Commercial product and lifestyle photographer Rodger Hostetler joins us today to talk about photo composition and lighting techniques. He considers himself a technical lighter, so he enjoys doing technical lighting work for photo shoots. With a background in graphic design and art direction, he has a lot of experience with keeping technical situations straight and organized. This is how he approaches lighting a product—he looks at the different facets to see what will light it up and make the product pop out of a page.

One thing he keeps in mind is that working with photography lighting is similar to playing pool. When light hits any kind of surface, it bounces like billiard balls off the edge of a pool table and into a pocket. In order to achieve the perfect reflection angle, you must look at the surface and understand exactly how the light will react.

Many of Rodger’s previous jobs involved mixing different sized shapes together and getting everything to balance out. In all of his work since then, he still works with this same situation, where he gets unusual sizes and shapes to work together and steer the viewer’s eye through the photograph.