Back to Hofstade!

There is something about this location in the winter that i really like, so we went there for Enisa's winters' snow shoot - 'strobist style'

This is somewhat how i prepare my flash and trigger to shoot in humid conditions:

Just a transparent plastic bag and a yellow stretcher , same stuff to protect the transmitter 'on camera'

The images ... (all with white shoot through umbrella)

Second Strobistworkshop

Few days ago we had our second strobist workshop ( www.strobista.com ), once again with a very nice audience and a very elegant model: Elke. (You might recognize her from my previous shoot at the studio ;-) )

The workshops are there to share our knowledge and experience, we try to keep it very to-the-point so max 6 students per workshop.
As it was snowing outside of Fort 5 @ Edegem there was a nice flow of light coming trough the windows, an ideal challenge to crank up the iso's and make some "about" pictures at 6400 iso and use the big aperture f 1.6 / f2 resulting in a very shallow DOF



So here you can see my colleague Peter explaining stuff about the beauty dish (with extra diffuser)





Yep, that's where the light comes from, just to be sure :-p

This is the result with the right camera angle

50mm ISO 200, f:5.6, 1/125th,
SB28 at 1/4 power in the beauty dish, camera left 45° high
AF-540-FGZ at 1/8 power, 1/2 CTO + gridded snoot, camera left, 3 meters behind model



Strobist info, same settings as previous photo, except the hair light is now a "bonnet" light and on the right side behind the model

Elke @ the studio

Playing with a striplight and a fine model in the studio can really deliver some nice results, just one light, using the light to sculpt the model out of the darkness...

Added some theatrical decor, follow the light

And spice it up a bit!

Next decided to do some clamp lighting, bare flash, standard reflector high right and a very frontal striplight on the left, ratio 1/1

Let the model fill the frame, 2 shoot trough umbrella's left and right of the camera 1/1 ratio, let's add some more spice!

Thanks to Elke and Elke Tuteleers who did the make-up :-)

800 Ws Ringflash

Thought this might be something nice to buy second hand, a battery operated 800Ws Ringlflash, just had time to do a quick test, D700 50mm @f8 1/200.

Looks promising, not?
Not quite Dave Hill but i don't like to imitate, I'd rather innovate ;-)

After this short test outside in the cold we went back to the studio, another shot with the ringflash. Pentax K10D tamron 28-75 @ 65 f:8 1/125th

Then we put the ringflash aside and choose some other lighting approach:

2 lights on the background (left & right softbox) and 2 lights with shoot trough umbrella's left and right of me, left umbrella at 1/2 power of right one

And the same lighting set-up, but this time the lights are balanced 1/1

thanks to Natalie, Nathalie and Little Black Rose for the make-up!

Getting used to some new gear

New gear? get used to it!

24mm is really wide when you're switching form APS-C sized sensors to this Fx format (as it was in the "good old days"), location i choose for my "tests" is "Domein Hofstade" near Mechelen, there's an old abandoned swimming pool loved by some urBEx colleges, but i left that for what it was and choose to explore a new area.
Due to some winterly fog in the lower layers the sky wasn't as blue as it should have been but what the heck, get on with it and take some pictures!

testing the 24mm "wideness"

(This is not a pano, but a creative crop as my college Bart would say)

Testing lens flare as i pointed the 24mm AF-D f:2.8 directly at the sun f:22 ISO 200 1/500th, yes it's there and that's normal I guess! (top left and bottom right)

I have to say that i really like this "wideness", so much in fact, I'm thinking about the 14-24 f:2.8 ... LBA strikes again (LBA : Lens Buying addiction)



After some time it was time to test the shallow DOF from the 50mm f:1.4, I once read nobody shoots f:1.4 outside in the sun? why not, i like the shallow DOF!

New toy...

In august i decided to switch over from Pentax to Nikon, My Pentax is a great camera but i needed a better AF in low-light and also a sensor that produced less noise in the pictures. Nikon seemed to offer what i wanted (except for the price of their zooms ... ) and also had an attractive model which offerd a full size sensor, my choice quickly set on the D700!

My spouse decided that Christmas was the perfect timing for this new toy so here it is...

Nikon D700 with 2 primes as a start, the 24 f:2.8 & 50 f:1.4

Picture made with the pentax K10D - 50 f2 MF , ISO 200 @ f:4

First tests at ISO 6400 look very impressive!!

SNOOOOW, and no model this time!

Almost Christmas... and Snow, seems to me it was a long time since we got a white Christmas over here, not sure it'll last till the 25th though!

Went out with my MF prime 50mm f:2.0 for some landscape photos in "domein 3 fonteinen".

A classic winter's shot:

Suddenly the sun came shining trough the treetops, time to enjoy the light show ;-)

You can see in the previous image I'm trying to add some mystery to the photos by using very shallow depth-of-field (DOF), i really love the look that medium format can produce and so i pushed it even further going from f:4 tot f:2