For nineteen years, Strobist has been about light. This post is about the other thing, the bigger thing, the thing that took me forty years and ten thousand assignments to fully understand. The success or failure of a travel photographer is not decided by gear, and only partly by technique. It is decided by how well you connect with the people and places in front of your camera. This is the one po

For fifteen years, this site focused on lighting. Before that, I worked as a newspaper photojournalist. Lighting was part of the job. So were access, preparation, and learning how to walk into unfamiliar situations and come back with something useful. Lighting solves technical problems. The harder problems are usually human. The Traveling Photographer’s Manifesto grows out of that larger frame. It

In 2006 I started a lighting blog while working full-time as a staffer at The Baltimore Sun. By early 2007, it became obvious that I didn't have the personal resources to give 100% to both Strobist and my job at the newspaper. That’s exactly the position I find myself in today. For the past year I have been working on a new project. It is photography-based, and will be as unique to the photo space

When lighting with small subjects, a speedlight is generally all you’ll ever need. Further, because of the scale and distances involved, even with a small flash you’ll be working at low power settings. For these photos of some of the resident animals at the Howard County Conservancy, we used a single speedlight generally at one-eighth power, and let the environment of the impromptu studio to the r

Apple’s new AirTags are a straight-up gift for photographers. After testing one for the past couple of weeks, I’ll be hiding an AirTag in my scooter, one in my car and another one in my camera bag. Read more »

The Paul C. Buff Link monobloc studio strobe ($895.95) delivers 800ws of portable power, and deserves consideration from anyone in the United States who is considering a big gun for use on location. Please note: This is not a full review. There have been several thorough examples already published — most notably this one by Mike McGee. There are many others, from the usual suspects, a Google searc

Lighting with flash can give you more than just the ability to control the quality of your light. With the inherent consistency of light from (manual) flash, you can layer in slices of time as well. But first, you’ll want to lock down two things: the ambient light portion of your exposure, and your camera’s physical position. Read more »

Whew. What a year. But if you're reading this, you made it through! As we all move into a hopefully much better 2021, here are three things you can do to improve your experience as a photographer for the coming year. Read more »

Quick, guess the lighting. If you said two lights, and use of high-speed sync to get the shallow depth of field, that's a pretty good guess. If you said zero lights and a rigid high-efficiency reflector, that's an even better (and correct) guess. When working with an inexperienced assistant — or looking to introduce someone to the world of off-camera lighting — a rigid/high-efficiency reflector is

At first glance: a simple, one-light portrait of activist gardener Janssen Evelyn. Dig deeper: a look at tonal mapping via specular highlights, stretching the range of your modestly powered flash, and how to discover your next project. Read more »

There are two main schools of thought when it comes to lighting. One is to light your subject in a way that is not grounded in reality but merely looks cool. And the other is to use lighting to translate the way your eye sees light into a way that your camera can better understand it. That latter choice is the option we'll be exploring today in a walk-through of a sunset portrait of artist Wendy N

Whenever you have control over the time of day in which you'll be shooting a location portrait, always remember that the hour that wraps around sunset will offer you at least five different lighting environments in which to work. And for today's portrait of birders Jo (left) and Bob Solem, we're going to use three of them. Read more »

Seeing as no one is doing much traveling these days, I thought it'd be fun to pay a visit with a Strobist reader photographing somewhere far away. Up for a little Lighting Cookbook field trip to Indonesia? Yeah? Then let's go... Read more »

UODATE: The bike sold, quickly, for the full asking price to the first person who showed up. Which was cool. And even better, the guy was like, "Who did the pictures? They jumped out at me." (Tiny speedlights FTW...) Have you tried to buy a new bike lately? Or even a used bike? The coronavirus pandemic has made them very tough to find. Between homebound people snapping them up and all of the vario

There's something about shooting medium format — especially in black and white. The look is unmistakeable: creamy highlights supported by lush, detailed shadows. So it's perfectly understandable why many photographers shell out big bucks for pricey medium format gear. In fact, it's possible that some of you are at this very moment casually thinking about how cool it would be to shoot with a MF cam

Hey, there's a pandemic. Have you heard? Looks like we might be spending a lot of time in the house with our immediate family these days. Maybe that family includes kids. And maybe they are starting to go a little stir crazy. Keep reading for some ideas for any lighting photographer who might be looking to make the best of some unscheduled family time. Read more »

How best to put this? The Godox TT600 is, objectively, a screaming bargain. It is a full-sized manual-only speedlight with power comparable to OEM speedlights that cost over eight(!) times as much. It features a reliable, built-in transceiver, a suite of different remote triggers and is part of a ridiculously comprehensive lineup of lighting gear. I honestly don't know how they can possibly sell t

Two pieces of news, on the X-Peditions Hanoi photo workshops front: The first is that I retired from teaching as of November 2025. But X-Peditions is still going strong. The second piece of news is that their new instructor, as of Fall 2026, will be none other than Ibarionex Perello , of The Candid Frame podcast fame (among many other things.) He is perhaps the best person in the world to be stepp

The LumoPro LP180 is no more. You could make a strong case that the LP180 was the best manual hot shoe flash ever produced — and maybe that ever will be produced. It was a beast of a flash, with a fluid user interface and features designed specifically for off-camera lighting photographers. Now, it's the last of a bygone era. Why did it have to die? What made it so good? And what will replace it a

To learn to create evocative light with flash, it helps to better understand how we experience the continuous light we see every day. To do that, you'll need to wean yourself from auto white balance, and even to abandon familiar waypoints like your daylight WB preset. Because our goal is to learn to exist in a more fluid way along the Kelvin scale. Read more »