We all smile in photos these days, right? Well, at least we’re supposed to. If you don’t you look like some sort of crank. Or a fashion model. Or someone who just had surgery. As photographers we run into the problem of problem smilers all the time. It’s a problem. Usually we are not documentarians, which means that people are supposed to have a big, but not too big, natural smile plastered across their fair visages. So what do you do? Yesterday I had to stick my tongue out at a CEO. She did not smile. It didn’t help. One lawyer made me quack like a duck at him. He said that that was the only thing that could get him to smile. Weirdo.

But so what else? What else can you do? Well, not much. If they just won’t smile sometimes they are doing a little kind of power trip with you. It’s all like “I’m so annoyed at having my picture taken that I refuse to make the tiniest effort to fake a smile, or to get myself to think happy thoughts, or use the Method” or whatever damned thing that people use to get themselves to look really happy. Often I threaten to tell jokes. Threatening to tell jokes can get people to smile, but then sometimes they call your bluff and make me actually tell the joke. I’ve got a duck joke which is pretty good, and simple. It’s not the same as the quacking thing I talked about earlier, it’s the one about the guy going to the doctor with a duck on his head. I also have some photographer jokes and a dirty joke about Bill Clinton. But if you finally have to resort to telling jokes to get a smile, that is, if your stockpile of goofy expressions and your ability to quack have all run out, you are maybe almost in trouble. You better hope that joke works, or you are screwed. Good luck.

Tadsen Photgraphy recently witnessed a centipede, all bedraggled and nearly ready to shuffle off this mortal coil. Do you know what saved him? Commercial photography saved him. I can’t really explain it, but you are just going to have to believe me.

After some research, however, mainly here, Tadsen Photography discovered that centipedes bite and are kind of disgusting and so we decided to kill the thing anyway.

People often ask me, “Hey Eric, where should I put my lights?” Well, in order to have a handy reference I thought that I’d just lay it down in some easy steps here on the blog. Photographic lighting is no big trick, really. First of all you want some lights. You can get them online or at the store, whatever you want. Just make sure that they are up to the task. One way to tell this is by looking at the bottom.

Ok, now that you have your lights you’ll want to know where to put them for maximum photographic-style output. For portrait lighting I’ve developed a fairly simple strategy which can be related by this formula:

Where “K” is the first light, “R” is the second light and the rest of it should be self-explanatory. If you need a hair light, just use the square root of gamma and take the modified result.

Now product and food lighting require different strategies altogether. If you are very close to the subject, use this:

MicroB should be your result, where pi and R are the position of the product and the strobe with respect to gamma.

I feel a little funny giving away my secrets like this, but with so many years of accumulated experience it seems to me like I almost have a duty to share what I’ve learned with the incoming generation of shutterbugs.

Keep on clicking!