given that it is owned by a public company. Rumors about Flickr's future are already rumbling through the industry.

What can you do to improve your chances of being noticed? If you are noticed, what can you do to decrease the chances that they will take advantage of you? And how can you start now to build a portfolio and a reputation that could lead to your success?


Next: Part 2 - The World's Window on You


Related links:

Rebekka's Flickr Stream
Rebekka's website
Multiplicity Series (Includes several Prius campaign photos.)

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'Ebay Remotes' Getting Better?

Gadget Infinity, makers of the infamous $29.95 "Ebay Remotes" have reportedly redesigned them to sync with Canon flashes and work better all around with other flashes. The link takes you all the way to Hong Kong, so mind the jetlag.

Full disclosure: I have never personally tried them.

But if they keep aspiring to greatness like this, the PW's commanding lead might be in trouble. Or at least they might have to start selling for a cheaper price...

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Ultra-Cheap Quickie Mini Macro Studio

Okay, so I'll be the first to admit that this paper light tent makes the $10 Macro Studio sound positively luxurious and wasteful.

That said, this is a technique I use a lot.

And since Strobist reader Jeff Geerling beat me to the punch on writing about it, I am sending you over to his place for a little field trip.

If you have something very small to shoot on white, there is no reason to crack open the studio - or even cut up a box - when your solution is as near as your laser printer. Two sheets of white paper and two pieces of tape is all it takes.

Oh, and both of my kids are so jonesing for those little iPod Shuffles. I do not need one for myself, as my 8-track is still working just fine, thank you.

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Two SB-24's, Some Ebay Remotes and a Thinking Photographer:

I happened to be checking out the Strobist Flickr stream right when reader Moosehd2 (AKA Ken Brown) dropped this photo of a Mercedes 300SL.

The simple-but-effective lighting design is both inspired and inspiring. See if you can figure out how he lit the shot, then click through to his photo to find out.

Says the photographer, who shoots for a collector and a museum, "Funnily enough, I don't really like cars."

Yeah, well. The photo is still awesome.

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New, Reader-Friendly Footers

It is a very rainy weekend, and I am here at Strobist International Headquarters screwing around with the HTML for the site.

At the end of this (and every other) post, you'll find some new features. This spot is called the post "footer" and I have tweaked it to benefit the site's readers.

The first line still points to the Strobist Flickr threads, which have grown into a huge resource for all things small-flash lighting. Why in the world would you want to ask a lighting question in the comments when there is a community of about 7,500 fellow enthusiasts with brains ready to be picked?

That said, if you have a comment, fire away.

Line two is a link to fave Strobist on Technorati. Oh, wait. That's more of a Strobist thing than a reader thing. But some of you had already been doing it and I wanted to make it easier for others to do the same. Much obliged, too.

Line three is my favorite, as it points back to the blogs that have most recently mentioned Strobist. (And yes, I do read what you guys are saying about me.) This link is way cool because it points the viral thing right back at you.

It is last-in, first-out, and blurbs the text around where you mentioned the site. If you are mentioning Strobist in your main copy, it will grab a couple of paragraphs and pull those up. If Strobist is on your blogroll, you'll pop up here every time you post, even if you do not mention us. (But the contextual blurb will just list your blogroll.)

I highly recommend checking these links regularly. I do several times a day and find all kinds of neat stuff.

For you bloggers, I always appreciate it when you tell your readers about the site. And hopefully this will start pointing the new reader garden hose right back at you in a cool, automatic way.

Lastly, the "Reader Hot Shot" link points to my ever-evolving list of favorites from the Strobist Flickr pool. You guys do some kick-butt stuff, and this gallery is updated literally several times a day. Again, the idea is for more more people to see what you are doing.

Here's a thought: Flickr is becoming a hotbed for discovering new photographers, and you guys are among the best on the whole site. Have you noticed how often your pictures are ending up on the Explore: Interesting pages? Our Flickr pool - your photos - are being watched.

So, I hope you will both use and benefit from the new changes.

Oh, and the cute tootsies pic is by reader PackGrad2000, who is hopefully getting an occasional full-night's sleep by now.

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Wired Rocks, and Dan is The Man

Shootin' the Orioles vs. Royals baseball game tonight, except that I probably won't be. It is supposed to rain cats and dogs starting at about 6:00pm.

