eBook: SimpleSLR Hands-On Photography Guides by Andy Lim

SUPER PROMOTION!! 

All SimpleSLR guides are going at half price (50% off) until September 7. Use the discount code WEDDING50

Andy Lim got started in photography after leaving design college in 1992, and has given several public talks on the subject of photography. He has a gallery of travel and landscape photography, which showcases his work, some of which have been published worldwide.  Andy conducts SimpleSLR hands-on digital photography workshops, from beginners to advanced levels.

He also writes useful and practical digital photography tips on his GoodPhotography.info website. Andy Lim is an accomplished professional wedding photographer. His brand, Emotion in Pictures, attracts clients worldwide with his unique flavor of wedding and portrait photography.

He bring this quite useful collection at an affordable price in an eBook format to help you master your speedlights.

In 3 different flavors that goes from Hands on Photography to Portrait Lighting and Portrait Recipes just as easy as 1, 2, 3.

This will definitely improve your photography and the way you handle your speedlights.

Hands-On Photography Guide
Learn to Take Better Pictures in 4 Hours

This is the electronic version of Andy Lim’s SimpleSLR PhotoClass. Having this e-book is almost like being there at Andy’s class, because the exercises that he takes his class participants through have been distilled here.

Unlike a regular book, it’s designed to quickly get you up to speed with basic photography principles, and provides a platform for you to experiment and refine your techniques. This is not another e-book on photography theory. Instead, Andy provides plenty of hand-holding using easy-to-understand conversational language.
Learn to take better pictures in 4 hours with this e-book!

We start off with a section of ‘Photography Exercises’ to familiarize you with the basic techniques of photography, using a show-and-tell approach. This breakthrough approach has been proven time and again to be effective in getting beginners to start experimenting intelligently with photography. Andy’s approach emphasizes deep understanding, and strives to make photography simple.

In the accompanying section called ‘Analyzing The Shot’ Andy takes you through his thought process with the photographs that he has taken, describing how he arrived at the combination of settings used for each shot, and further advice on how you can apply these techniques to your own photographs.

Lastly, great care has been taken to design an e-book that is easy to use, elegantly crafted and most importantly effective in teaching you photography. This e-book is horizontally laid-out, which maximizes your screen area for reading (instead of the portrait orientation that many e-books use). Paragraphs are narrower for easier reading, and diagrams/photos are used throughout to illustrate each point.

Preview this e-book by checking out a few sample pages. This will give you a good idea what to expect when you purchase it.

Portrait Lighting Guide

This series of guides aims to help photographers master a key aspect of wedding and portrait photography, which is lighting using a variety of methods: speedlights, available light as well as natural light.

Available light does not always mean natural light, because available light can come from any light source, including the overhead spot light used in a wedding ballroom.
View a sample page from this guide.

SimpleSLR Portrait Lighting is the anchor guide that will help you create portraits at the speed of light. I will show you simple lighting techniques that create powerful results, which can be put together very quickly using the most basic equipment. This is the first guide you should purchase as it contains foundation skills for using speedlights effectively.

Portrait Lighting Techniques On-the-job skills of a wedding and portrait photographer, revealed using an approach that is easy to understand. Available to you at prices that are a steal!

Efficiently Organized Pages packed with useful information and how-to diagrams. Illustrated with actual portraits by professional photographer Andy Lim.

Less Is More Contrary to popular belief that more pages are better, SimpleSLR digital photography e-books get the point across with fewer pages.

Elegantly Crafted Photography Ebooks Landscape format PDF e-books designed to read well on your screen. Works on any computer or Ipad. Print them out if you like!

Portrait Recipes Vol.1
Indoor Portrait Photography

In VOLUME 1 of the 3-volume companion guides Portrait Recipes (available individually or as a bundle), various portrait scenarios in indoor portrait photography are illustrated, and 8 different detailed lighting setups are revealed.
 
Detailed diagrams showing placement of lights (be it speedlights or available light) accompany each scenario, with EXIF settings shown, and my thought process described.

Portrait Photography Lighting Tips

These are the 8 scenarios in this volume of Portrait Recipes. Each scenario comes with its own set of challenges, and I will reveal portrait photography lighting techniques that include:

• how to solve indoor portrait photography lighting challenges on a case-by-case basis
• change the look of the portrait easily without tedious post-production
• how a speedlight-lit portrait compares to one that was shot entirely with available light
• quick guerrilla-style lighting techniques that deliver results with a basic set of equipment
• portrait photography with speedlights

With these tips, you can create natural looking photography with flash, and confidently tackle any lighting situation during your next portrait or wedding shoot!

