Karen in a haystack

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Karen came up with this idea of shooting in a haystack... in the middle of the winter...

It was about 3°C so Bart van den Hout, Karen en myself were seriously freezing our butt off, we warmed everything up by using some CTO gel on one of the speed-lights

Again i made a very small video of the shoot, just to give you an idea of the location
(quality is not good, i know, but this is not like a "lord of the rings budget" production :-p )

A part of the shoot was done with an Hasselblad H1D with Leaf 22Mpix digital back but i'm not convinced of the indoor shots (done at ISO 100 f:2.8) Skintones and overall colors do not look good to me, however i liked the shot of a car outside, so much more detail in the shadow area.

The dynamic range is amazing compared to my D700, sharpness is about equal and I prefer the Nikon colors....

Sebastiana and Xira

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Picture above depicts our "2 zotte dozen" for that day, Bart Henseler ( http://bitbanger.wordpress.com/ ) and Cindy Van Dyck (http://www.wishyourstyle.tk/ )
Bart came over to assist and to do the filming, many thanks for this dude!


I've uploaded a little video of the day, i hope you like it :-)

The location, tour & taxis was arranged by my co-photographer Dirk Ganseman, you will find all his results on his website or blog very soon, check http://www.gakrid.be

Thanks Dirk!

Make-up was done by: Asly BaSs !
Styling done by: Cindy Van Dyck !

These are some photos we made of Sebastiana

Most lighting setups are the same, about 20 tot 30% flash fill below ambient.

Front fill with the Wescott Apollo 27", powered with the SB-900, backlight with a silver umbrella powered by the Pentax AF-540-FGZ and gelled with 1/4 CTO, very subtle

As you can see in the video, this picture is natural light only, with the help of 2 California Sunmovers.

For this picture i set the back-light a stop above the front to get a lightly more dramatic look

Nice job Sebastiana !

And then I thought it would be fun to steal Dirks model Xira for some shots in a more college girl styling

Lions Ice Hockey team

A few weeks ago Koen (picture above) asked me if i could come over to there Ice skating to make some pictures of the guys and the girls from te Lions Ice Skating Hockey team.

I said, okay, let's give it a try, i knew this was not going to be an easy assignment, low level of ambient light with the usual crappy white-balance, lot's of movement, stupid backgrounds and so on.

First i did an evaluation of available ambient light, this gave me ISO 6400 , f:2.8, 1/125th shutter speed, so this would be our base to start from.

I decided to add three speedlights, 2 in the corners and 1 at the side, so this would cover about half of the entire field, i just don't own enough speedlights to light everything up (60 x 30 meters)...

The ice preparing machine made a nice testobject to control my camera setting, i quickly decided that taking light meter readings on the ice was very ... dangerous so i did it on experience, screen and histogram, not the best way but for once i decided to go for it.
As the machine had some big white panels it was easy to see with the highlight clipping warning where thing got out of the sensor's range.

Tha cameraman, Bart "Dude" Henseler, thanks!

In this small video you will see me setting up my small flashes and you will get an idea of the overall conditions, I used the 2 shoot trough umbrella's you see at the end in the video to take the group shot.

This is the safety net we had to photograph trough, well most of the time, safety is very important you know ;-)

So, 3 speedlight @ 1/16th power, 70-200 Vrii f:2.8, ISO 6400, f:2.8 and 1/125 th as the shutterspeed ...

Quick teamshot (24-70mm ISO 1600 1/80th @ f:5.6)

Natachaaa

- Sweet as Candy -

Okay, I was a bit afraid of shooting beauty with candy, i've seen it go bad too much times in the past but I think we did a great job here as a team, the beautiful face was provided by Natacha, the amazing make-up done by Michelle Didden (really great job!) , Cindy Van Dyck provided the candy and did main styling for this shoot!

Some time ago i found these little colorful bows in the HEMA, I thought they would make a good starting point for some beauty portraits

I still need to hone my Low-key skills, this is for me one of the most difficult forms of portrait photography... I'm still looking for a lot of inspiration in the non-nude low-key style.

Wide angle Vs Tele, shallow depth of field

This was going to be a nice winter's day with a lot of sunlight coming from a low angle but the foreseen model came home too late the day before the shoot and she was too tired to get out and do the shoot we had planned... sh*t happens

I decided to go for a walk in the forest and stumbled into this "twisted tree"... a strange appearance, it looks like a giant came by and let all of his forces loose on this tree.

As i was walking with my new 35 f:2 lens (yes, I really like those fixed focals) and photographed it at f:2, it still wouldn't come loose from the background, okay, the Dof is longer with a Wide angle but a wide angle is supposed to give more "depth" in your photo, as i wasn't really happy with the result i decided to take about the same picture with a mild tele lens, the 85mm AF-d 1.8 @ f:2, the contrast is almost the same but the colors came out in a very different way. Again this proved that a photographer needs to know his gear ;-)

Twisted tree with the 35mm f:2 AF-D @ f:2.0

Twisted tree with the 85mm f:1.8 AF-D @ f:2.0

So to set an object loose from the background it's better to use a Tele, big apertures also help


Shooting this star far away we call the sun, I have to say the effect from the Pentax lenses was much better, none of my Nikkor lenses can give me the same star shape that i got from my Pentax 18-55 kitlens

I'll just let you enjoy the rest of this series i made:

Pushed in a litte corner

This series is a bit different from my normal work, i got pushed in a little corner and wanted to leave my safe zone for this once, the ambient light was so beautiful and usable that i immediately decided not the use any flash light for this shoot with the amazing Inge

In the back you can see a big city Skyline ;-)

This is way out of my safe zone, but I liked it nevertheless

And added a bit of "Polaroid" look to these 2

I did some shots with a Hasselblad 500 with a 400ASA color provia film, this is a scan from a small print, it still "feels" a lot different from digital (80mm f:2.8 1/125th)