I got the piano tuned the other day. Hurray! It sounds wonderful and it’s actually easier to play now that the tension on each key has been adjusted. But taking advantage of an open piano, I asked the tuner if he minded if I took some pictures over his shoulder. It [...]

We finally attacked the garage. After three years of living with a packed garage (ala one of those depressing clean-the-clutter tv shows), we finally cleaned up and cleaned out. Granted, all of the junk was not our own. We inherited 60 years worth of garage workshop engine grease, nuts, bolts, cobwebs, [...]

A great product shot can range from the simple to the complicated, but the key to it all is to make the product look its very best so people will buy it. Here are some easy things to think about when approaching a product shot…

For the past 10 days, I’ve been shooting and Photoshopping dancing shoes for a website. There are a lot of shoe styles to shoot, and even more shots to edit, so I’ve been swamped. In a few days, I’ll write some specifics about how I lit these, but for now, I’ll say [...]

Shiny metal is one of the most challenging surfaces to shoot. Think of all the products in your kitchen made of shiny metal! Rounded surfaces are even more difficult because they act like a wide-angle lens, seeing everything in your studio. Here are some guidelines and diagrams for shooting objects made of shiny metal.

I’ve been playing with my diopters this week. Diopters are close-up glass filters that screw onto the front element of SLR Camera lenses. They allow you to focus really close-up on the subject without an expensive macro lens. I took a bunch of shots with different lighting configurations, and these were [...]