The key to improving our photography is an ongoing understanding of light: how it behaves, how it looks best on different faces, how it bounces around creating different effects. Here are a few ideas about learning how to “see the light.”

There’s a really interesting exhibit at the Williams College Museum in Massachusetts called American Art and Early Film. The premise behind the exhibit is to “to show how artists and audiences of that period grappled with the new visual technology.” The exhibit displays paintings from the 1880′s and 90′s juxtoposed to early motion pictures with [...]

I’ve started writing text materials for the Cinematography and Motion Picture Production classes I’m teaching at APU in the fall. The students will use this info like text books, and I thought I’d share these articles on I Speak Film. I’ve read a zillion books on cinematography, but there isn’t a stand-out book that I’d [...]

Magic hour is that magical time of day after the sun has dipped below the horizon, and before the sky has gotten dark. For photographers and cinematographers, it is a wonderful time of day for shooting portraits, architecture, landscapes, water, and products. Calling it an hour is really a misnomer for most parts of the [...]

Summer is fast approaching and I can think of no better way to spend it than to take a class or two at the Maine Photographic Workshops. There are many film and photography workshops in the world, but my all-time favorite place to learn is at the Maine Workshops. They have week-long classes, summer programs, [...]

How to create the look of daylight in studio when shooting products.

So I’ve been teaching more at Azusa Pacific University. I work there as an adjunct professor and this semester I’m teaching Broadcast Journalism and doing the lecture portion of their Motion Picture Production class. It’s going really well, I think. Last semester and for the last couple of years, I taught Basics of Cinematography. It’s [...]

Arguably, the most useful and inexpensive movie-making tool is the Clothes Pin. Called in the biz a “C47″ or a “Bullet,” these can be used to attach gels to lights, remove scrims from lights without burning your fingers, and all sorts of other great applications. I sometimes used them to tie my hair back or [...]