I’ve been working hard lately to improve my photography techniques, ever since I got some studio lighting. It’s amazing what a difference good lights make, but it takes a lot of work to figure out how to use them right. And you definitely have to use at least 2 lights, and make sure you turn the camera flash off, figured those out the hard way

Actually, I have three 1000W lights, but I don’t have a circuit in my house that can handle more than one of the lamps for more than about 5 min . . . so I started trying to use just one light plus my
camera flash, and that made a mess. Well, it wasn’t terrible, but it certainly wasn’t very impressive either. So I finally found some outlets on a different breaker that aren’t too far away, and I can at least get 2 of my lights on at the same time.

I’ve been keeping the lights at right angles to eachother for the most part, with a wide softbox sitting low and close and a tall softbox farther back and higher up. I think all these sets had the tall softbox at about double the intensity of the wide one, but since it’s also farther away the light falling on the scene from both is probably about the same. I should work on that a bit more to add some more depth to the scene, but I’ve been trying not to turn anything up too far so I don’t blow any more breakers.

I’ve also been having a lot of fun with my mirror lately. Not only does it make for some really interesting picture though, it also lets me watch myself while I’m posing. Sometimes I actually forget about the camera for a few minutes and just watch myself in the mirror! But anyway, I think it adds to the artistic feel of the photos. Though it also had a bit of a learning curve to keep both the camera AND the lights out of the mirror’s reflection!

I just (finally) learned how to airbrush in Photoshop as well. Not that I plan on using it much, but it’s still fun and can help clean up some less than perfect pics. I practiced a bit on the pics in this post, but you probably can’t really tell since I resized them pretty small.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to lately. Enjoy the pics, and of course if you want to see the rest of the sets, they will eventually be up on The Crossdresser .com