When we featured Strobox back in 2009, it was a simple idea: provide an easy way for photographers to create lighting diagrams and share them with others. Since then, they’ve upgraded their website to include a gallery where you can browse photographs done by others, view their lighting diagrams, and comment on them.

If you don’t have a full arsenal of lightning equipment, you can filter the photos by what kind of lighting equipment was used to browse photos that are more relevant to you.
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Portrait photographer Gregory Heisler has done quite a few portraits for Time Magazine covers, including a few for their Person of the Year issues. This is an informative video where he steps through how he went about photographing Rudy Giuliani at the top of Rockefeller Center with the Empire State Building in the background. If you’re interested at all in portraiture and/or lighting, you’ll find this video quite educational.
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Editor’s note: This walkthrough was originally published on Clint Decker’s Flickr account. We found it pretty informative and asked him to share it here.

Here is a little video on how I did the photography with Canon Speedlites while dropping items into a tank of water.

With a white background, I used a Canon Speedlite 580ex II on the left and right of the fish tank with water. They were set to manual 1/128sec.

I had a Canon Speedlite 430ex II on a chair behind the fish tank pointing towards the white background so it would come out pure white. This was set to manual 1/64th of a second (I would of done 1/128 but the 430ex II can only go down to 1/64). You want to go 1/128 so it freezes the splash mid air.
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This photograph, titled “Easy Rider“, was shot by photographer Chris McVeigh (AKA powerpig on Flickr). The photograph seems so unbelievable that many people asked whether it was faked using Photoshop.

In response, McVeigh posted the following video showing his technique.
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Google has a useful account on YouTube called GoogleWebmasterHelp that publishes short video answers to search engine optimization (SEO) questions submitted to them. If you have a website promoting your photography, then thinking about SEO can help you drive more visitors to your photography.

Here are a couple videos that are relevant to photographers:

How can a photographer’s image-focused site gain PageRank?

Takeaway points: include text relevant to the image(s) inside the img tag and around the image to help the search engine understand what the page is about. For example, you could include a description of the photo in the name or title tag of the image.

Secondly, allow visitors to comment on the image. This often leads to users describing some aspect of the image for you (i.e. “I love the light falling on the barn door”), which helps search engines understand what’s happening on the page.
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Tilt-shift lenses are usually pretty pricey, so many people fake the effect during post-processing by selectively blurring sections of their photographs. There’s even simple web-apps that can add such blur to give your photographs a miniature scale model effect.

If faking the effect isn’t legit enough to satisfy your photo-geekiness — and you’d rather not drop big bucks on it either — there’s a nifty do-it-yourself solution you need to check out: Bhautik Joshi over at cow.mooh.org has a new DIY Tilt-Shift project that teaches you how to convert an old lens into various kinds of tilt-shift lenses.
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Freddy Wong’s YouTube channel is a must-subscribe if you’re interested in video editing and home-brewed CGI. A couple months ago we featured an amazing video they made where an entire action scene was done using light-painting techniques. What’s neat about their channel is that they also create behind-the-scenes clips explaining how each one was made.
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