Scott Kelby – Photo Recipes Live

So last night my copy of Scott Kelby’s new book/dvd combo, arrived in the mail, Photo Recipes Live: Behind the Scenes, I was pretty excited. This new book/dvd combo is an extension to his popular Digital Photography series and goes into greater detail as to how particular shots where made in each book. If you have not read his Digital Photography books (volumes 1-3) I would highly recommend it.

I didn’t get a chance to watch all the videos last night, I still need to watch the last four, but I’m slightly disappointed with what I’ve seen so far. Don’t get me wrong, Scott does a great job explaining each shot and how/why he sets up things in a certain way. The disappointment I have with the dvd is that most of the shots he reproduces require at least 1 to 2 thousand dollars worth of strobes/spider lights. I would guess that the target audience of the Digital Photography series are amateurs or maybe a few pro-amateurs, most of whom probably don’t own strobes/spider lights. I wish Scott had included examples of how to reproduce these shots using hot shoe flashes (off the camera of course). Now I’m not saying the entire dvd is filled with strobe/spider light examples, Scott does have a few videos that primarily use natural light as well as one “on location” video that are great and can be reproduced by most amateurs.

If you want to work with strobes and you’ve never worked with a model or in a studio I think the video does a great job at making you feel as if you were shooting with Scott for a day, and for the price that’s an awesome learning experience. Once I’ve finished all the video’s I’m defiantly going to try and reproduce some of the shots (using hot shot flashes) so I’ll post what I did to try and get similar results to Scott’s photos.