Lighting

Visualizing how a lighting setup will affect a portrait subject can be tricky. Moving a single strobe just a few degrees can create a radically different effect. Patrick David decided to go a step beyond existing portrait lighting cheat sheets, and set up a 3D simulation with movable lights in order to see what the resulting photo would look like.

In the fall of 2010, Boston Magazine hired Teru Onishi, a talented jewelry, cosmetics, and liquids specialist, to shoot 25 different drinks in his Manhattan studio. The photos were to illustrate one of the magazine’s cocktail roundups–the image shown here is a whiskey smash. All had to be styled and shot in less than five hours, leaving about seven minutes for each drink.

Ryan Gibson, an editorial photographer from rural Georgia, specializes in athletic portraits. One of his favorite places to shoot? Locker rooms. “When I’m working on a feature story, I want to get as much variety as I can from a sitting,” he says. “After we do the field, stands, or courtside shots, I like working in the locker room. Depending on how I use my lights, I can get a lot of different looks there in a short amount of time.”

If you’re ever at the Manhattan terminal of the Staten Island Ferry in the evening, you can catch a great free light show whenever a ferry approaches the dock: What looks like hundreds of fireflies flashing all over the boat. It’s the tourists trying to photograph the Manhattan skyline with on-camera flash.