On days like this, you show up at Camden Yards and wait it out. But in the end, your shift is very likely to be an evening off with free hot dogs. I'll take it without a smidgen of guilt, as it partially offsets some other days where the workload is all but impossible to accomplish.

UDATE #1: I was right. It rained the whole time. But they played anyway. It rained nearly the entire game. Cold rain. Wet rain. Football is cool to shoot in the rain. Baseball is not.

So I am sitting here going through Wired Magazine, my favorite monthly dose of visual stimulation. I never fail to read it cover-to-cover. And usually the day it arrives.

Wired is a photographer's playground. They tackle hard-to-illustrate, conceptual topics better than any mag I have ever seen. They take chances. They are not afraid to risk failure in the pursuit of something great. I love that.

It is also the go-to place for interesting tech news and trends. And when I say tech, I do not just mean interesting gadgets. They look at technology in a holistic way that comprises all of the ways in which it affects us.

The scope of this magazine never fails to amaze me. In that sense, I consider it my very favorite biz mag, too.

Better yet, they are only $10 for a whole year if you live in the USA. That's two cups of Starbucks. Makes no sense to me, but I'll take it.

This month has a photo illustration (left) by Dan Winters for a story on how science is hacking, improving and altering our senses. Not an easy thing to illustrate.

But Winters' approach shows why he is one of my very favorite photographers, both in his lighting and his conceptual execution. Take a look at Winters' website to see what I am talking about. His photos are at once sparse and sophisticated. He brings a fresh eye, a playful mind and a craftsman's touch to just about everything he does.

If someone put a gun to my head and said, "Dan Winters, or Greg Heisler?" I do not know who I would choose.

This is a thinking photographer's photographer.

UPDATE #2: I just spent the hour from 1:00am to 2:00am studying every single photo on Dan Winters' site. Two things: (a) Dan is a genius. (b) The wee hours of the morning is a fantastic time of day (well, night) to look at that kind of stuff.

Wherever you are headed in your photographic path, you should be getting regular stimulation from inspirational sources like Dan Winters and Wired Magazine.

What about you guys? Are there any magazines that you find especially good inspiration for your photography? Lemme know about them in the comments. I am always on the lookout.

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Next on the List: Indoor Plumbing

Boy, I am a real doofus when it comes to this web stuff. But hey, I'm a shooter, not an HTML'er.

Just spent some time in a belated attempt to learn the basics of Technorati. I hadn't even claimed this site until tonight. (I know, I know...)

If you are a Technorati user, and you dig Strobist, there is now a link in the post footers where you can fave us. Or you can do it right here.

Muchas gracias, y'all.

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On Assignment: Munchies

We do an annual survey at The Sun on how people snack - what they eat, how much, how often, etc. I thought it would be fun to play around with the items a little by shooting them very close and lighting them for detail and texture.

Mind you, this is basically a porn shoot for me. I love junk food. Luuuv it.

So much so that I am constantly practicing one form of girth control or another. I could kill a large bag of Cheetos before halftime if the game is good enough. Fortunately, I have recently come across the junk food equivalent of methadone in Ruffles Baked Potato Crisps.

They are great, with only three grams of fat, none saturated. No kidding, they'll make you forget the real thing. I actually prefer them to the original model at this point. Unfortunately, the whole bag still has 30 grams of fat. So I still have to be reasonable about it.

But for this assignment, we were shooting the high-test stuff. Oreos, Cheetos, chocolate - you know, the stuff that makes life worth living. I mean, we had some token healthy snacks, if you don't count the salt. But we knew what folks were really eating.

If the lighting and color scheme looks familiar, it may be because I decided to give these a bit if a Jill Greenberg treatment. I didn't go all the way, as the texture precluded getting that wrap-light sheen. But I did model the light in similar, but more subtle ways.

I do the homage thing a lot when looking for a starting point in the studio. But always out of genre. Kind of like, "How would Timothy Greenfield-Sanders shoot a tomato?"

So, I used hard light everywhere. One speedlight was directly behind the subject, pointed at the background. The front light came in from high, and slightly to one side. Different foods were front-lit from different directions.

The front light also had a very tight snoot, made out of Cinefoil, a matte-black aluminum foil. The exit hole for the light was the diameter of my finger, which allowed for some light control at the macro level.

