Sunday, April 26, 2009

Glamour Girl?

So what do you think? is this glamour or not?

Shooting against the sun at about 3 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon adds some nice rim lights, just a little bit of fill with a reflector and you are done, to add some sparkle you could use a small strobe at low power to put some nice catch lights in the models eyes.

































Model Ineke, Mua by Sandra Peeters

Shoot in the flowers

An idea I had for a long time in my head, a nice girl in a field of flowers...

When driving up to pick up my model (yes sometimes I do that) a saw a superb field of Colsa shining bright yellow in the sunlight, i immediately knew this was the place where we would come to do a part of the shoot for that day.

Model Iris is very inspiring and nice to work with, she always seems to know just what to do to make the picture look a special...


Autofocus was a bit disturbed with all those nice bubbles flying around but i managed to lock it on the iris of Iris, lighting info: sun in the back, shadow fill with strobe on the left side (shoot trough white umbrella), again the idea was to cut ambient light at about 2 stops below flash light as you can see on the background.
You could not guess but this picture was taken at high noon in direct sunlight ;-)

At some time we decided we had seen enough of this yellow little flowers and drove on to another spot where i decided to work with natural light + diffusers and reflectors (i should really get me one of those nice California sunbounce things, anyone care to sponsor me on my quest for perfect lighting?)

Put Iris down in the grass , arrange her hair and add some flowers, take a photo and that's it...

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Castle of Ingelmunster

Few weeks ago some guys from "modellennet.be" organized a nice meeting between photographers and models in the beautiful environment of the Ingelmunster Castle. (All was very nicely organized!)

2 models for that day, Annelies and MysteriousMaemi.

In a corridor filled with "stuff" (not stuff i like) I had an idea of putting one of my strobes in a room and using the door opening as some kind of huge Gobo to "shine" some light on Annelies, we added some dust from old curtains but it doesn't really shows up on the photo
(have to work on a system to make smoke on location and trust me, mixing amonia with HCl is not an option)



Next,
A nice shot we took outside of the castle and I wanted the romantic bridge to show trough in the background.
some info on the lighting:
High left the sun, and a white umbrella to block the direct sun rays from falling onto MysteriousMaemi's beautiful face, a bit lower was Alain with an extra diffuser to do the same for the skirt, on the right side we have Marina with a huge silver reflector to add some "rim" lights, extra fill provided with a strobe at 1/8th power shooting trough a white umbrella (in front at about 20° of the camera angle) Sigma 50-500 to take the shot
(yes you can do model shoots with the "Bigma")


What I work with?

Most people think I use one of those high-end camera's to make my photos.
Yeah, sure with a big and expensive camera nothing can go wrong, only lovely pics can come out...

Well in fact that's not what I believe, you can make stunning photos and you don't need a €7.000 camera, and you know why? Well because photography is all about light, no light = no photography and that is much more important than your camera. (i bougth my back-up body in second hand for €450 last year...)

As i do not think it is important i will not tell you what I work with, but i can tell you that Pentax is comming to the market with something new which will probably be called the K7 (stupid name btw), it has something to do with a mountain near the more famous K2 and the 60th anniversary of Pentax.
Depending in Specs this will be my new toy within a few months... the new DA*60-250 f4 seems pretty interesting too :-)

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Strobist Practicum :-p



First you have to read, then read it once again and than try to understand what you are doing.

then you need some "stuff" (yes i like "stuff")

- strobe/speedlight (at least one) in my case the Pentax AF540FGZ
- stand with "hotshoe"
- radio trigger (I've chosen the Elinchrom Skyport system)
- a nice camera (I still use my "old" Pentax K10D)

-sunlight and place to move (in fact you don't need a lot of space because this photo was made with a wide angle 18mm)

-motivate Yanina to jump really high and make her look like she is enjoying life (thank you Yanina :-) )

What you don't need is luck, just put it all in "M" and experiment!

As you see there are still some parts of Yanina's body that are not frozen, this is something i want to work on to get it all tack sharp!

Presence

It seems this blogspot "thing" is a nice way to spread my experiences about "stuff" I do, so from time to time i'll try to post some new things over here, i got inspired by the guys form strobist.com (nice blog btw, check them out @ http://strobist.blogspot.com/ )

As i am not much of a writer, I'll end with one of my onliners:

"I'm really serious about not being to serious"