Season 1, EP 2:
Sam Hurd’s Masterclass on Using Prisms, Light & AI to Inspire Your Photography

Justin Benson

Welcome to After the Shoot, a podcast where we take a peek behind the lens to get inspired by the stories, challenges, and ideas of some of the most successful photographers in the business.

I’m Justin Benson from Aftershoot, an AI culling and editing software that helps give photographers like you your time back so you can focus on what you do best, while our magical unicorns take care of the most boring and time consuming parts of your job. I’ll be your host for this podcast, and I’m so excited to have you here as we talk with some of my favorite creators.

Episode Teasers

I keep a lot of momentum from one idea to the next so that there’s no fixation or expectation from them. Like, where’s that photo we spent 15 minutes during our cocktail hour?

…doing things as much practical in camera as you can. It creates a grounding in reality.

Justin Benson

On this episode of After the Shoot, we’re sitting down with the incredibly talented Sam Hurd. Sam is such an inspiration as he’s able to take elements and harness them into building, building a better image through his creativity. Whether it’s a prism or a copper pipe, he finds amazing ways to incorporate elements that you wouldn’t normally use inside of your photography, and this creates a dreamy, ethereal experience for you and your clients. This is definitely a do not miss podcast episode, and I can’t wait for you to enjoy it with us. So without further ado, Sam Hurd.

Justin Benson

Hey, everyone. Justin from Aftershoot here. Welcome to the Aftershoot podcast. Today I have a very special guest, and I am so excited to be chatting with him. His work is something that you can look at and just simply be inspired. You ask questions while you’re looking at it. How did you achieve that? How did you get there? And that’s why I’m so excited to have him. So without further ado, I’d love to introduce the amazing, super talented Sam Hurd.

Sam Hurd

Thanks, Justin. Well, happy to be here in the middle of, yeah, Peru.

Justin Benson

Middle of Peru, so we have a nice location. So you just gave a talk, and it was super awesome. I heard amazing things about it, but I wanted to really dive in first with. How did you get started in photography?

Sam Hurd

Yeah, I got my first camera, 16 years old, something like that. Sony, by the way, I don’t shoot Sony now, but it was a Sony digital. The thing that I really liked about it was the body was separate from the lens and it would articulate, and I loved that. I could shoot viewfinder, but I could also shoot from the waist like many people do now. Sony was so early to all that stuff, but had a little Sony memory stick, probably like three megapixels. And me and my best friend both got digital cameras around the same time. And I grew up in Virginia, in the mountains, and so we would just do hikes and photograph nature. I didn’t start photographing people until my first job out of college that I randomly found on Craigslist. I traveled a lot just for backpacking, for fun. Again, mostly landscape work, but I had a little portfolio of photos, and they hired me to basically do event photography for this place in Washington, DC. And that kicked it off as soon as I started photographing people, which I’d always sort of wanted to do, but had no access. Like, I’m not the type of person that’s like, you’re really beautiful. Can I take your picture? Like, never would I do that. So it gave me access now because I’m the photographer to photograph people at events, and I fell in love, and then my coworker got engaged, and after a few years of doing events, I shot her wedding. And that kicked off the whole wedding thing.

Justin Benson

So, yeah, that’s amazing. If you look back now at your first wedding, did you do a good job?

Sam Hurd

Yeah. Surprisingly, I’m so proud. I have one photo in my portfolio all the way from my very first wedding.

Justin Benson

Wow.

Sam Hurd

Yeah. I evolved the editing a little bit so that it’s more current and consistent because it’s like my editing used to be. I always had this idea that a good photographer would achieve, literally down to, like, the tone curve and everything about the edit in camera, which I no longer believe. One of my favorite parts of the process is editing with as much, like, unique, customized processes as I can in the layers, from, like, a custom camera profile to everything. But my initial edits for weddings would just be like, oh, it doesn’t look like it did on the back of my camera. Darn. And I would try and edit for that, which is kind of weird. But, yeah, I did a good job. It was just very different stylistically. I got very, I think, like most photographers, caught up in all the different flashes and modifiers that I needed. I bought the Gary Fong thing, you know? And so I shot a lot of off camera flash at that wedding, which is fine. It had a nice look, but it just tended to slow me down more than I wanted to because I like to shoot alone without an assistant. And so over time, very quickly, I turned it away to just more natural light and then flash if I had need it. Absolutely have to yep.

