Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Lalala-Laura-Laura

Pretty girls and fast cars, i love both but to combine them in 1 photoshoot is not my cup of tea, it has been done so often and all the pictures resemble one another.

Model: Laura Theys, MUA :muaDjenien, Assist: Luc




But here we where, Laura was ready to model and the new Ferrari 458 Italia was screeming for some attention (which is off course what's it supposed to do anyway)
I watch out not to fall in the typical girl-car shoot, so i decided to keep the car in just a tiny pit of the frame, even with only a small part of the bodywork i'm sure almost 90% of the people would recognize the car is an exotic anyway








The next thing was a bit of a try-out, it's something i wanted to try for a long time but never really had opportunity to do it. 1 side is lit with the Apollo Westcott softbox (SB-900) and on the other side a simple shoot-through umbrella (Af-540-fgz). I had 1 misfire on the SB-900 probably due to me shooting faster than the recycle time but i really loved the result, it's amazing to see how much detail is retained in the shadow area with the Nikon D800e, this is also a situation where the extended dynamic range comes in handy.















and some more soft, very soft stuff ...









Friday, May 25, 2012

Wild horses

The Nikon d800e, what an amazing piece of engineering, sharpness and "micro contrast" are redefined for what is possible on an FX size sensor but keep your feet on the ground, the more than 36 million pixels are unforgiving on your shooting style, motion blur is easily revealed because of the enormous amount of detail, even the smallest amount where the focus is off becomes painfully visible at a 100% view.
Only the best lenses will be able to deliver good detail resolution, so using top quality lenses is mandatory.

I have to say that the Nikkor Af-s 24-70 f:2.8 never really convinced me on the D700 (soft corners - focus shift) but it seems to perform a lot better on the D800e but i'll have to use it more before i can come to a "real world usage" conclusion, two lenses that have really convinced me so far are the Nikkor Af-85mm f:1.4 G and the ever amazing Nikkor 14-24 f:2.8.

The Af-s 70-200 Vrii that performed very well on the D700 seems to be able to justly keep up with the demands of the D800e, if you don't need a zoom in this range i would certainly recommend switching to primes like the 85 f:1.8G or f:1.4G, i don't own one but i wonder how the 200mm f:2 would perform on this body...

About Moiré = not really an issue until now and not much worse than the regular D800 from what i've seen

Obvious question = Will a client see the difference between a  800px downscaled photo from the D700 or the D800e? No probably not, neither will he see you had to crop to 25% of the original and still have about 10Mpix files, that's at your advantage, so is sharpness and the really comfortable dynamic range a low ISO

Enough of the technical mambo jambo, time for some real life results i would say:

This is a "landscape crop" downscaled to it's websize:

You can find the full resolution file on my flickr stream,  >click here for 20MB of detail<

But if you don't feel like going for a walk on my Flickr stream here is a crop!
I had to downscale it to 75% to be 800px wide.. just a tiny amount of wtf goes around when looking at these files i can tell you!


But Mike wouldn't be Mike if he didn't have a model to shoot ;-)

Model is Julie Ghoos (She got a pretty score at the latest Miss Belgium contest. )
MUA / hair : Sophie Adam.

All was shot with the Nikon D800e + Af85mm 1,4G and Af50 1,4D











Details, details, details ...





This was a soft-focus technique to show the difference between a "normal" picture and the less contrasty one, feels a lot like a David Hamilton and that was the purpose because i was going to need some similar effect for my next shoot