Indoor Shoot Setup

I've had several people ask what the setup was for the lifestyle shoot I shot last week so I thought I'd tell you guys in case you wanted to try it out.

For the shoot I had 2 Profoto Acute 2 1200 packs and 2 strobes. It was a very simple setup. One light was outside at a 45 degree angle to the window. It was set pretty hot so that it would blow out the window and look like direct sunlight beaming in. For the other one, I didn't want it to look like artificial light so it was never in a direct line with the couple. It was always around walls, through doors, with the light bouncing around before it got to the couple. It took a little playing around to get the right amount of fill from the inside strobe. We just played with the positioning and the ratios and after a little experimentation we liked what we had. Both the strobes were triggered wirelessly by pocket wizards. I also had a few white foam core reflectors that I used for fill if needed. You can get foam core at pretty much any pro-photography store, its super cheap and the quality of the light off of them is way better than those silver or gold 5-in-1 reflectors.

That was it. Once you get it right you can just shoot away and you have awesome, consistent light. Let me know if you have any other questions.

#6

We just added terabyte #6 to the "stable" of hard drives here at MNP. For those of you that aren't photographers or nerds, a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes. All together we have about 8.5tb of total storage and its seems to grow by a couple of terabytes every few months. We've shot about 2.5tb of images in the past year and we have everything backed up twice on hard disk and also on DVD. I've done tons of research on the best way to store images and the concensus seems to be this way... lots of drives, a second backup of the images on another physical drive and a third on DVD or CD.

When I was first starting out I searched and searched for answers to my questions and although I found a lot of photography related help, answers to questions about storage, workflow and just the day to day business of being a photographer, were not as readily available. Now I'm getting questions from other photographers just starting out about issues they're facing so I thought I'd start posting about stuff like this in hopes to possibly help someone out.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Cornucopia of Canon

Today the UPS man came and delivered a veritable cornucopia of Canon goodness. Most of you won't quite grasp the significance of this event but its a pretty huge deal for me and my photography.

Nikon is the arch-nemesis of Canon and in the fiercely competitive photography market, while there may be a dozen or so brands, there are only two considered by professionals... Canon and Nikon. Until today I was a Nikon shooter. Unlike most people, I think both brands have strengths and weaknesses and until recently I've held to the belief that Nikon's strengths outweighed their weaknesses. Well nothing has really changed but Canon released a lens last month that swung me over to their side. The 50mm 1.2. So with all of the other things Canon has going for them this was enough to make me reconsider my loyalty. It seems like Canon is being more innovative and I want in on that.

So I'm now officially shooting Canon and couldn't be more excited.