Every one of us gains knowledge and inspiration from various sources. As photographers we tend to identify and appreciate the work of other photographers, we are visual people, it is in our nature to be attracted and inspired by certain images. I have a love of travel and a keen interest in portraiture and the telling of tales through faces and settings. This does not really reflect in my stock photography, at Microstockhelper we shoot what we perceive to be in demand in the stock photography market and what we feel will be best for the business. On a personal level I am drawn to and inspired by the work of a few photographers, among them are Steve McCurray, Annie Leibowitz and Joey L.
I first came across Joey’s work when I watched a video about his trip to Indonesia and photographing the Mentawi Tribe. At the time I was living in Indonesia (now in Cape Town) and just starting to develop an interest in
We recently did a cool shoot of breakdancing in or cape town studio. one of the most important things to factor into a dance shoot is flash duration. We shot this with Elinchrom RX600 lights which have a short flash duration at full power as you will see in the BTS video. In the video we take you through a few lighting setups as well as some post production through lightroom, adobe photoshop and capture one. Below you will see some lighting diagrams and finished images to show you
A family friend who is a wedding photographer recently contacted me and asked if I would help teach him some lighting techniques and post production workflow in order to help him get into the world of Stock photography. Please note that it is not essential that you have a studio, fancy lighting or the best equipment in order to submit to stock agencies, you can start with as little as a Nikon D90 and a 50mm lens. Donavan Whyte has always wanted to shoot more fashion style images and hence his desire to master studio lighting. So he decided to fly me up from my Cape Town Studio and spend a day and a half helping him out.
I was happy to see that he was somewhat prepared for the shoot, arranging 4 models, makeup, props and
Here is a video tutorial I made about helping you isolate studio shots using gradients and layer masks.
This is the finished image, as you can see the gradient is much smoother than what the video recording software showed. Here is the lighting setup and it was all shot in our new cape town photography studio.
A cyclorama or infinity wall is quite common in a lot of photography studios. The curved wall creates a seamless background and makes for a perfect studio shooting environment. That is why I decided to build one in my new Cape Town Photographic Studio. I have documented our progress and below you can see how we went about it and what we used to build with.
