Lighting It Up in Austin with Robert Seale

Houston-based commercial and portrait photographer, Robert Seale, was kind enough to share some of his strategies and techniques for putting together a successful portrait shoot. We met up with him in Austin last month for a PhotoShelter event where he brought along an entire lighting crew headed up by Taylor Jones and indie rock musician Michael Scott Creature.

creaturerock-by-robert-seale.jpg
Photo by Robert Seale

After the event was over, we discussed throwing together a webinar as a follow-up where he could talk more in-depth about what actually went into producing the shoot. And we were lucky to record it and share it with you here.


Here are the slides that Robert used for your reference:

Lighting it up in Austin with Robert Seale

and here is the video:


I added some video that I shot from the event to beginning and the end of the piece…it’s definitely worth it to watch the end for Robert’s key portrait advice. 😉

Equipment List

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This article was written by

Allen Murabayashi is the co-founder of PhotoShelter.

There are 7 comments for this article
  1. Anthony M. Davis at 9:14 am

    Thanks for posting this webinar/video. Not being able to be part of the various webinars because of travel or other commitments has always been a source of frustration for me. As a Photoshelter subscriber I want to be able to get ALL that is available to me. I would bet there are others feeling the same way. If you post the webinars here, that would be a good thing. Thanks again for posting this…it was good.

  2. djaef at 10:10 pm

    Hi I’m just trying to access the slides at a bigger size so I can see the diagrams, but it says the file is private. Is there no way to see this larger? Great photos by the way, and fantastic educational resource.

  3. Huckle Cat at 7:58 pm

    Great webinar. Robert sounds very approachable and easygoing, and is easy to understand. Only thing I would have liked better is more photos of the lighting setups. The sketches were a little small on Vimeo and hard to read. They are also considerably harder to visualize. Great for demonstrating how you should plan out your shoot, but harder to see what he had already done. A combination of his commentary with video, switching back and forth between stills and video, would have been ideal.

  4. Juan Carlos at 1:17 am

    Interesting that Robert was shooting faster than the Profotos could recycle (hence the long beeps in the video). I wonder how much, if at all, that affected the final images?

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