It’s no secret that product photography is a highly specialized field that requires a lot of technical knowledge, both for the shoot itself and for the post production. Hi-tech products, with their highly reflective surfaces and subtle textures, provide additional challenges. Watch, in the timelapse video above, as Peter Belanger tackles a shoot for the cover of Macworld.

© Peter Belanger

Although his subject, the iPhone 3GS is small, Peter uses up to 9 Acute/D4 Heads at once with both grids and reflectors, more than plenty of photographers would use to light a whole person! A 3 D4 packs provide power to the sea of c-stands and strobes.

This shoot is from 2009, but Peter is still going strong and perfecting his craft. To learn more about his process and the the thinking behind his work, check out an interview he did over on The Verge. See more of his work at peterbelanger.com.

All images and quotes in this post are used with permission and ©Peter Belanger, all rights reserved; story is ©Profoto. Please respect and support photographers’ rights. Feel free to link to this blog post, but please do not replicate or re-post elsewhere without written permission.

Think you can’t take great portraits with just a single, unmodified light source? Think again!

Mark Wallace, for AdoramaTV, uses a Profoto D1 500 and some tricks involving a mirror to transform a bland, unflattering portrait into one with depth and pizazz. Unlike a magician, though, Mark’s happy to reveal his secrets.

Watch the video above and see more from Mark on AdoramaTV.

All video and quotes in this post are used with permission and ©Mark Wallace, all rights reserved; story is ©Profoto. Please respect and support photographers’ rights. Feel free to link to this blog post, but please do not replicate or repost elsewhere without written permission.

© James Weber

If you’ve been keeping up with Ian Ruhter’s Silver & Light series, you’ll definitely want to check out James Weber. Like Ian, James is using Profoto’s powerful strobes as a way to rejuvenate the wet plate collodion process.

“Wet plate collodion is a chemical process as much as it is a photographic process,” writes James. “It’s getting back to the darkroom which adds a uniqueness to each image. It’s using large format cameras and lenses that are 100+ years old. It’s using crazy, huge aerial lenses from World War II to get amazing large plate portraits. It’s getting back to the roots of the first recorded images. It’s part Breaking Bad, mixing up the chemistry, and part Ansel Adams trekking up mountains with a large format camera to get the shot. The process slows you down so that you take in all of the minute details of your subject before you shoot. Because of this necessary attention to detail, it’s made me a better photographer. To me, it’s the most fun you can have with a camera.” (more…)

Erik Isakson is a sports lifestyle photographer working out of southern California. Along with filmmaker Jason Maughan, he recently produced this behind-the-scenes video of a shoot he did with athletes and dramatic splashes of water.

For the shoot, he used his PocketWizard FlexTT5 to trigger a couple of Profoto 8a strobes, which were placed behind the subject to create a rim light accentuating the mist and water flying through the air.

See more of Erik’s photography at erikisakson.com and erikisakson.tumblr.com.
See more of what Jason does at jmaughan.com and connect with him on Twitter and Instagram.

All videos and quotes in this post are used with permission and ©Erik Isakson and Jason Maughan, all rights reserved; story is ©Profoto. Please respect and support photographers’ rights. Feel free to link to this blog post, but please do not replicate or repost elsewhere without written permission.

“If you had the chance, the opportunity, to inspire a future American president, would you?” This is the question photographer and Profoto Master, Matthew Jordan Smith is asking in his new project Future Presidents.

Future Presidents is all about inspiring young children and their parents to dream big. His goal is to travel to all 50 states, along with his Pro-7b and Magnum reflector, capturing images that answer the question, “What would you do if you were the President of the United States?” (more…)