Justin Benson

That’s awesome. So your workflow essentially evolved your first wedding. You know, you probably went from, like, what the pinnacle of people are thinking, like, oh, I need flash everywhere, and it’s got to be amazing. And you actually evolved in a direction that probably allows you to capture better emotion because you’re not waiting on a flash to recycle, you’re not trying to set up flashes. You’re kind of just going, I mean, I watch your patreon and all these days, and I just see you going, and you’re just like, that’s the thing. Boom. And you just have this such a unique and inspiring way of shooting and that kind of. How did that evolve?

Sam Hurd

Yeah, actually slowly in the beginning, and it probably took about three years before the voice inside my head with the imposter syndrome, and everything got quieter, where I could confidently walk into any lighting scenario and know what to do, or at least understand that eventually I’ll know what to do. I still take tons of crap photos. It’s not like every picture is exactly what I think it’s going to be right from the start. And just. It took about three years before. I was just very comfortable in my process. And after about four years, I started teaching more, and that really changed everything. I really encourage people, even if you don’t want to be, like, a wedding photographer educator, just do something. Write down your thought. Review a piece of equipment, just for fun, just for yourself. Doesn’t matter if nobody reads it. You learn so much more about your process. And why do I start? Where do I start with a photo? Is it the composition? Is it the pose for me, that really silos my thinking? So being able to walk into a space can be especially, like this, overwhelmingly beautiful. Like, where do I even start? The light. The light is where I start. So that narrows down this overwhelming sense of possibility to. There’s maybe four or five good angles of light in a reasonable walking distance. We go there. After that, you start to figure out your composition. Once, that’s nailed everything else. So really having that kind of siloed thinking came from teaching and talking about my work a lot and proved to be the most critical and beneficial part of my process, because it’s, yeah, not overwhelming anymore.

Justin Benson

That’s amazing.

Sam Hurd

The sense of possibility early on, I think that’s why people struggle. It’s just like, you can do anything. And that’s also why I trended away from off camera flash for wedding work, at least because it’s still too overwhelming for me. Because you can just craft amazing light anywhere the possibilities are too overwhelming, so I just let the guy, the light guide me.

Justin Benson

That’s fantastic. And I think that’s a really important thing, and I think you’re the epitome of that journey. Right. So a lot of us get hung up on, like, oh, I need to use flash all the time, or, oh, I need to. I’m a natural light photographer, and I should just always be natural light. But it’s not necessarily. It doesn’t necessarily need to be that. I think. I think the best photographer is the most interesting photographer’s work. They’re harnessing that flash when they need it, and then they’re utilizing the natural light as the starting point. And at least in my work, it’s. I do, like, 90% natural light. Even though a lot of my stuff that I share is off camera flash, my clients prefer the natural light. They love to just see me work within the light that’s available, and it’s the off camera flash that’s, like, the embellishment that’s the extra thing. Like, this is creative, and you couldn’t do it, and so you had probably the opposite journey of me where it was like, I was just like, oh, I’m taking natural light. And then I was like, oh, I got to do flash all the time. And now I’ve come to that same point. Once I started talking about it and explaining how I process things, I said, you know, I’m gonna step back and just kind of do it this way. Nice. So my next important question. I love the tools you use. Right? So I now carry around a copper pipe. So I found that through you. So how did you begin that process? And, like, do you experiment on sessions and just kind of like, if it doesn’t work, you’re just like, hey, pretend that never happened, or.

