This YouTube video made me chuckle because people have and still do say these things to me. They perhaps don't mean it or aren't thinking too much about what they are saying. Yeah, probably the latter. Ha!

Thanks to Sukhi Ghuman for the link through her Twitter feed.

I was one of those that scoffed at the idea of learning old-school lighting and posing. But guess what? I was wrong. Learning the fundamentals is so crucial to our success that when the Monte Zucker Lighting and Education bundle was being offered through PhotoDough.com, I had to jump in and get it.

Who was Monte Zucker? He was a master as lighting and posing. He was a teacher. At one of the first WPPI's I attended, I recall a room full of nearly a 1000 people sitting there watching this man teach his techniques. The minute the seminar ended, the crowd surged on towards the stage to badger him with more questions. I had absolutely no chance of getting close to him. I felt like I was at a rock concert. People like Bambi Cantrell still talk about him and what he taught her.

“Based on classical tradition, Monte’s portraiture has never strayed far from his original intent – to capture a moment in people’s lives and memorialize it for posterity.”

After battling cancer, Monte Zucker passed away in 2007. I know it was a huge blow to the industry he cared so much about.

Here is what Bay Area photographer Michael Corsentino says about Monte Zucker:

“Sad that some people don't know but at least they're asking. He was a great person and a passionate educator, definitely missed.”

Thankfully, his teaching lives on.

You can learn more about Monte Zucker's products here. But if you are quick, you can grab a good chunk of what the store offers and save $131 now through PhotoDough.com.

For $49 you receive a downloadable set of 4 CD-ROMS, including 6 slideshows with over 500 photographic examples with text descriptions. Also included are PDFs that you can tote around on your iPad and refer to often. As I said, I bought this bundle and I am looking forward to getting back to basics. Frankly, there are too many “teachers” out in the world now who are just winging it. If you want to learn from the best, this is your chance.

Get to know Monte Zucker and learn from him at your own pace. The PhotoDough.com deal is only on for a limited time.

Oh, one more thing – it's tempting to learn from a master and just copy what she or he says. That would defeat the purpose of photography for me. I intend to learn from Monte Zucker, but plan on adapting it to the way I work with my clients. Making that experience unique is key to everyone's success. Good luck!

Images are created in fractions of a second and our memories are often too poor to remember how we set up a particular shot. Indeed there is a part of us that probably feels confident in achieving the same look and concept, if only we knew where and how the off-camera flashes were placed, how they were modified or what our settings on the camera were. Well, a couple of weeks ago I connected with Janis Lanka, who founded Strobox.

Strobox is a place for all types of photographers to share how they set up that amazing photo! The easiest way to learn is to look at photos and their lighting diagrams so you can see for yourself how they were created.

Here is a, um, snapshot of the questions I peppered Janis with during our conversation. If you have other questions for him, please post them in the comments section below.

1) It's great that in such a short span of time, you have been able to create a community of photographers interested in presenting their work and getting it critiqued. How do you, however, qualify the images? Is it a free for all – anyone can post to the site regardless of quality?

While currently there are few basic rules that I screen each photo for, we are continuously adding measures that help us filter through spam or unqualified photos. It's important to note that Strobox is about a community that raises everyone’s awareness about photography lighting, and as a such, the quality control should be a part of community effort. The ultimate goal is that work displayed is a result of a joint effort from our community rather than just from one or two individuals who happen to have access to MySQL db!

2) Tell us a little bit about yourself – are you a professional photographer? Why or rather how did you see the need to create a website like Strobox for photographers?

Just like most who reads this, photography has been a hobby of mine taught to me by my dad with a Zenit camera. Fast forward almost two decades, my learning curve needed some improvement and I purchased a book about portrait photography which explained how each photo was made by giving technical information as well as sketches of lighting diagrams. That is when I asked the question on why such a thing is not available online. The idea was born and it took another 2 years to make it happen. An iPhone app, a community site, and a book later I still see it as a fun experiment.

Currently my day job consists of being a Strategy Consultant at digital agency “Blast Radius” and by evening I'm trying to coordinate a group effort to make Strobox happen – someone from Canada contributes their design skills, from Slovakia their CSS skills, from Lithuania their programming skills, and from England their editor skills, etc. The Strobox core team members are volunteers and not necessarily professional photographers. We continuously need more help (PHP anyone?) so if you want to join us, let me know!

3) I received Strobox 2010, your first book which is more of a compilation of some of the best work your site has seen in 2010. Books aren't typically huge money makers for their authors. So why take that risk?

No, making a book has not been our revenue strategy. First and foremost it's a celebration of our community and their efforts to help each other raise awareness about photography lighting. While this was yet another one of those enthusiastic experiments which resulted in hundreds of hours spent trying to figure out different legal and logistical things in the book-publishing world, it was totally worth it! Not financially, but the emotional reward is there when you hold that book in your hands for the first time. This book seeks to showcase our community’s achievements during 2010, acknowledge our top contributors, and most importantly, attempting to help us financially sustain our online community. On top of that, we’re also sharing 40% of the book’s profit with the top ten photographers who joined us for this initiative. This has been our first attempt at publishing, and we hope that we'll be able to do this every year and show our appreciation to our community this way.

4) Technique and using tools is one thing. Being able to craft images by collaborating with your subjects is another story. Do you think your site will ever shift the focus every so slightly to discuss that collaboration? That almost intrigues me more than what kind of a light modifier was used in the process of creating an image. Am I in the minority on this?

