The combination of soft and hard light creates pictures with a distinctive look, and they need very little retouching too. Mixing a main light with a fill light is a common technique, but I’ve been battling with trying to understand how best to use the deep grid for my tiny Lastolite EzyBox Speed-Lite 2. Each …

The main lens of many photographers, the EF 70-200mm L-series has been updated. Not to do things by halves, Canon has updated both the f/2.8 and f/4 Image Stabilizer versions; EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS III USM and EF 70-200mm f/4L IS II USM. These lenses have been a pretty well guarded secret, or maybe I’ve …

Flash settings are much easier to change using the camera LCD screen. This post will show you some shortcuts to get even quicker access to flash settings. Many EOS cameras introduced since 2007 have the possibility to configure the Speedlite flash settings by pressing a series of buttons and navigating to the relevant parts of …

It’s been a busy few weeks with plenty of portraits at workshops and camera club talks. Today’s post is a few of the portrait photos that I’ve taken recently plus an explanation of the lighting for each one. Jonathan – Iceland At the beginning of April I visited Iceland with my buddy Jonathan, partly to …

Portraits with a 400mm lens! Photography rules are made for learning, understanding and then breaking, an EF 400mm f/2.8L IS II USM is not the lens that most people would think of as a portrait lens. Portraits with 400mm lens I was working with Speedlite flash at a Canon event. My subject for the two …

So happy to see me smiling face over on Scott Kelby’s blog as today’s guest post. Yes, I’m on Scott Kelby’s blog with my first guest post for him. It does seem a bit surreal when you get the message that Scott Kelby would like you to write a post, and then comes the challenge …

I wrote a few posts ago about my EOS 5D Mark IV coming back from a C-Log update with firmware 1.1.0 and now there’s a new firmware update, version 1.1.2 available for all cameras. Well that’s a coincidence, I wrote a post on 30th March about the odd version of firmware in my camera following …

Did you know that you can use a remote radio Speedlite to control your camera? Last weekend I was in Iceland to deliver a couple of workshops for Origo, who happen to be the Canon distributor for Iceland. One part of the workshops included the radio Speedlite flash system. One of the features that I …