My separation lights came in from the back and low, on each side. They also had (normal) snoots on them, mostly to control the flare that would come from their being aimed almost back at the camera.

It was an odd scene, really, with a Cheeto, for instance, impaled on a toothpick and surrounded by four speedlights. I found myself wondering if a Cheeto had ever had four speedlights around it before.

But that idle thought was quickly put to rest by an unforseen problem: How to shoot the Cheeto in such a pose so it did not look blatantly phallic.

(Sheesh, the things we have to quietly take into consideration...)

Once I got my lighting scheme nailed down, the shoot went pretty quickly. We'd sort our way through all of the ugly specimens and find a good poster child example to shoot.

It was a fun exercise, and I was surprised to find out (a) how much texture there really is in those little snacks when you get up close, and (b) how many ugly ones you have to eat look through to get to a good one.

I used a D2XS to get a big file size, and extreme detail. I was shooting through a 55/2.8 macro, with an extension tube to get even closer. Everything was shot at f/22 or f/32.

Dang, just writing this makes me want a Reese's peanut butter cup.

Alas, it was all for naught as the designer ended up using the boring examples they had me shoot on blow-away white. She even cut out the potato chip.

(Sigh.)

In the end I thought it looked very pedestrian, and that we missed a chance to do a snazzy looking page. I mean, this stuff would have looked cool really big, IMO.

Ten years ago, I probably would have walked into features and uncorked a few choice words and blown the very working relationship I have been trying to nurture. But now, I just see it as part of the job. And I instead focus on the fact that I really enjoyed both the shooting process and the result.

One of the most important things I have learned in the last ten years is not to use the paper's final product as your validation point. You have to shoot for you.

To stew over something that is in someone else's control would just be damaging to the working relationship and maybe even to my output on the next shoot. And nobody needs that.

Besides, I can always comfort myself with a bag of baked Ruffles.

Click on a pic, and then click "all sizes" to see them really big. If you want me, I'll be in the kitchen.

NEXT: Hero Fan

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Ideas We Like: Greenie Clamp Mini Stand

You have already seen how to convert these cheapo, 99-cent Home Depot clamps into flash mounts, using your umbrella swivel adapter and another 39 cents worth of hardware.

But Strobist reader Zedin has gone one better and is using $1.98 worth of the greenies (along with an umbrella bracket) to make an impromptu, tiltable flash stand.

These clamps are soooo useful, folks. Just don't screw up and get the $3.99 orange ones by mistake. Get four of the cheapos instead.

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Dungeon Fun, And an Extended Vacation

UPDATE: Can't fool you guys anymore. Renegade Photo's comment was the first to get the general concept, and the comment right afterwards nailed the technique perfectly.

And yes, for those who mentioned it, the red streaks were the flash's ready light, which we left in.

I was lucky enough to get to be a part of my friend (and fellow photog) Thomas Graves' Basement Gallery a coupla weeks back.

Thomas is battling whipping non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, something he apparently thought would be more interesting to do than to shoot for the last few months. His weapons of choice were lots of drugs and a challenged challenging sense of humor.

As a little background info, this guy used to be my assignment editor at The Sun. ("Hey, I see you have 15 minutes between your afternoon assignments. Can you find me some weather art? Make it a vertical, okay?")

He lures people into his house with that "come visit the sick guy" routine, and then traps them in his basement studio until they make a creative self portrait. You know the type.

Well, here's mine, and I thought I'd throw it out to you guys to reverse:

• One strobe.
• One exposure.
• No Photoshopping.

Fire away in the photo's Flickr comments, and I will post the dumber-than-you-probably-think answer later today.

And check out Thomas' bloggish web page thingie and his basement gallery if you want a textbook approach to beating cancer.

Way to go, Thomas.

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Worth a Read: Photo Business News and Forum

If you haven't checked lately, John Harrington's Photo Business News & Forum is really developing into a go-to site for people interested in the photography bidness.

I just finished reading a Photoshelter/Digital Railroad comparison, and a piece on the economics behind corporate art.

Good stuff.

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Another Ringlight How-To

Thanks to Simon J. for the heads up on this combination ringlight/tanning machine. The author foregoes flash in favor of floodlights.