Portrait Recipes Vol.2
More Indoor Portrait Photography

In VOLUME 2 of the 3-volume companion guides Portrait Recipes (available individually or as a bundle), various portrait scenarios in indoor portrait photography are illustrated, and 8 different detailed lighting setups are revealed.
 
Detailed diagrams showing placement of lights (be it speedlights or available light) accompany each scenario, with EXIF settings shown, and my thought process described.

Portrait Photography Lighting Tips

These are the 8 scenarios in this volume of Portrait Recipes. Each scenario comes with its own set of challenges, and I will reveal lighting techniques for portrait photography that include:

• how to solve indoor portrait photography lighting challenges on a case-by-case basis
• change the look of the portrait easily without tedious post-production
• how a speedlight-lit portrait compares to one that was shot entirely with available light
• quick guerrilla-style lighting techniques that deliver results with a basic set of equipment
• portrait photography with speedlights

With these tips, you can create natural looking photography with flash, and confidently tackle any lighting situation during your next portrait or wedding shoot!

Portrait Recipes Vol.3
Outdoor Portrait Photography

In VOLUME 3 of the 3-volume companion guides Portrait Recipes (available individually or as a bundle), various portrait scenarios in outdoor portrait photography are illustrated, and 8 different detailed lighting setups are revealed.
 
Detailed diagrams showing placement of lights (be it speedlights or available light) accompany each scenario, with EXIF settings shown, and my thought process described.

Portrait Photography Lighting Tips

These are the 8 scenarios in this volume of Portrait Recipes. Each scenario comes with its own set of challenges, and I will reveal lighting techniques for portrait photography that include:

• how to solve outdoor portrait photography lighting challenges on a case-by-case basis
• change the look of the portrait easily without tedious post-production
• how a speedlight-lit portrait compares to one that was shot entirely with available light
• quick guerrilla-style lighting techniques that deliver results with a basic set of equipment
• portrait photography with speedlights

With these tips, you can create natural looking photography with flash, and confidently tackle any lighting situation during your next portrait or wedding shoot!

Hands-On Photography Guide
Learn to Take Better Pictures in 4 Hours

This is the electronic version of Andy Lim’s SimpleSLR PhotoClass. Having this e-book is almost like being there at Andy’s class, because the exercises that he takes his class participants through have been distilled here.

Unlike a regular book, it’s designed to quickly get you up to speed with basic photography principles, and provides a platform for you to experiment and refine your techniques. This is not another e-book on photography theory. Instead, Andy provides plenty of hand-holding using easy-to-understand conversational language.

Learn to take better pictures in 4 hours with this e-book!

We start off with a section of ‘Photography Exercises’ to familiarize you with the basic techniques of photography, using a show-and-tell approach. This breakthrough approach has been proven time and again to be effective in getting beginners to start experimenting intelligently with photography. Andy’s approach emphasizes deep understanding, and strives to make photography simple.

In the accompanying section called ‘Analyzing The Shot’ Andy takes you through his thought process with the photographs that he has taken, describing how he arrived at the combination of settings used for each shot, and further advice on how you can apply these techniques to your own photographs.

Lastly, great care has been taken to design an e-book that is easy to use, elegantly crafted and most importantly effective in teaching you photography. This e-book is horizontally laid-out, which maximizes your screen area for reading (instead of the portrait orientation that many e-books use). Paragraphs are narrower for easier reading, and diagrams/photos are used throughout to illustrate each point.

Preview this e-book by checking out a few sample pages. This will give you a good idea what to expect when you purchase it.

Enjoy this great set and get them all while they last...

Lenstag Aims to End Camera and Lens Theft

Nowadays with so much gear floating around and also with lot's of other eye of the beholder peaking around the corner the streets are now less safer than before and when carrying your gear you MUST HAVE an insurance to cover it at.

Your Precious!!!

They are never safe even if insured, and when you lost them and get stolen you rush to foruns and friends databases to try and keep track to them.

It's always a pain and in most cases you will never get them back, even after spending several hours reporting them to the police and insurance company.

I know that most of the online databases where you could mostly try to find your gear by serial number (Flickr or Google) aren't our best friends but then came Lenstag.

Well you can say puff!! it's an online free service and no one would care about this.

Well let me explain you something!!

Lenstag was created by Google engineer Trevor Sehrer and is an online equipment registry that makes it easier to report and track stolen cameras and lenses.

Let’s take a look at how the service works. It starts with a simple one step sign in/up form. Enter your email and password, and you’ll soon find yourself looking at a main registry in which you can list out all the gear you own.

