Live Streaming Photo Shoot with Tiffani Webb

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This is my most recent live streaming photo shoot. I worked with the model Tiffany Webb who is great on camera -both still and video. We were on air for about an hour on Ustream and I showed the entire process of the shoot live. It's fun, but rather stressful at the same time. You can't help but think that there are no retakes...if you screw up, its going out there live. And no, I don't have thousands of people watching, but even if its just a hundred or so people, you don't want to make an ass out of yourself.

Most of the videos I post here are edited down to a tight 9 minutes or so and I think they are pretty informative. But here you get a hour that really gives you an idea of the ebb and flow of a shoot. My addressing the audience during the shoot changes the dynamic of the shoot but I think you still get a really good idea of what a model shoot is like at my studio. Tiffany has a lot of energy and she wasn't just putting on a show for the audience. She's always a mile a minute.

I can't get over the idea that all you need is a cheap web cam, laptop and internet connection and you can broadcast live all over the world. If you have a jailbroken iPhone (I don't) you can even do it right from the phone.

twitter.com/johnricardnyc

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I must be the only person who wen through the trouble of making a commercial for his Twitter page. Having been on Twitter for several months now, I must say I don't like it much. For one thing I don't get enough views on the photos I post on Twit Pic. Clients pay me to take photographs on a regular basis. But when I post photos for free on Twit Pic nobody bothers to look. Makes no sense.

Worse, I can't understand half the posts I read on Twitter. It's all inside jokes like, "The little man is back under the bed," or whatever. I never know what anyone is talking about.

Live Streaming Photo Shoot with Julissa Neal

My first Live Streaming Photo Shoot was a success. I photographed Artistic Curves model Julissa Neal. We did a couple of lighting setups, including a Dean Colins lighting setup that I (John Ricard) learned from watching his DVD series. I also used the Elinchrom Octabank.

Live video by Ustream

Photographic Tutorial - Posing a model

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Celebrity photographer New York John Ricard gives a photographic tutorial on posing a model and how to use lights to create the look you want.

The number one request I get for my videos is on the subject of posing the model. I covered that pretty well on this video but there is so much more to it than what is on this video. The main thing is to make the model feel comfortable and to capture who she is. I usually have the model do her own poses for the first few minutes of every look I shoot. This way I am sure to get the "real" person who is in front of me. By the time I start giving her poses that I've learned from shooting other models, I'm not sure whether we are shooting this model, or the model that I learned the poses from. We are taking good pictures for sure...but are we capturing the model that is standing in front of the camera, or are we creating a new person instead?

It's not necessarily wrong to create a new person since so much of photography is about creating an idealized, perfect view of things. But if I'm going to do that, I also like to make sure that I've also photographed the person standing in front of me as well. For that reason, I always spend some time shooting the model doing her own poses -even if she doesn't know how to pose properly.