Chinese translations of my flash photography books

It was with great surprise when my publisher notified me that my 1st book, On-Camera Flash Photography, has been translated into Chinese and is now available for purchase in China. While still trying to digest that news, I got an email from the translator of my 2nd book, Off-Camera Flash Photography, wanting to clarify a few things. So that’s pretty big news, especially because it’s already getting good reviews, if I go by the star ratings.

As soon as I get my copy, it’ll sit comfortably next to the Polish translations of my 1st book and 2nd book, and the Brazilian edition of my 1st book. It’s a feel-good moment. : )

photography workshops and seminars in 2012

full-day flash photography & lighting workshop – New York

I will be presenting three flash photography workshops in New York this year.
The first date is Tue, May 22    – sold out!
The other workshops will take place in July and October, with the specific dates to be announced.

After Dark Photography Education – Charlotte, NC – May 14-16, 2012

This discount code: NVNP will save you $72 when you register
signing up and more details on the After Dark Education site.

Blog posts about my experience with After Dark Edu … I love it!

As mentioned in various posts last year, I had decided to pause the travelling workshops for the time being. The workshops in other areas of the USA, away from home, have been rewarding, but the time spent travelling has taken me away from my work as a wedding photographer, and I need to focus on that again.

However, if someone wants to help get a group together of 10 people, then we can figure out if a workshop away from New York is feasible.

I’m still finalizing dates and places for possible workshops in the UK and possibly the Netherlands. And maybe, maybe even Canada.

If you find these articles interesting and of value, then you can help by using
these affiliate links to order equipment & other goodies.   Thank you!

Stay informed of new articles via the monthly newsletter.
Also join us on the Tangents forum for further discussions.

After Dark Photography Education – Charlotte, NC – May 14-16, 2012

I’m very happy to say I’ve been invited again to present at After Dark Education’s next event, which is in Charlotte. As you may well know from my previous blog posts about After Dark Edu, I love it! It is in my opinion the best opportunity for any photographer to learn and shoot. A lot.

This discount code: NVNP will save you $72 when you register!
To sign up, or for more details, check out the After Dark Education site.

(The image at the top was taken at a previous After Dark event in Las Vegas.)

Fotografia z lampa blyskowa w praktyce

Google’s translation says that means: “Photography with a flash in practice”. Either way, I’m very proud to announce that my second book, Off-Camera Flash, has been translated and released in Poland. More details here on this Polish site. A big thank you to the followers of the Tangents blog there in Poland who made this possible!

I’ve mention on the Tangents forum, and in comments sprinkled around here on the Tangents blog, that I am busy writing a third book on flash photography and lighting. The topic is quite expansive … and I am struggling at the moment with the title.

The title of a book needs to be interesting. It needs to be snappy. It needs to catch people’s attenion. Simultaneously, it needs to inform the potential reader.

This is a tall order. So I thought I’d reach out to everyone here who follows the Tangents blog, and see what ideas they can come up with, based on the (draft) introduction to the book:

The top three entries will get an autographed copy of the book when it is released. (Probably some time early in 2013).
The author of entry that I use (or eventually base the title on), will get a mention in the Acknowledgements  of the book, as well as mad props here on Tangents and on my Facebook Page!

Two other rules: I have final say in this. And no whining allowed.
Oh, and I may or may not use the winning suggestion for the title. Or I may use it as a further idea. (I would still acknowledge this in the book in this case.)

Here is the introduction.  (As I mentioned, it is still in draft form.)  
So let’s see what you can come up with!

Introduction:

I was asked the following question in an interview:

“Is there a single thing that you can tell us that would improve our flash photography instantly if we were to do this one simple thing?”

My answer came from a simple realization that took me years to really grasp:

It is all about direction of light. Whether you use natural light; on-camera flash; off-camera flash; multiple light setups or video light – it all comes down to the direction of light. Once you recognize this aspect of photography and lighting, then the door is wide open for you to be able to comfortably use any light source.

This book was originally intended to be about multiple off-camera flash. It just seemed like the natural progression from my previous two books – on-camera flash, then leading to off-camera flash. It just seemed like a good idea to keep progressing from there.