No more freezing-cold, scantily clad models for him. No, sir.

He's made a pretty good how-to page if you want to try it out.

Don't forget to budget for some good quality UV filters for your lenses, should you decide to use it a lot. Because I am pretty sure this thing would burn you your own, personal hole-in-the-ozone-layer right over your studio.

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RSS SOS - Thanks

Muchas gracias to the 971 people who let me know that the RSS feed address had been changed right out from under me, and was no longer working as a result. I have switched the code to the new URL, so things should be running more smoothly now.

As for the day-to-day RSS issues, I am trying to figure out a way to keep you guys from getting a fresh ping every time I update an old post, which I do frequently. The process now is "flip RSS off, update the post, flip RSS back on."

But that causes some RSS feed aggregators to get a little hinky. Any suggestions are welcome, as always. Comment away if you have anything to offer.

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Pimp My Light: Light-Painted Knife

You might think I would think twice about PML'ing a guy who plays with guns and knives. But that would be giving me credit for being way too smart.

Todd Brewer made this evocative shot as part of a series of photos for a friend's website. He is clearly being very creative with his light, using a snooted LED flashlight to create patterns of light to draw the eye to key areas of the composition.

All except the most important part: The sharpened part of the blade of the knife, which remains in shadow.

You might think it would be difficult to light the polished blade with the LED flashlight, which is a tightly beamed light source. And you'd be right, if that is what you were trying to do to define its polished surface.

But you wouldn't want to light the actual blade even if you could. And it is the mirror-like texture that will point you to the solution. You do not want to light the steel of the knife. You want to light what the knife sees. Here's how to do it, using that same LED flashlight.

A light-painted photo like this one is done in either total or near darkness, with everything in a fixed position. The camera is on a tripod, the knife position is known and (usually) many tries are completed before you get a light-painted result that you like.

Thank God for digital. Can you imagine doing this on film? We used to do just that.

So, finely polished knife blade positioned and with the room lights on, you look through the fixed camera position while a helper moves a piece of paper around until the knife shows you its reflection cleanly on the blade.

You can do this by yourself, but you have to clamp or fold the paper so it stands up by itself while you go back and forth from paper moving to camera to find the right spot by trial and error.

Paper positioned to reflect in the knife blade, the rest should be getting obvious by now. You are going to light the scene by deftly moving your little flashlight around, and then create the knife blade highlight by lighting the paper with the same light source.

Personally, I would leave that to be the last variable to solve. It is gonna take a few tries to get the scene right. (I say a few - it'd take me dozens of tries.)

But for the final trick - once you get the scene-lighting movements down pat - you paint in the blade highlights.

If you were doing this by strobe, you'd likely just task one small light to hit the paper (which would paint the reflection in the blade.) But you have a moving, dynamic light source, so why not use that to your advantage?

Why just paint the paper evenly when you could paint it in a cool gradient, (by varying the flashlight time different parts of the paper got) making just about any tonal range you wanted in the blade.

(Total control would be yours, muah-ha-ha-ha...)

Once you get the technique memorized, doing other knives would be a snap. And somehow, all of your knife shots would look very different than those of your fellow photogs.

Which is kinda what this is all about, no?

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Light Partying, and a Fuji S5 Review

Strobist reader Ryan Brenizer had a little party with a couple of fellow light-types, and posted a bunch of photos from the evening. It's cool that these kind of lighting-themed get-togethers are starting to happen.

If you want to hook up with fellow local flashers, check out the Flickr Strobist threads, which are starting to get some city-specific events. (Or start one of your own.)

Ryan has also posted a two-part review of the just-out Fuji S5 Pro, [MPEX|Amazon] the much anticipated "Pimp my Ride" version of the Nikon D200 [MPEX|Amazon] body.

According to Ryan, there is an awful lot to like about the new camera. Looks like it nails the color, and the dynamic range is nothing short of amazing.

Case in point: The dual-photo at left is a "stress test," if you will. A way overexposed raw capture is on the left. And what Ryan was able to save (in Adobe Lightroom) on the right.

(Wow.)

As for his review(s), the good points are in Part 1, with the cons in Part 2.

(Thanks, Ryan - and invite me next time, will ya?)