 

After you sign in to your account you will your account. At this moment you will not have much there except a link to Share your gear list with your friends, that is very useful and you can customize as you please in the settings area.

Let's Start to add gear. You can register any gear you would like but some are already in there, for the most used gear anyway. As you start to type a list will show you the options, but if your gear is not in the list you can add it manually.

The same for your lenses and other accessories.

Here is a list of some gear I set and are now ready to be verified by ticking the blue icon or removed by clicking on the red trash icon.

After you have registered all your gear online, it's time to verify if it's really yours.

This may be the part where you will back away just because it will take you a little longer to have all your gear photographed.

Don't get yourself carried away by this step, this will really make a proof the gear is yours and is a great safety precaution to have it registered. Not like on Canon CPS or Nikon NPS where you can have all your old lens and cameras even the ones you have already sold so that you can have that Platinum membership.

Don't be LAZY go and take pictures of all your registered gear and make this happen ASAP!!!

If you have sold some gear or want to transfer it to someone else this is also possible, just follow the steps.

Then if you have some stolen gear that was already registered you can report it stolen, just that simple.

This is the message that will pop up after you report it stolen. Once this report is filed, your gear will be marked as stolen in the Lenstag system.

For example, a photographer buying a lens on Craigslist will now have an easy database to query for figuring out whether they’re buying stolen wares. Police departments and pawn shops can also use the Lenstag registry for easy lookups.

In addition to providing the information through a Lenstag search, the site attempts to make the stolen gear report show up in Internet searches. Each stolen piece of gear has its own public web page that lists it as a stolen item.

And you can also check the online gear that was already reported stolen. This way you can buy your 2nd hand gear on ebay or somewhere else with "some" safety. I say "some" has this will not contemplate for the moment all the stolen gear that are out there but it's a good starting point.

This page is indexed by search engines such as Google. What this means is that you won’t need to do any special searches on the Lenstag website — a simple search on Google for a serial number and a keyword (e.g. “stolen,” “lenstag”) will do.

Larger businesses have already begun partnering with Lenstag in order to keep a handle on their gear. These include two large equipment rental companies, LensRentals and BorrowLenses, who are now utilizing the system to reduce theft and speed up equipment recovery.

There is another place where you can look for stolen cameras and we talked about that in this Lighting Mods article "Stolen Camera Finder, helps you find your camera".

3 Basic Lighting Setups for Great Photos

So, you have some great photography lighting equipment but you aren’t sure how to best use it. Or, you’re still looking for photography lighting equipment, but you don’t know what you need for what you’ll be doing. Don’t sweat it! In this article, we’ll be looking 3 basic lighting setups for great photos that you can use to help you get the best pictures that you can snap.

1. Paramount lighting.  Paramount lighting is a style of lighting setup that is used with females due to the high cheekbones and good skin tones that are focused on – it makes men look hollow. The main light is high and directly in front of the subject’s face, the filler light is under the main light, and the overhead light opposite the main light should only hit the hair, not the forehead or face. This creates a very “highlighted” look and can make some amazing portraits.

2. Rembrandt Lighting. The Rembrandt Lighting setup makes a small highlight on the shadowed cheek of the person you’re photographing. The main light is down and to the side of the subject. The overhead lights are closer to the subject, and the background light should be put overhead. This creates highlights on the cheeks that make the eyes and cheekbones stand out on the subject – it’s more commonly used in males, but females are also featured.

3. Profile Lighting. Profile lighting provides a very stunning look that focuses on the features of the subject’s face. As suggested by the name, the subject’s face will be turned 90 degrees from the camera. It makes the features on the subject’s face look more elegant. The main light is placed behind the subject so that it makes the face “pop” out in the image. The hair and neck will also stand out, which means you need to be careful how the main light is positioned. The background light is positioned to the side of the subject, depending on how they are sitting and what way their head is tilted.

So what sort of setup will you use? What are you looking for in your studio that will make it different than other photography studios? How will you setup your room so that you can get the best portraits and pictures with your lighting setup? Most setups call for anywhere from 3 to 5 lights, so consider that when you’re setting up your studio. 

Setups are quite simple to do without a lot of hassle and strain on what you are already doing. They can be placed in different areas of the room and not take up any space if you do it correctly. There are a variety of photography lights out there to choose from, and each of them have their own pros and cons when it comes to whether you should use them or not. Do your research and determine which lights you want to purchase and what sorts of setups you are going to use.

If you’re looking for a great place to buy photography lighting equipment, consider TheLAShop. They have all of the photography lighting equipment that you will ever need, and they will help you choose exactly what you need for your studio or other purposes. Check out The LA Shop today.