Sam Hurd

Yeah, a lot of things to dive into with that question. I start with your last one during a session, I definitely experiment a lot, but I keep. And nine times out of ten, they fail entirely. I never let the couple know that I could be taking the worst photo ever, and I’m like, oh, my God, you look amazing. I get overly excited just so that there’s always a positive energy, because they’ll pick up and mirror your anxieties if you start to. My camera’s not focusing. What’s going on? It’s like they don’t want to hear that. But I keep a lot of momentum from one idea to the next so that there’s no hopefully fixation or expectation from them. Like, where’s that photo? We spent 15 minutes during our cocktail hour, you know, trying to make, because you said it was going to be awesome. It’s like, no, no, no, I gotta try and keep it so that we’re, I’m working on an idea, maybe a minute or two, then we move on to the next one and the next one, and then ten ideas later, who knows what you got? I don’t even remember half the time. That’s one of my favorite parts, is pulling things up and aftershoot and seeing what I got because I forget because things move so quickly. But it all started in terms of the various tools and objects that I shoot through. When I say that I experiment, I typically experiment with the exact same tool in a variety of ways. I know a lot of photographers that like to just bring something random and see what happens in that randomness. And that can be really cool, totally valid approach. What I found that really works consistently, allowed me to reinvent things, was for myself using the exact same tool in a huge variety of environments. Because you mentioned the copper pipe, right? So you hold that up to your lens in the right conditions, you get a beautiful, cool circular flare. That’s not something I realized. The person that gave it to me was at WPPI, like 2012. And I had given a talk about using a prism, and we can talk more about prisming in a bit, but the AV guy was like, taking my mic off and just like, gave me a pocket full of stuff. And in that was this, like, little random silver painted plastic pipe. And it was kind of a joke, but I kept it in my sling bag forever and started to just bring it out more and experiment. And if it’s not the right conditions, you don’t really get anything out of it. It doesn’t do anything. But boom. Once I realized shooting at sunset, holy crap, I get this crazy circular, predictable flare that I can now use and manipulate. That’s when it unlocked. But I had to commit to a ton of shit of like, shooting with it in cloudy, you know, nighttime with no other lights, where it did nothing, where I was just experimenting with the same object in a variety of circumstances. Before I could, I had like a, I could harness what it was. Same with the prism. That, that’s really where I learned that lesson. And I originally bought a prism because I was playing in a band at the time. We were called prisms, nothing to do with photography. We were banned from college, and we were either going to be named prisms or rhinoceros. I don’t know why.

Justin Benson

Thank God it’s prism.

Sam Hurd

Because here we are. I mean, it really, we bought, I bought it the six inch prism from a teacher’s store on Amazon because we were thinking about album art. And I was like, oh, maybe I can do something, you know, Pink Floyd album cover Rainbow, something with a prism. And we didn’t use it at all for that. It just kind of sat on my desk. And one of the things, one of the people that inspired me early on was Ryan Brenizer. He has this method of shooting called the Brenizer method. It’s a technique and an idea that’s existed for a while. You take a panorama to get a wide field of view while getting a really shallow depth of field. But he popularized it and simplified it, like, boiled it down to a really method behind it. And I was always like, I need to come up with something like that. What can I do? What can I do? And I started to bring the prism with me just as a whatever. Where it unlocked for me was getting ready photos, which is also a wonderful time to experiment because you can kind of knock out the basics really easy. And then you have a stationary person sitting in a chair. You can take a second, you can take a beat and just like, hold something in front of your lens versus trying to jump right in with a couple where you’re balancing a lot of ideas all at once. So getting ready photos with the prism, I realize, hold on. I can reflect away all, like, the trash on the dresser behind her or the makeup artist whose hand is always right there. I can mask using the reflection of the prism, all these distracting elements now reflecting back in maybe the backside of the bride’s face. Now I’ve got this cool side to side view or whatever. That’s what unlocked the prism for me. And then again, I committed to using the exact same one in a huge variety of environments and started to recognize, like, where it’s going to be useful, and it just became what it is. Yeah. Now there’s like entire prism companies.

Justin Benson

I know it’s crazy. You can magnetize them and all sorts of things.

