Sometimes photographer (and probably not sometimes but always) works as a painter: he not only captures, imprints surrounding reality which emerged in front of him, but also has a desire to embellish, to change this reality.

Richard Warren found time to answer our questions about professional photography.

This studio lighting setup is quite susceptible to model position change. However it is very interesting and you are sure to enjoy it much from the very start. In this session I use cherry background from Colorama and highlight it using two sources to get the lighting design against the background required. To make the colour gradient use blue filter at the left softbox, the right light source creates a lighter spot against the background.

The second important lighting source in my setup is the fill light. The aim of using a fill light is (not being seen in lighting scene) to add some light that will illuminate the dark side of model, to pull out the details and to get the information in the shadow areas of photos.

This studio lighting setup comprises three light sources and is very easy to use, but to my mind gives very interesting result. Beauty dish located on the left of a model serves as key light, and model itself is at a distance of two meters from the background.

I have heard someday one sentence that the great picture is a mix of 90% of model, 5% of photographer's experience and 5% of good luck!
That is a joke but that is true!!!
When you have pictures in your portfolio with very nice models that means the level of your photography.

In this article, we consider the case when the main artistic effect and idea achieved during the shooting, not through postprocessing.

Perception retouching and it's quality, as well as photography itself, is extremely subjective. The main indicator of the quality of the retouching means how it corresponds to the aim.

Our main task in this photo was to correct defects that could not be eliminated during the shooting, and to highlight some details, trying to keep the natural texture of the skin.

To soften and widen the light spot, I placed the frost-frame in front of the reflector with a diffusion gel covering the entire frame.

I often use this solution when I need to soften the hard light and blur the border. It is regularly used by filmmakers because they generally use strong lighting, but in the world of photography this isn't so.

Sometimes it happens that you work alot of hours on just one idea and get uninteresting ordinary pictures, but on the other hand ,sometimes it happens that a 15-minute shoot gives you a really unpredictable and excellent result.

We came up with an idea for this shoot in New York with a stylist Marissa Adele. Our aim was to submit the photographs to fashion magazines and try to get them published. It is a pretty common thing when a photographer or a stylist invite models, hair&make up artists, assistants, rent a studio and required props and arrange a shoot, putting their own ideas, skills and time in order to later offer the photographs to magazines instead of waiting to be commissioned (which is, considering the competition these days is almost impossible unless you have a pretty serious connections).

Before describing how the picture was taken I would like to talk a bit about how significant this work is for me. It is one of my favorite works! Every photographer should strive to make vivid and memorable pictures. I think that this is the best way to prove their skills, to draw attention to yourself and your creativity.

And ...and the Profoto Acute 600 battery pack and me too! 
This is the last picture of several images with the model lying on the sand, out of her power to go further. I wanted to get very dramatic style of picture where you couldn’t understand what kind of weather and time surrounds the model. I wanted to get very saturated colors, with unnatural tints that would make that the pictures more fantastic, dramaticdramatic, and overrealsurreal!

To help myself with rapid beauty retouching I developed a Photoshop action called “Blur+Grain”. I’ve been using it successfully for many years now and I’d like to share it with you today in this tutorial.

It may be three and more… Why?  A RAW file keeps a lot more information as compared to a TIFF file or even a TIFF-16.  Let’s not talk about JPEG format that holds a lot less. 

Sometimes we may need to extract two, three or maybe more images from a single RAW file.