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.

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.

New York-based photographer Kenneth Volpe has a Bachelor of Engineering degree and a Master of Engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology. In other words, he knows what is going inside the camera. But that does not mean he cannot create art with one. On the contrary, since the formation of his own photography company Transposure in 2007, Kenneth has been known for turning his deep understanding of the physics of photography into perfectly lit images.

We recently had the privilege of seeing Volpe in action. He was doing an on-location beauty shoot in downtown New York, and we were there with our cameras to film it. “In my opinion, the mark of a good photographer is someone who can take the ambient lighting and match that with strobes so that it looks natural,” said Volpe, who used four D1 monolights, two Softbox RFi 1×3′, a Beauty Dish and several grids to achieve that effect.

Watch the video and learn how.

Mark Wallace walks you through using zones, or groups, wirelessly in this video from AdoramaTV.

Mark sets up six Profoto D1 lights: a White Softlight Reflector as the key, a 2×3’ Softbox for fill, two kicker lights aimed into V-flats to highlight the model’s cheeks, and two different background lights — one with a 5 Degree Grid and another with a Zoom Reflector.

Since all his lights are in their own zone using the Air Remote, he can control them independently without ever leaving his camera. “In fact,” he says, “we actually got six different looks from our shoot.”

Watch the video to see all six looks and read more on AdoramaTV.

All video and quotes in this post are used with permission and ©AdoramaTV, 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.