Videos

Jerry Ghionis shows creative triggers in everyday environments: warped reflections under a Chicago bridge become a cinematic backdrop with an Ice Light and tungsten white balance, split light bounces from groom to bride, and couples stand away from walls for blur. He explains aiming flash past the far eye socket.

Jerry Ghionis's Nikon stage talk likens light to water: a showerhead, hose or fire hose whose pressure explains highlights and shadows. He defines good light as flattering or storytelling, shows sunlight ricocheting off a groom onto a bride and describes a diffuser as a strainer softening the sun.

Jerry Ghionis's Westcott-sponsored B&H seminar covers conventional and unconventional light sources, arguing that light matters more than place and that knowledge, not filters, separates serious photographers. Examples include diffusing harsh sun over a couple, a 65-year-old bride placed in direct sun under a diffuser, and natural diffusers on location.

Jerry Ghionis's B&H Depth of Field talk urges photographers to obsess over light rather than location, since shadow and darkness create depth. He defends wedding photography as every genre in one, reflects on the emotional worth of a single print and critiques audience shots as good, better or best.

Jerry Ghionis poses and lights a full-length female subject: toe towards camera, heel back, knee bent, chest forward and back arched, then body turned away from the light and face turned back into it, the opposite of a male pose, before using a dark canvas backdrop to shape facial shadows.

Daniel Norton works with one Profoto B10 on a tethered Nikon Z6 II with 24-70mm, photographing Marissa for Adorama's OnSet. He kills ambient at 1/200s, ISO 100 and f/5.6 to set a black frame, then builds studio-style and environmental portraits with modifiers, a hair light and a mirror as fill.

Chris Knight, author of The Dramatic Portrait, shows in a Profoto-sponsored B&H talk how one light and a reflector create many portrait styles. Using a Profoto B1 with softboxes, octaboxes, umbrellas, beauty dishes and a five-in-one reflector, he covers dialling in modifiers, feathering light off the background and shaping shadow.

Daniel Norton, live on Adorama's OnSet with Canon 600EX-RT speedlights, argues a speedlight should be any photographer's first light because flash is about shaping light, not rescuing darkness. With Marissa he builds a portrait: a background light at 1/8 power, a key light, then a snooted hair light.

Bob Davis, a former Chicago Sun-Times photographer, recounts at B&H how a blurred fire assignment convinced him to master flash, and how he replaced Broncolor packs with Vivitar speedlights, stands and umbrellas. He walks through speedlight-lit assignments including a pool shot with blue-gelled lights and a camera in an aquarium.

Erik Valind's B&H Event Space workshop covers the characteristics of light, manual camera controls and building an off-camera lighting setup with modifiers. In a live demo he reinforces that shutter controls ambient, aperture controls flash and ISO adjusts everything, dialling from f/5.6 to f/13 rather than walking to the flash.