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On Assignment: Spring Arts Guide

I'll tell ya, the longer I am away from softboxes, the less I miss them. Where I used to see them as the go-to, default soft light source, I now consider them to be expensive, light-sucking and limiting. Now, I only use them in special situations.

In the past I would have whipped out a 'box for this photo of a montage that was assembled just to be photographed for the cover of the Baltimore Sun's Spring Arts preview section. In many ways, it is is a copy shot. But the subject is three-dimensional enough to have to light it in a way that reveals texture.

This was to be a starting point for what would ultimately be a heavily altered illustration. For instance, I did not have to worry about the double-images on the tulips, as they would be taken out in the subsequent changes.

It's basically a shadowbox montage that exists out of the bounds of the shadowbox. So it was a little different than doing a copy photo of a painting or a document. I wanted the light to be directional enough to reveal form. But I also wanted it to be soft and smooth enough to evenly light the whole subject area from top to bottom.

My standard modus operandi is to abide by the K.I.S.S. principal, and keep things simple enough to not invent more problems to have to solve.

I decided to shoot this with one speedlight. Rather that put it into some kind of a light modifier, like an umbrella or a softbox, I find if more useful to shoot the light through a diffuser. That way I can have raw (undiffused) light spilling past the diffuser, for a more powerful fill light reflection.

If that sounds complicated, it isn't. Consider my diffuser, to start. I generally just look around for whatever piece of paper or cardboard or plastic is available and this time was no exception. The easy choice was the tupperware box in which the designer had brought the supplies to the studio.

It was a little clearer than I would have liked, and would not really diffuse raw light that much. So I stuck the piece of tracing paper that the designer had used to comp the shot inside the bottom of the box before placing it on its side.

Voila, one custom-made light diffuser, ready for action.

The shape of the box fit the subject on the long end, and was about six inches high when place on it's side. I wanted to raise it a little to gobo the light at the floor level and control the highlights on the far left. Remember, this shadowbox thing is several inches tall.

Thus, found object number two: A piece of wood. The flash was stuck on the floor on the left, with a snoot to control the beam spread. These cardboard snoots are the single most useful light accessory I carry, IMO.

Here's how the setup looks, without the light.

From here, you can also see the reflector I used - a bent piece of white cardboard. Hey, it don't have to be purdy to reflect light.

At first glance, you might not think this cardboard light enough to do the fill job smoothly. But that is where the diffused light/raw light equation comes into play.

The tupperware diffuses the raw light from the flash and knocks it down by about two stops. But it is only catching part of the raw light beam. After adjusting the aperture to allow for the light loss, the net effect is to make the raw light that spills over the top of the tupperware (and heads straight to the reflector) two stops brighter when it gets there.

The fact that my diffuse light (from the left) is basically two stops darker than my raw, soon-to-be-reflected light heading toward the right, makes for increased light ratio control. And I also have the ability to get soft light from two directions that is basically 1:1 in intensity if that is what I want.

By adjusting the angle and controlling how much raw spill hits the reflector, I can easily knock that fill ratio down to whatever I want. I can also do this by moving the reflector back some.

Theoretically, I could use a very efficient reflector and/or stick some more sheets of paper into the tupperware and end up with a stronger light source from the reflection side than from the diffused side. Total control, with one small light.

Here is the setup in action, and you can see that the spill light ended up hitting pretty high, which gave me the ratio I wanted. To make for a brighter reflection, I would have raised the flash a little (with a little board or a shoe under it) to make the raw light start hitting the reflector board at a lower spot.

That would have given me more light from the right side. That's so much more control that I would have with a softbox. And the cost is nil.

Here's something else to think about. By using the minimal gear (even though I was shooting in a studio full of Profoto lights) the solution becomes easily transportable to just about any location. I am using the stuff I carry with me nearly everywhere, and a couple of found objects that would exist in just about any home.

The more I do this, the more important I think it is to not think (or gear up) any differently just because you are in a studio. That makes your your lighting solutions as portable as your speedlights.


NEXT: Munchies

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Okay, Let's Start on Year Two

First of all, thanks much for the kind words on the Year-One thing. That means a lot.

There were a couple of questions mixed in, so I wanted to answer those before we moved on.
___________________


Is that you? I dont think you have every posted your own pic on Strobist... but I may be wrong.

Yes, that is me. I posted another photo way back in the OA section, called "Dealing With a Difficult Subject," and someone sent in a shot of me shooting a football game once.