When I started collecting material for the book on multiple off-camera lighting, I paused on the idea ‘why?’. Why would we need multiple off-camera flashguns? Not just to show off how cool we are at juggling the light from multiple sources. I mean, it is quite something to set up a bunch of lights. But the real reason would be to solve a problem – to solve some kind of lighting problem that a single light couldn’t fix. Or that simply moving your subject into different light couldn’t affect.

The extension of that idea led to the theme of this book – problem solving when we have a difficult lighting scenario, or perhaps just one that is a touch too bland.

However, the problem solving technique doesn’t necessarily rely on multiple flashguns. The technique might be as simple as posing our subject towards more flattering light. Or we could simply use on-camera flash. Or off-camera flash .. or eventually, multiple light sources.

This brings us right back to my opening comment – with lighting in photography, it is all about direction of light, and the quality of light.

As creative and inquisitive photographers we should not just stop at just one specific approach. It’s more fun and more of a challenge to try various ways of using light. This journey we are on as photographers is just more of an adventure to if we’re constantly learning and mastering more.

Therefore in this book, we will look at different methods to get great light on our subjects – we’re going to use natural light; on-camera flash; off-camera flash; multiple light setups or video light – it’s all about the light.

So here we are. Let’s have fun!

more still about flash photography

I presented another Master-Class this year at WPPI in Las Vegas. I rather audaciously chose the title of my talk to be:

Flash Photography – The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth

As a photographer, there are certain inescapable essentials we absolutely have to know before we can progress in understanding light and lighting. In this presentation, Neil barrels through the conflicting advice you’ve received, offering the essential building blocks to help you truly grasp the power of flash and lighting done right.

That does seem rather bold now! Very ambitious. With the presentation I pulled together a number of key concepts which are essential to understanding flash photography. So there wasn’t an overall theme in this case – just ten different concepts which I think are important.

The presentation over-ran by about 45 minutes, with all of the questions that had to be answered. The response to my presentation was very good. One of the emails I received afterwards said: “I took your platform class at the WPPI this year and I have to say, it was my favourite by far!!” And that is so good to hear!

With this, I have decided to add the material to the flagship articles here on flash photography.

flash photography concepts

It is mostly links to the related articles – but all the information is there. Time to explore!

If you find these articles interesting and of value, then you can help by using
these affiliate links to order equipment & other goodies.   Thank you!

Stay informed of new articles via the monthly newsletter.
Also join us on the Tangents forum for further discussions.

Fundy has let me know that Fundy Software has released a cool little tool that could help with your digital workflow. And the best part? It’s free.

Free Image Finder from Fundy Software

How many times have you gotten a list of files from your bride or your shopping cart. It might a complete list with the entire file names or it might be just the numbers on the end of the file names. The only way to go through and find these selects is go open the folder up in Bridge or Photo Mechanic and find and tag them one by one manually, then copy them out to a new folder.

Image Finder does all this hard work for you. It’s super simple to use. Just paste in a list of file names, the file names don’t even have to be complete. If you have 074, Image Finder will find that file name or something like Johnson-074.jpg. So don’t worry if all your clients don’t’ send complete file names. After pasting in the file names, point Image Finder to the folder where the images are and click Find. It will find all the images within about 2 seconds. Then just copy out those images to another folder.

Then you’re done.

You can download it for free right here.

Check out this video on how it works.

availability of my flash photography books

I’ve had several people tell me that my books aren’t available on Amazon’s Kindle anymore. So I double-checked with the publisher, Amherst Media, and received news that while my books aren’t available as a Kindle publication, they are available in a number of other electronic formats.

We’re not on Kindle for now. We are on iPad, Nook, Kobo, Google Books and dozens of Android tablets and PCs through protected Pdf and ePub files.

IPG, our distributor into bookstores and Amazon, is having a pricing issue with Amazon. Amazon is demanding that Kindle books sell for next to nothing, basically cutting out profits for authors and publishers. Amazon, as a threat, has pulled over four thousand books from Kindle including ours. IPG is working on it to establish fair terms and has the support of the publishing industry.

