Chiara!

This shoot with Chiara should have taken place a long time ago but at the time of our previous appointment Chiara was sick and unable to shoot.

I've replaced my Nikkor Af-D 85mm f:1.8 with the more exotic and new 85mm Af f:1.4 G and i'm really impressed by the sharpness at f:2.0 or even at full opening f:1.4, color rendition and contrast is just perfect.

The AF of the 1.8D version is faster, the 1.4G being "slow" and certainly so in low light but it's accuracy makes up for it big time, the Bokeh is amazing, just like the "old" one.

I tested the old 1.4D a time ago but i found that the corners never got sharp, even at f:8 it isn't 100%, and compared wide open at f:1.4 the newer G version is A M A Z I N G
(G version = "the crippled one", because the lack of aperture ring)

If there ever comes a new version i'm sure they will ad VR to make us buy a new one :-p

Lucky me, for this shoot i was still accompanied by Minne as co-shooter / assistant, she is the one holding the Sunbounce PRO zebra panel for these shots.

As these are made in October, the sun is pretty low and it makes our job a lot easier shooting at noon and filling the shadows, also color temperature of the natural light feels better to me.

Suddenly a little bit of clouds appeared, but the sunbounce is still able to fill those eye-sockets with just enough light to make for a nice portrait :-)

MUA Sandra De Moor

This shot is Wide open aperture, 85mmG f1.4, Fill light with the Sunbounce Pro zebra

2 possible compositions in 1 picture, i thought this was a nice effect in post

Chiara is a though girl!

All pictures 100% natural light + bounce panels, no added flashlight was used or abused to make these ;-)

Myrthe @ sea

You won't be seeing a lot of sea in this series because it we did not go tho Ostend to take pictures of our North Sea but we went there to photograph Myrthe!

When i say "we", i mean Sandra De Moor as our MUA and Minne Van Den Noortgate as my co-photographer.

Minne took some excellent pictures too, you should check out her work :-)

Myrthe, is amazing, with her beautiful hair and amazin' eyes she has a lot to make it easy for a photographer to take great pictures!

More and more i'm going back to basics and work with natural light combined with the Sunbounce panels, it makes shooting a lot easier and quicker which is nice for the model en results in more pictures. But when needed i can reflect to the help of some additional flashlight. But as said, the entire shoot was done using only 1 big Pro Zebra panel and 1 Mini Siler Panel, you will see them as a catchlight in the eyes :-)

Light coming from behind is always amazing, certainly so when the sun is placed very low

I have to say we got pretty damn lucky with this shoot on location, the weathergods were really on our side, shooting outside in belgium on the 31st of october is pretty amazing and we even had decent temperatures, i even took of my coat at the warmer hours of the day

No fill on this one as i think Minne who was in charge of bouncing was in fact takin pictures too :-p

Almost same setting but with light bounced back (look at the eyes!)

And a more cinematic approach

For this shoot we provided basic styling, time was too short to shoot every outfit and Minne brought some stuff too so we had a lot to choose from.

Styling is really what makes the shot come to live, so i hope to be styling a lot more shoots in the future

For the following pictures we got inspired by one of our colleagues who is known for always placing his subject between his camera and the sun, metering exposure on "the dark side" and not using any fill techniques + adding some funky colors to it in post

First picture with the sun shining in the lens to generate some lensflare

All was shot with D700 and the AF-S 85mm f:1.4 G