Don't be fooled by this picture. I can assure you that the camera adds 10 25 pounds, 15 years and subtracts six inches from my height. If you want a more accurate, real-life depiction, think Brad Pitt. But holding an SB-26.


Birthday Eh? So how many spankings would that be?

One, for the one year the blog has been alive. Were it my birthday, considerably more work would be needed from the spanker.


Is it time to put together a Strobist WoodStock? Should all of us make a trip to some place where we can all meet share ideas and gadgets. Wouldn't be great if we could have it sponsored by manufacturers of the products we use.

I will talk to the people who make Frosted Flakes and see what I can come up with.


Just wondering if, in coming up with the "Strobist", you considered the name "Flasher" at all?

Yes I did, along with a couple hundred other ideas. The idea was to make up a new word that (a) connoted what I wanted to teach, and (b) I could spell.


I guess I'm the only one who clicked the miss usa pic, very funny!

Yeah, I was actually surprised that more of you didn't want to see the contestants closer up...


I'm told there's a book in all of us. Maybe it's time for you to think about yours?

I thought about it for a good long time, and decided my schedule would not permit doing it the way I would want to do it. But I will say there is something in the works that should be far more interesting. And besides, I could never "outmagic" the Light - Science & Magic guys.


And to Jeff, who noted that he has never grown more, photographically, in a year, I would answer, "Neither have I."

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Strobist Turns One

One year ago tonight, I posted the first reference to a new experiment of a lighting blog, Strobist, on a photo message board. What began as a little online notebook to keep track of my thoughts on small-flash lighting has grown into something way beyond what I ever expected.

Through March of 2006, I put together much of the Lighting 101 posts, and a couple of On Assignments. Actually, I made pretty good time because I was home sick for a several days during the month. And in checking my grammar and spelling on those early posts (not great under the best of circumstances) it should not surprise you to find out that much of it was written under the influence of drugs.

Hey, if Edgar Allen Poe can write on opium and booze, I can do it on Thera-Flu.

On April 5th of 2006, I was in Ocean City, Maryland on an assignment to follow the Miss USA contestants. The pageant was to be held soon in Baltimore, and they assigned me to follow around the whole herd of unnaturally perky gals for a couple of weeks.

Tough job, to be sure. But someone had to do it.

Late at night, I sat down in my hotel room with my laptop and a slowish cell phone internet connection and made the first-ever mentions of Strobist on a couple of photo message boards. After a month of cranking out posts, I felt like I had enough to light this thing up and see if it would fizz. Pathetically, I back-dated my first post to February 28 because the thought of having just March and April in the archives list looked so newb.

The year that has gone by since has left me totally dumbfounded at what has happened with the site. I have watched as a whole community has formed around the idea of cool light from cheap little flashes. I have seen so many people grow their creativity and skills - and meet other like-minded photographers.

I have been gratified to see people with little-to-no previous flash skills blossom into kickass lighting photographers. And every month brings more and more people into our little nonexclusive lighting geek club.

My own skills and creative thought processes have grown significantly as a result of being at the receiving and of so many great ideas from so many different readers. Ideas are the rare commodity in this business, and I find that I have far too many to try at any given time. And that totally rocks.

Most of all, I have enjoyed meeting so many people - both online and in person - and hearing so many stories about how discovering light has changed their photography for the better. That makes me feel great.

I have no idea what the future may hold, or how long I can keep up the harried pace of shooting full time and driving this sometimes out-of-control train. But I can tell you I plan to keep going and to see where it takes us. So far it has been too interesting to stop.

Thanks for a wonderful, caffeine-laced, sleep-deprived mind-expanding year. I cannot wait to see what the next year brings.

And because I know you too well, click here for the lighting dope.

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Get Creative With a Little 'Light S and M'

One of the best things about running a blog on flash technique is that I pretty much live in a vortex of lighting ideas. If something cool is happening, you guys tell me about it. That is how I originally found out about the book, "Light - Science & Magic" last year, when I asked you to send me your favorite photo book titles.

L-S&M was by far the most popular suggestion, and it has been a favorite of Strobist readers ever since. A few of them have even formed a Flickr group dedicated to the principles they learned in the book.