Another issue is that the Kindle book quality is very poor. We encourage our readers to buy their eBooks from Apple or from Amherst Media direct. In fact, we are now having an eBook sale on our site. Our eBook quality is the best, books are in full color with page design features and page numbers.

So that’s where we are at the moment.

Also, if you’d like to order an autographed copy of my book directly from me … that’s an option too!

book 1: on-camera flash

book 2: off-camera flash

update: Spinlight 360 – new how-to videos added

Just to let everyone know that the creator of the Spinlight 360 has added five more how-to video clips to the site. This should answer many of the questions on how to use it and how to assemble it.

There is a discount code for readers of the Tangents blog.
More info on the Spinlight 360, and info on how to order one

I’ve recently been using the Spinlight 360 at the weddings that I’ve photographed.

Now onto something … more … um … I have no words really …

Fake Chuck Westfall reckons that the Spinlight videos should’ve been juiced up, with me as a vampire hunter. But I’m not so sure my face would even scare a baby, nevermind a vampire.

If you find these articles interesting and of value, then you can help by using
these affiliate links to order equipment & other goodies.   Thank you!

Stay informed of new articles via the monthly newsletter.
Also join us on the Tangents forum for further discussions.

After Dark Photography Education - Dallas, TX

I’ve raved here about the After Dark photography conventions before, as being the best photography convention / learning experience that I’ve attended. So it is with great pleasure that I did several presentations at the After Dark event in Dallas, TX during Feb 27 -29, 2012. I even expanded the range of topics I taught to include a presentation on basic portrait retouching in Photoshop and Lightroom.

Of course, part of the fun of After Dark Edu, is that you can use any of the 10 bays where there are numerous lighting goodies, and photograph one of the models there. So you get to play with gear you wouldn’t normally have access to … along with the various Mentors there to help you. Or, if you choose, you can just play around on your own and discover. And this is what I did here when I photographed Madison. I added a beauty dish and an Eyelighter reflector, and a gridded softbox for a bit of a kicker, and another light for the background. Just having fun, seeing what the result would look like. And that’s a way to learn. Here’s the pull-back shot …

One of the presentations I taught was, as could be expected, about on-camera bounce flash:

Here’s the result with one of the models:
(The smaller insert is the photo without flash, just for comparison. And I know I should’ve fixed her hair for the shot, but I was too intent on explaining at the time.)

Here’s the link if you’re curious about the specific technique used in bounce flash photography, to get that lighting pattern.

Something I’ve done at previous After Dark conventions, is to use just the modeling light (with the diffusion of the softbox), as the light-source. It’s so easy to see what you’re going to get as a result, when you use the continuous light of the modeling light. And with a Nikon D3s, the high-ISO noise is no concern.

Here is my friend Blonnie, who is a Delaware wedding photographer.

The softbox was huge. (If I recall correctly, it was around 4′ x 5′. So the light is incredibly soft.

Time for a new profile photo for myself for Facebook.

The same light source for both images! However, the light pattern and result is quite different. She sat further back compared to the softbox, so there was a wrap-around effect, giving beautiful soft light. I sat closer to the “front” of the softbox, nearer the camera. So the effect is much more dramatic.

Just a small reminder how the positioning of your subject in relation to your light source, completely changes the light … even with a large light source.

And it is just fun to hang out with people, and chat and watch all the activity. There’s always something going on, until deep deep into the night. Three images I captured via my iPhone and Instagram:

One of the young models showing his moves. I tried to time my shots with the other photographer who was firing the flash setup. I’m not sure if that specific idea worked – somehow I expected to get any photo completely blown out when the flash goes off – but, this image worked. I like it.

Jabeen, lit with an incandescent lighting setup.
(Jabeen is married to well-known Dallas wedding photographer, Humza Yasin.)

The station where the models prepped.

Thank you to everyone who attended, and thank you to everyone who follows the Tangents blog and came up to introduce themselves. It’s always quite an honor to meet in person.

And anyone who is interested in attending future After Dark Education events, check out their website for more details.

If you find these articles interesting and of value, then you can help by using
these affiliate links to order equipment & other goodies.   Thank you!

Stay informed of new articles via the monthly newsletter.
Also join us on the Tangents forum for further discussions.