Other Genres: Events, Weddings, Real Estate and Product

Karl Taylor breaks down a whisky-bottle shoot on black Perspex: a softly lit background, gold foil card behind the liquid to make it glow, two strip softboxes fired through doubled tracing paper so the light gradates smoothly, one serving as an edge light, and focus held on bottle and label.

Raymond Hatfield's Beginner Photography Podcast interview with Jerry Ghionis covers leaving formal training, seven do-or-die shots after the ceremony and worries about newer photographers. Ghionis explains light via shower-head analogies, small sources hard and large close ones soft, and finds direction in overcast light by turning while watching his hand.

Mik Milman, an event photographer of ten years, lays out a start-to-finish guide to corporate events, birthdays, red carpets and nonprofit galas: why the work suits a fly-on-the-wall temperament, finding clients, shooting and editing a job, and pricing by starting near $75 an hour and raising rates until bookings slow.

Mik Milman breaks event coverage into six shot types that tell a story: establishing shots conveying scale at a hall or ceremony, close-up candids on an 85mm or 70-200mm framed through foregrounds or over a shoulder, posed cocktail-hour groups asked to look at each other for laughs, and artistic portraits.

Mike Burke outlines a minimal real estate photography method using only a camera, tripod and bracketed exposures: a Sony a7 III or a6000-series body, a 16-35mm lens, chest-height placement in kitchens to show countertops, a bubble-levelled tripod head, and verticals checked against a window edge rather than the in-camera level.

Karl Taylor recreates a studio wine-bottle shot using only window light, doubling up diffusion to hide the window frames, adding a foam-board reflector for a highlight line, hiding iPhone torches behind the bottle for a background glow, with a one-second exposure. He critiques member entries that strayed from the brief.

Steve Gerrard of Montreal counts down ten tips for concert photography, where lighting, crowds and a three-song limit remove control: start with small bands who need promotional images and may become headliners, shoot support acts to dial in settings, and expect lighting to change, as it did for Arctic Monkeys.

Andrei Restrepo shoots a vacant three-storey Houston home with a Canon 5D Mark IV, 16-35mm f/4 IS, tripod and polariser to cut window reflections off wooden floors. He works from chest height to balance ceiling and floor, uses the in-camera level to avoid keystoning, and mixes corner-to-corner and head-on views.