Today marks the official release of their third edition, the bigger budget for which has allowed them to update the book with new photo examples and diagrams. The addition of full color from cover to cover makes the book much more visually accessible for photographers. Kind of an important thing when one is talking about lighting, no?

If there was a knock on the earlier editions, it was that they were somewhat dated. Not anymore.

And the book remains jam-packed with the same teach-you-how-to-think information that has made the previous versions such a go-to resource for lighting photographers.


For Photographers, By Photographers

Authors Fil Hunter, Steven Biver and Paul Fuqua all are the real deal, working in photography, illustration and design in Northern Virginia. Hunter taught lighting at the college level, and now works in several different forms of media. Steven Biver does killer photo/illustration work for a variety of clients. (His site is really worth a few minutes of your time, BTW.) Paul Fuqua works with Discovery, those guys who do the cool science and nature stuff on TV.

The book is not a gushing career retrospective. It won't tell you how the authors schmoozed ten extra minutes out of Bill Gates on a shoot.

It is not a series of portfolio photos and how they were made. Oddly, as many techniques as it delivers, you cannot even call it a "bag of tricks" type of book. The examples are (for the most part) sparse, visually simple photographs that drive home the techniques and solutions being covered.

Ego and bravado took the week off in favor of raw, honest information dissemination. Amen to that.

What the book does is teach you how to think about light. After 20+ years of doing this, I feel like know my way around a studio. L-S&M is already changing the way I am approaching my lighting.

I have always considered myself somewhat of a fish out of water when it comes to writing (I am a picture guy) so what I want to do is to walk you through the book, chapter-by-chapter, to show you how comprehensive their approach to lighting really is.


A Walk Through the Book

The first two chapters cover the authors' approach to learning and a discussion of the basic qualities of light. While this may seem a tad superfluous to some, it ensures that all of the readers are up to speed before jumping into the pool.

The third chapter, "The Management of Reflection and the Family of Angles," is the foundation for the rest of the book. It all comes back to this. Reflection, both specular and diffuse, is to lighting as arithmetic is to algebra. You really cannot hope to learn the latter without a thorough understanding of the former. But even here I found new ideas that challenged the way I thought about light.

Chapter four deals with subject surface quality as a component of lighting. Often overlooked in the one-size-fits-all approach to teaching lighting techniques, this is a critical determinant of your final look. The light is positioned and sized and sent to the subject. But before it gets to your camera to record an image it can be drastically altered by the subject itself. You will learn not only to anticipate this variable, but to use it as yet another means of control.

Basic physics covered, (and don't let that "P" word put you off) they now move to three-dimensionality and form in chapter five. As with everything else in the book, they lay foundations and then allow you to incorporate what you have just learned into more complex concepts. A casual flip through the book might lead you to judge the illustrations as too simplistic. Don't be fooled. What they are is a distillation of the concepts being presented in a way that allows you to learn them more easily.

From here they move into how to light various surface qualities - metal in chapter six and glass in chapter seven. This may seem needlessly specific to some. But my take is that most of the subjects we shoot are more complex. And knowing how to attack each surface variable leads to a better problem-solving technique on the more complicated shoots.

Chapter eight moves into people, with a head shot as the vehicle to talk about how the various lighting positions affect a portrait. Again, the subject is very basic - a head shot. But this is a subject you just cannot do a lighting book without addressing. And many will find it a good reference.

If anything can be taken for granted in the business of location photography and lighting, it is that nothing can be taken for granted. Chapter nine deals with the "extremes" of lighting challenges. White on white. Black on black. Opaque and translucent background in both of the above combinations. At this point, I would not have been surprised to see a section on black holes.

The final chapter, Traveling Light, will (hopefully) be familiar ground to long-term readers of this site. They cover some basic tips and techniques in a way that will be useful to many of you. But this book is primarily a solid foundation - for many, an all-new foundation - that will teach you how to think about light and enhance your problem-solving skills.


For Thinking Photographers

I have heard earlier versions of this book called a "Lighting Bible." Those are strong words to throw around, and I find the following description more appropriate.

If you are a thinking photographer, "Light - Science & Magic" is a book of revelations about light. And if you are not a thinking photographer, it may very well turn you into one.
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(If you have read Light - Science & Magic, and would like to share an opinion, please sound off in the comments section below.)

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