Honl Photo Professional David Honl Light Tutorial DVD The 2 Disc DVD Workshop From David Honl

Despite giving it only two stars, this is not a terrible DVD. It does show Honl using his products and his demonstrations are somewhat informative. He doesn't shamelessly plug his own gear and oversell what it can do. He incorporates some products from other manufacturers to do the things his products can't. And there are things to be learned here. Seeing the limited amount of equipment he uses and the portability of it all is certainly a lesson in traveling light and still getting great results. And for each of his setups, he adequately explains what equipment he's using and diagrams each shoot afterward, which might be useful if you're a beginner.To a beginner, I would like to say this is be a gentle start for learning a few lighting setups. But if you're a beginner, you'll probably be baffled as there is very little explanation of concepts and terminology. This is the biggest problem with the DVD set. It's not deep and varied enough for anyone who knows even some basics about lighting, and it's too light on fundamentals for a beginner.Clearly this is product is meant for photographers with some lighting experience. But there really isn't enough info here for an experienced lighting photographer to justify the creation of the DVD, let alone the price tag. Even though there are two DVDs, I can't imagine that the entire content couldn't fit on just one. Worse, the vast bulk of the run time on each DVD is spent chatting (mostly NOT about photography) with various minor celebrities and his hammy actress wife. If you could cut down the portions on just lighting and his description of his gear, I would estimate the run time of the DVD would be about thirty to forty minutes. If you go to his website and check out his storefront section, and view the "Honl Photo Lighting Lesson #1 & #2" pages you will learn just about as much about the use and merits of his photo products as watching two DVDs worth of videos. And it's free...One last thing: the photos presented on the DVDs don't look very good, in part due to some very amateur video production. Besides having some contrast, saturation and grain issues in the video in general, the interlacing on the still photos when he chooses to push in on them and especially the wide shots in the Bill Munl interview is horrible. But check out his website to see the same photos to get a better idea of what can be achieved.

The video is kind of boring, with lots of filler. He assumes that viewers know what an "8th speed grid", gels, gobos, and softboxes are (so it is not for beginners) but then omits a lot of technical information, such as the power settings of the flashes, and how they are synced. Too much time is wasted on drawing diagrams while I would rather see the photo as he is talking about it. (I have to remember what the hair looked like when he talks about using a hair light, for example). And yes, the cooking segment is ridiculous: I don't care how the food was cooked, this is a photo tutorial not a cooking lesson. Because of it's scatter shot information, high level of filler, and not knowing who the audience is (beginners or advanced photographers) I would say give this one a pass.

In some ways, this may have to be one of the worst made teaching videos of all time. The content is placed on two disks, when the amount of "real" content is not enough to fill 1/4 of one disc. You know you are on the wrong track, when right in the middle of the video, the photographer's actress wife gets about 20 minutes screen time talking about how she cooked a meal they're about to shoot. It's relevance? None. I'm not kidding, you'll be scratching your head. Then near the end their is a realy interesting interview with Bill Mummy the former Lost in Space star (Will Robinson). This too, has NOTHING to do with shooting light in photography except some comments about some of his pictures.When the photographer shows how he shoots the shot, it's good, but too quick, and way over the head of someone trying to figure out to improve their skills. If the photographer cut the 2 insane irrelevant scenes, added 3 times the material, and went a little slower, it would have been ok. Instead, it's a joke and a ripoff.

I know absolutely nothing about photography or lighting and found the DVD very informative and fun. I've heard when you photograph food for example, most of the time they actually add some kind of coating to make it look nice. The fact that he used nothing but lighting for the shot and it still looked great just amazed me. I also enjoyed the part with the animals. Cats are so unpredictable and he still managed to get a great photo with that ring flash gizmo... and how can you control a hen? I'm also a Babylon 5 fan so that was an extra added bonus having 3 cast members in his DVD showing different lighting techniques... it was a geek moment to be sure, but a nice geek moment. I learned quite a bit! Thanks Dave for making such a unique product.

Very poor DVD, not enough information. Very amateur in its manufacture. Sample lighting setups with not explained well at all