What is Strobist?

At its heart, this website is about one thing: Learning how to use off-camera flash to elevate your photography.

I'm David Hobby, the photographer behind Strobist. Over the course of my 25+ year career as a staff photojournalist, I completed over 10,000 editorial assignments. One of my strengths in that job was in using small speedlights to elevate the quality of my location work.

In 2006, I returned from a typical assignment for The Baltimore Sun with the photo below. Adding the small flash in the background took a problem lighting environment (ugly industrial sodium vapors) and turned it into much stronger photo. After getting permission from my Director of Photography, I wrote a post describing how I lit it.

And that's how this site started.

I started diagramming more assignments, and writing down tips and techniques. Soon this little project grew to be far bigger than I ever planned. Two years later I left The Sun to publish Strobist full-time. Fourteen years, 2,000+ posts and ~220 million page views later, here we are.

If you are just arriving, I envy you the door that you are about to walk through. When you learn how to light, your photography will explode with new possibilities.

If you are a complete beginner, you are in the right place. More than four million photographers from all around the world have taken the plunge before you.

Strobist's Free Lighting 101 course starts from absolute zero, and is considered to be the best resource of its kind on the web. It is updated regularly, as the gear we use continues to get better and cheaper.

Compared to most other facets of photography, lighting gear is refreshingly affordable. And all of the information on this site is free. (If you want to grow into more powerful lighting equipment later, fine. We'll talk about the big lights, too. But hot shoe-based speedlights are the perfect starting point: small, simple and inexpensive.)



In addition to our free Lighting 101, 102 and 103 courses, we also have an On Assignment series, where you'll be guided through more than 170 real-world assignments, showing exactly how they were lit.

There is also the Strobist Lighting Cookbook, in progress now, which will help you to tie various concepts together and build on your experience. And there's a lot more, which you'll see as you scroll down the front page.


Questions? No Problem.

You can always ask me directly via Twitter. Or join the Strobist discussion group on Flickr and fire away. But please, search the relevant terms in your question as it has probably been asked and answered before.



You can post your successes there to show off, or your failures when you need help. It's a place of peer-to-peer learning.


Okay then! Pick a place to jump in:

Lighting 101 (Most people start here)
On Assignment
Front Page

Strobist Terms of Service

Please read the below Terms of Service which relate to linking, content reproduction, translation sites and use of the word Strobist®, which is a registered trademark.

First of all, thanks for caring enough to click through to read this. Right away, that separates you from the automated scumbot content scrapers that I have to go after nearly every day.

Strobist® is the product of countless hours of hard work and it is very important to me that I protect the value of the original content. Everything you see on Strobist® is copyright David Hobby in the year that it was first published. (In the case of third-party contributors, they retain the copyright.) That does not mean that you cannot use material from the site, only that there are a couple of rules.


Linking In

If you want to link to the articles, that's cool. It's what makes the blog world spin. But don't be a scraper. Feel free to post brief abstracts of the original posts -- the pithier the better. Please limit any verbatim excerpts to ONE PHOTO and ONE OR TWO paragraphs at the most. A prominent link to the original source is required, lest we confuse anyone about the source of the content.

VERY IMPORTANT: Frequently this blog publishes the work of other people. Given that you were not part of any previous agreements or permission, do not reblog the work of others from my site. Any permissions I may have gotten certainly do not include you. So ask them before assuming it's cool to just republish their photo.


Content Reproduction

Wholesale cut-and-paste reproductions of entire posts are strictly prohibited and will be taken very seriously. That is copyright infringement, plain and simple.

My preference is to come after infringers (especially the automated, made-for-Adsense scraper guys) with a two-by-four. But I have been told that the lawyers are more civilized (a matter of opinion, to be sure) and, ultimately, far more rewarding.


Related: Please Don't Steal My Work

If you ask to borrow my car and I say yes, that's cool. If you borrow my car without asking, that is auto theft. That's common sense.

AND YET, many publications do not seem to have even this modicum of intelligence (or so they claim, after being caught, or blame an intern, yada yada). Sadly, the theft and republication of my work is a problem regular enough that I have a standard response to it. And here it is:

My work is available for re-use, with pricing on a case-by-case basis. Generally, for editorial re-use, the minimum price is $250 USD. Not a lot of money.

But if you borrow it without asking, your after-the-fact bill is tripled to a minimum of $750. Is that more than you normally pay? If so, then perhaps you cannot afford to be stealing my work. In fact, no matter what the price you could have saved 67% by merely asking first! Poor-but-honest pubs take note of this easy price break.

If you balk at paying for stolen work after being caught, the price will still be (minimum) $750. But you'll also get a free bonus of getting called out to the photo community (just ask Psychology Today or Business Insider or a slew of others.)

While that may seem a little dickish, it is preferable to a copyright infringement claim and/or suit, which is the inevitable next step. And a special circle of hell is reserved for those publications who claim to serve the photo community, which can ironically be the most sticky-fingered of all when it comes to "borrowing" photography.

Seriously, do not use my work without asking. My before-the-fact fees are very reasonable. But after-the-fact, it's basically jihad. I'm pissed, the law is on my side and I will turn up the monetary pain and public visibility until you own up and fix it.

So maybe just don't steal in the first place. Thanks.


Strobist® Trademark

Strobist® is not a generic term. I coined it in 2005 and it is the federally registered trademark of Strobist.com. Thus it is not available for your generic use with lighting products or education. Please do not use it in your URL or to describe your product or lighting-related service without expressed written permission.

It is not my desire to waste my time (and ultimately, your money) coming after you for a trademark infringement. It's much cooler, less stressful and far cheaper if you just don't do it in the first place. Thanks in advance.

Cheers,
David Hobby