Sam Hurd

And I have, I do none of that. Yeah, I still have my prisms from Amazon. I bought, like, I think after that first year of shooting when I really realized how cool it was, and I wrote a blog post about it. I bought like 300. And I’m just slowly going through them as I drop them or lose them or give them away.

Justin Benson

Yeah, that’s so cool. So prisming just yet another effect that, you know, it’s that in camera effect, and I think it goes right back to, like, maybe it’s maybe unintentionally, but that inspiration, you said, I’m trying to get it like the back of the camera when that first wedding, right? And now you’re doing that. You’re doing that same thing, right? Because in theory, I could make it a double exposure in Photoshop. I can take an image and try and replicate a prism in Photoshop and waste time and energy doing it that way. Or I can hold up a prism in front of me and go for it.

Sam Hurd

Yeah, yeah. A lot of times it’s faster and easier to just do it in real life. I mean, this wasn’t something I cared about or thought much until maybe just a few years ago. But Christopher Nolan, the director, in some interviews, randomly, he mentioned how doing things in the camera, he shoots film and I don’t. But doing things as much practical in camera as you can creates a grounding in reality that even if people don’t know why and know nothing about photography or what they’re looking, that you can sense something is real or not. Even the wildest things that I might do with, I have different colored filters, red, green, and blue, that I’ll shoot through as a triple exposure. And I don’t know, maybe you can throw a picture up because it’s really hard to describe. But if you move your subject and keep everything else the same from one shot to the next and layer them all, you get this imprint of magenta, cyan, and yellow, basically against, like, a white wall. Really, really cool effect. Not something you see in real life with your own eyes, but it’s grounded in real physics. Red, green, and blue. I’m just isolating the color channels using that in a creative way. Yeah, you could photoshop it and get a very similar look. But I think it’s also worth noting the internal gratification is just a completely different level for yourself when you nail it in camera. It’s just, it’s so fun. Renews this sense of giddiness for me. It’s so fun. And, you know, sometimes you can photoshop together an idea that is cool, but there’s something in the back of your head every time you look at that photo where you’re like.

Justin Benson

And you’ll know.

Sam Hurd

Yeah, but it’s photoshopped. Damn. So, yeah, that’s kind of actually.

Justin Benson

To that point, I started playing with flash, so I started taking three flashes and doing exactly that. One with a red filter, one with a green, one with a blue. And when you, where all three lights intersected, you get white light yep. And then the shadow that cascades is that cyan, yellow, blue, that whole cascade effect. And it’s so cool to just have it happen. And I could easily just take a shadow and paste it and then lighten it, and I could make that effect very easily. But again, the effort of taking out three flashes, setting them up, lining it up, posing your subjects, going through the whole process, and then actually watching the shadows form is insane. It’s just such a rewarding and exciting feeling. And that leads me to my next. I want to talk about insight because this, to me, is such a cool tool for somebody like myself who’s very goal driven. So when I’m shooting a wedding, I’m like, okay, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this. And just like you, I’m keeping it moving as fast as I can, but a lot of times I’ll have a creative shot off in my head that I’ll be like, okay, I’m going to do this creative shot at the end. I’m going to get the basics out of the way. Then I’m going to pull out flash and I’m going to gel it and do whatever, and I’m going to just do something creative later. And so insight is a tool that can essentially help me craft these ideas with a photo so I won’t ruin it. I want your description. I could describe it poorly, but you can describe it for real.

