I don’t know of any artist, or anyone else for that matter, that hasn’t experienced failure. I believe Woody Allen said, “If you aren’t failing, you aren’t trying hard enough.” The fact is, we all learn a lot more from failure than from success. I want to share my latest failure with you.
Yea, I know it seems a bit creepy and egotistical to assume that anyone should care how I made a photograph. So right up front, I’m writing about it because every I time shoot, I learn something new. I am a firm believer that you cannot learn photography by sitting in a classroom, or going online and watching tutorials, or even reading books. You have to get the camera in your hands and USE IT! So I wanted to share the techniques I used here, in hopes that at least some of you might want get out your cameras and give them a try. That’s pretty much all there is to it….I’m just trying to be useful…..while I continue my quest for world domination.
I created a video on how I shot the image below. The key is understanding how to freeze action with strobes instead of with shutter speed. I’ll create another tutorial on the post production work, because the final image relies heavily on it. this video deals exclusively with the camera settings and the studio strobes, and how they each contributed to the final shot. I used Paul C. Buff Einstein 640 monoblock lights, which IMHO are the best value for what you get. Among other things, they have an amazingly short flash duration, which allows for some serious stop-action shots.
This video is only half the story. The post-production in Photoshop is where it all comes together. I will deal with that in Part 2.
I’ve been in a creative slump. It happens to everybody. As a result, I forced myself to create a still life. I don’t normally do still life images, so I figured I’d give iot a shot using 3 off-camera flashes. I made a video of the process, which you can see below. I decided to make a video instead of writing an article, in order to save some time.