You are probably in the right minority by asking this excellent question! I would say that story and emotional response it creates is what makes a photo stand out from the others. Lighting technique is merely a tool to help you with that goal. I love listening to other photographers share their techniques and stories of collaboration – those things can't be methodologically systematized as lighting diagrams can. So, in a rather simple way the Strobox community is trying to do one of those “un-sexy” things and geek-out about photography lighting to help each other get the basics right so that sites like yours could take them to the next level.

5) I suspect with sites like 500px.com and Sylights.com, competition keeps you in check. What would you say Strobox does differently and better than those other sites?

Both of your mentioned sites do an amazing job and each of them excel at different things. Without getting in too many details, focus of Strobox should be changing a bit so stay tuned! Additionally, because this is mostly a volunteer experiment that is not based on generating revenue or trying to entice customers, I would rather ask a question of what keeps us doing this. It's our community members who write us and thank us for a useful iPhone app, it’s our Facebook fans who encourage us and like to hear what we’re doing, and it’s our community members who help us with moderation.This started as an attempt to get educated about photography lighting by looking at other examples. But it has turned into a platform for learning. When you learn something, we’ve done well.

Thank you for help us not just create lighting diagrams but also curate them and share them with others. We'll be sure to follow you on Twitter to hear more of your experiments and new features on Strobox.

This post and the one I just published about pre-designing albums have to do with wedding photographers but I am willing to bet portrait photographers can also glean quite a bit of useful information from the online webinars I am about to mention.

Let me be very clear (again) that I don't promote products, services or events if I don't personally feel they are valuable to me and by deduction, to you. So, with that being said, I have to tell you that in about an hour from now, wedding photographers will have the distinct opportunity to listen to some of the very best in our business – about the way they do business. The goal here isn't to blindly copy them, but to extract what you can and adapt it to your own unique situation.

The event is called I Do. It's a Joy of Marketing production and the awesome Sarah Petty and Erin Verbeck have brought us the following luminaries to chat with us about their businesses and what has made them successful in the past. If you are looking to do things differently in 2012, you'll want to register to listen for free or simply buy the recordings and the transcripts.

Full disclosure – I received a complimentary set of just the transcripts and was blown away by how accurate and thorough they were. You can print them off one by one, as you are listening to each one of them and take notes or highlight whatever they are saying. This is how I plan on using them. The recordings are of course awesome because you can always go back to them and listen to them while you are on the road, working out in the gym or working on your edits on your computer.

If you haven't clicked on any of the links above and simply want to know who will be speaking, here is the list of presenters:

Christopher Becker
Zach & Jody Gray
Julia Woods
Kevin Jairaj
Mark Garber & Jennifer Gilman
Dan Doke
Steve & Jennifer Bebb
Joy & Jules Bianchi
David Ziser
Laura Novak
Scott & Adina Hayne

Learn more about the speakers.

The event is spread over 3 days – December 28th (that's today), January 4 and January 11. Here is the full schedule.

To be able to listen, you have to register. If you find the information useful, as I did, you can then make a decision to buy the recordings or the recordings and the transcripts. If you are reading this before the event launches at 12 pm EST, you may still be able to buy the recordings for $79. I know the price is going to go up after today. So, jump to it, if you are interested. And yes, if you click a link, say this one, and you end up buying the recordings, I get a small commission.

For a limited time – that's until December 31 of this year – when you sign up for AnimotoPro, you'll get 3 months added to your account. That's 15 months for the price of 12. Not too shabby, eh?

And, yes, full disclosure, I get something out of this too. For every one of you who signs up using my affiliate link, I also receive 3 months added to my account.

WHY ANIMOTOPRO?

It's simple. It's elegant. It's easy. It's customizable. You can set the video resolution from 360p to 480p to 720p (HD). It can drive traffic back to your site, especially if you embed your slideshows on Facebook. And who doesn't want quality clients these days, right?

So check AnimotoPro out to see if it is the slideshow program for you and your workflow. Once I process and retouch images, I save the images to a “slideshow” folder. I use AnimotoPro's classy interface to upload the images (this is perhaps what takes the most time). Then as it is uploading, you can choose one of the many songs (I found the selections to be diverse). The “Advance Settings” allow you to title and describe the slideshow and also hide the “Animoto” branding.

MY WISH LIST FOR ANIMOTO PRO

Here is my wish list for what Animoto could do better – 1) the ability to loop in two or more songs for a slideshow and 2) branding the slideshow with my own logo (you'll see below that I hacked my way through it by inserting an end slide with my logo and contact information).

A SAMPLE SLIDESHOW

Here is a sample slideshow I processed in about 15 minutes. I uploaded the images, chose a theme, decided on a song (you also have the ability to upload your own choice) and added text and other link backs to my website.

I am convinced that the service will pay for itself very quickly. Imagine the impact it will make with your clients. With AnimotoPro you can also download the slideshow, create a special DVD for your clients and either gift it to them or charge them for the added value you are providing them. In any event, it is a win-win.

THE DEAL ENDS ON DECEMBER 31, 2011

If you have been on the fence about working with Animoto, now is the time to get down to business. Between today and December 31, you and I will both get 3 months free if you decide to subscribe to AnimotoPro.

IF YOU SIGN UP …

If you sign up with AnimotoPro and use their service, please come back and leave a link to your slideshow in the comments below. I would love to see how you end up using it.