Sam Hurd

I’m still trying to figure out talking points for it because it is so new. This idea of, okay, generative AI is essentially the technology it’s leveraging, and I trained it on about 2 million of my own photos and a bunch of other work that went into it. I spent like eight months coding this whole tool just for me to use it, and now anybody can. But I was so frustrated when generated AI really kicked off in like 2022, 2021. I started to see photographers rightfully like, get excited about this really cool looks, completely photorealistic output that they could make just by typing a sentence. That’s fun. And there’s a valid layer of creativity that happens in learning how to use these generative tools and how to trick it into doing what you want with prompts. But at the end of the day, you’re getting a result that looks like a photo and it’s not. So there’s this unethical layer of what’s going on here, even if you’re completely transparent about it. Where I would get most frustrated and sometimes angry was photographers who know how to take the photo. Like, you can see, yeah, it’s beautiful. Put them in that attire, put them in that lighting, and take the actual photo, but not bother with it. Just post the generated thing and kind of ride. Yeah, this is AI, but most people are looking at it without reading the caption and getting into the details. If you’re known for photography, you’re kind of riding on those coattails in a way that I just found really distasteful. But objectively, these generated images look beautiful. So how can you close that gap between using it as an inspirational starting point and then still going out in the real world and making that photo happen? Maybe it’s very similar or exactly like the AI idea, maybe it just isn’t. But you start in a direction that leads you somewhere you never naturally would have gone. And so that’s what insight does. It’s tried to remove basically as much friction in the process as possible. And I’m leveraging FTP, which is so funny because this is a cutting edge, brand new technology using 40 year old FTP transfer. But what’s amazing, in most pro camera bodies, the FTP transfer is the least amount of friction once it’s set up and you can just use your, it needs an Internet connection. So you just pair your phone to, like, your phone hotspot, or pair your camera to your phone hotspot. Any image on the back of your camera, you hit one button, it sends to insight, and then about a minute later, it generates a thumbnail of four different pose ideas based off the actual environment that you’re shooting in. So really similar quality of light, similar perspective, similar field of view, depth of field, all of that. So the results that you get, the goal is that they’re really applicable. Like, you can see in that idea how it might work in real life and then go do it. And it closes that gap of, like, using some cutting edge technology to stay creatively inspired, but still needing to recognize what is even cool in the shot and still having to, like, do the job of a photographer. Yeah, right. Settings write light and direction for your subject.

Justin Benson

And I love that. I mean, that concept in and of itself. There’s so many questions, so many concerns about, like, where AI is heading in the space and how people are leveraging it. You know, whether you’re using generative of AI, just like you said, in a way that’s maybe not so ethical. Right? You’re kind of taking the photographer out of the equation. If you can take the photo, you shouldn’t be Gen AI. Ing it. Right. You should be taking the photo, like show your true, your true nature, the thing that you’re doing, versus say, you know, I’ve done a couple images where I’ve gone in and I’ve said, okay, here’s the photo. I took a photo of person on the couch and I’m like, I don’t have a backdrop. I don’t have anything that I can do. So I’ll genii something that I can put them in because that’s all I had. But I’m not going out and advertising and running on that. So it’s, it’s kind of just like my personal things that I like to have fun with.

Sam Hurd

Everything’s on a spectrum for sure. For me, this is what made sense, where again, that joy and that giddiness of what I’m doing in photography is sustained and enhanced. It’s so fun and it’s really cool. So that delay of a minute, I used to think it was kind of annoying, but it’s kind of the anticipation of like, oh, I wonder what it’s going to do is you start to get a little addicted to it. And I will note there’s a lot of safety concerns proactively before it hits. Any generative AI selectively blurs your subject’s face, especially if there’s kids or anything. It blurs their face so that they’re not recognizable and that’s why they generated results. They have similar characteristics of your subject, but it’s not going to look like them.

Justin Benson

Yeah, that’s important.

Sam Hurd

And I can’t. Yeah, I have no access to the photos that are being sent to it myself. Nothing. So I’ve tried to take every kind of step that I possibly can to keep it private and not feeding the AI monster.

Justin Benson

And that’s the big fear, right? The AI monster is floating around, but that’s, that’s so cool. So I could basically go in, I can take a photo, it’s gonna transfer up, it’s gonna generate me something back, and I’m gonna get it on my phone like some generative ideas. So in that minute, I’m there still working, still doing my own thing, still doing my own process. So like, I could take the first photo, upload it, and then I can go through my regular workflow, keep the process moving, which I think is important. Right. You don’t want to sit there and say, okay, we’re gonna wait for this 1 minute for this image to come back. So you’re still working, doing your thing, but then you’re getting back a result that maybe you take some inspiration from. Maybe it’s not the same thing, maybe you’re not replicating it, but you’re literally just looking at a concept that you can say, hey, this is actually the light right here. I see what just happened. The sun coming through the trees. The AI sees that. And maybe I just didn’t frame it right. Maybe I need to move the sunlight right here so I get that nice little frame. So having that kind of in your pocket is such an incredible tool. It allows you to be a little bit more creative if you’re struggling with posing too. I think that’s probably the I could set them up in a pose in a beautiful spot, and then AI is going to come in and say, hey, here’s like four more different poses. In theory, that would look great in this location. So that’s helpful.

Sam Hurd

It took me a long time to appreciate just how one subtle change in hand placement can completely change the feel of a photo. And sometimes it’s that simple. There’s nothing to do with the lighting, nothing to do with composition. It just, for whatever reason, showed an idea where the hand is up near the neck instead of around the waist. It’s like, oh yeah, that’s way it’s more asymmetrical and interesting and it’s great. And just to go back to the whole again, goal was to remove as much friction as possible. And if you’ve never tried it, FTP transfer from your camera is seamless. You look at it, you hit a button and you get right back to shooting. There’s no blackout or delay in your camera. Like if the moment starts to unfold and you need to take a picture, it jumps right back to it and it sends in the background. Most of the camera apps, like the transfer apps from Bluetooth and Wi Fi are terrible. And the initial transfer only takes about 3 seconds. Wow. It doesn’t need a raw file, so you have to shoot in raw plus JPEG, but the smallest JPEG possible. So it takes like 2 seconds to send the original transfer. And you can send bulk, it’s not one at a time. You can send batch, so you can shoot off like five or six. And it’s not 1 minute per idea. You’ll get five or six renders back a minute later.

Justin Benson

Wow. That’s so cool. And I think that’s changing the way we kind of look at photography. I mean, all the tools that are available to us give us new ways to work. Whether it’s speeding up your workflow or in this case changing how? Improving your work. I mean, this is just a work improvement.

Sam Hurd

Completely new creative input never existed before.

Justin Benson

Exactly. It’s a new way to photograph, which I think is amazing. So with that being said, insight, it’s in beta now.

Sam Hurd

It’s out.

Justin Benson

It’s out.

Sam Hurd

I mean, it’s always kind of been in beta. It’s literally just me. So if you sign up and you email support or whatever, it’s me replying, even if I’m like us or refer to it as a thing, it’s just me. So it’s out. I’ve been slowly just feeling out any bugs or feedback from users and just want to use it myself. It’s only been out for maybe four months. But yeah, insight photo is the website. Awesome. Awesome.

Justin Benson

And then my next question. So you said you trained it on hundreds, thousands of images, 3 million of mine. Yeah, 3 million of your photos. But they’re your photos, right? So am I going to start shooting like Sam heard now? If I. Am I getting a lot of inspiration?

Sam Hurd

Interesting question, but no, no, no. I don’t want to get too into the technical details, but there’s a completely, there’s a complete source of randomness in what it decides to do. And yeah, in a sense, some of the poses, the themes overall might be things that I would do, but it’s not going to look like Sam heard because your original input changes things completely. If you send it a lens with a photo from a 70 to 200, with that force perspective and that really shallow depth of field, the input’s going to come back like that. If you send it a 50 millimeter 1.2, which is what I commonly shoot with. Yeah, it’s going to look more like maybe my work, but the original input of your style takes priority. And then over time I’m hoping to make it a little more advanced where I could just. You want it to be like way more like your own personal style. Give me your Instagram handle and I can just train it on what you’ve posted at Instagram. I could do that. So who knows where I’ll take it in the future, but I don’t think that’s really even necessary. I think it’s enough of a different input from one photographer to the next with the source photos that you’re going to still be able to make it all your own.

Justin Benson

Yeah. And again, I think it goes back to the inspiration. Even if I get the photo back from it, I’m not going to do that same thing. I’m going to do my version my spin on it. I may take some elements of it and say, okay, this is what I’m going to do, or this is what I’m going to not do. I like the pose, but I don’t like the angle or whatever it may be. Maybe I want to switch lenses. Maybe I see a pose and I can visualize something different that I didn’t see before just by the perspective of it. So again, just inspiration, which is really cool. And that’s why I wanted to sit down with you and just talk inspiration, because it’s been a real pleasure chatting and I’m so excited to, I’m going to go buy some prisms now, honestly, because I’m like, I haven’t used prisms, but I love the idea of just incorporating some of those other elements. And for me, it was always a fear factor. So it was always like, okay, what if I pull out a prism and it’s a terrible photo? And what do I say to my client? Like, oh, it didn’t work. Yeah, I wasted. But knowing that, you’re like, hey, I’m going to devote a minute to this and if it doesn’t pan out, I’m going to move on and maybe I’ll try it later or maybe I’ll bring it back in another way. Shape or form I think is a really, it helps build the confidence that I’m not going to ruin it or embarrass myself.

Sam Hurd

And like anything, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. And I don’t actively, almost ever talk to my clients about photography. I’m getting to know them conversationally. I might say, like, I’m just going to try something and let’s see if this works. But usually they have no idea when I’m using a prism versus not or when I’m using insight versus not. It just is kind of this background subroutine that’s running in my head that, but I’m talking to them about just real life stuff just to keep them comfortable and not focused on the fact that there’s a giant lens pointed at them the whole day.

Justin Benson

So, yeah, that’s awesome. All right, so my last question before we go. You have an accoutrement of tools in your bag. What are the things that you’re carrying on a session? Do you carry on your average? Are you carrying a prism, a copper pipe?

Sam Hurd

Yeah. Okay. So there’s a reason why I try and diversify with multiple tools, whether, like you mentioned already, those two I built a custom canon, has a really interesting mount adapter that allows for drop in filters, like right in the adapter. It’s cool. You can throw an Nd filter in there. I busted up a variable Nd filter and put in a piece of cardboard that blacks out half the frame, but it’s on a wheel because it was a variable Nd filter. So I can rotate it in camera. This where half the frame is blacked out and as a double exposure, you can take one frame, have it be half of something, turn the little wheel around, and in camera, take the second frame and realign and recompose a completely different side shot.

Justin Benson

Whether it’s prisms or the ring of fire, we’re all excited to see what’s next.

Sam Hurd

Yeah, everyone takes their own path. I mean, it’s amazing what Aftershoot is doing. I can’t copy something like this. This is incredible. The work that you all put into, especially Veronica, bring us all into the middle of nowhere in Peru is just incredible. I don’t know any other company that’s ever done something like this. So yeah, it’s much appreciated just to build community, right? It’s wild.

Justin Benson

Yeah. We’re just here to create a community. And again, it goes back to Aftershoot and the core foundation of what we want to do is uplift the industry as a whole. This is a great opportunity. AI is going to change the space and just that’s, again, why I wanted to talk about insight so much is because it’s a good AI. It’s an AI that’s going to help photographers grow or become better photographers, or get inspired. And it’s not the type that’s going to say, hey fire headshot photographer, I’ve got a solution for you. So again, I wanted to highlight that. And again, we’re here to build community. So thank you for flying all the way to Peru to come teach. And thanks for sitting with us on this podcast. And we’re so excited for all of you watching at home. Please be sure to subscribe and check out our next podcast coming soon. Bye everyone.

Justin Benson

Thanks for tuning in to After the Shoot. Got any burning questions for today’s guests or just want to keep the conversation going? Drop us a comment if you’re on YouTube or join the Aftershoot community to share your thoughts. You can find the link in the description. Make sure you subscribe to get notified as soon as we drop the next episode. And trust me, you don’t want to miss it. And if you like this episode, I’d love it if you gave us a rating or a view on Apple Podcasts Spotify or wherever you’re watching this podcast. See you next time.