Follow the white rabbit

Steffi, MUA Evelien Van Tigghel

Just follow the white rabbit, crazy stuff is sure to happen :-)

Most people are pretty sure that my pictures are almost unprocessed, don't know why, maybe they look to natural? But i don't really care what people think, i just follow what i feel is right for me, commercial or not i really don't care, just shoot what you are comfortable with,  i've done it now for many years ;-)

But unprocessed, they are not.

This is to give you a little idea of what i look at during post:

It doesn't always come out, during post i can change my mind and i decided to add a bunch of warmth to this one

let's go on with the rest of the shoot:

We went in the car park and tried out some more out of the box stuff, just let go of everything you know and go with the flow ...

3 girls and a couch

3 Girls (Sandro, Clea, Sarah), 1 amazing stylist (Glen Franssen) and a great Make-up Artist (Sybille De Beuckelaer) and a couch...

I'm not gonna go very deep in the lighting setup, it's pretty easy, ring flash with beauty dish = on axis light at his best :-)

body Curves (NSFW)

I love skin, real skin, perfect skin, unclothed skin, skin is amazing...

Made during one of our Workshops where we go into a deeper approach of controlling light...

One more after the jump (NSFW!!)

The Nikon dudes.

No really, what is wrong with the Nikon dudes, "Dark to see the logic" would be the words of master Yoda...

I understand that the earthquake, Tsunami and flooding in Thailand caused some problems and delayed the arrival of the nikon D800, but we had great cameras at our disposal for some years, like the D300(s), D700, D3, D3s, D3x,... so it was no problem waiting for the upgrade (not for me anyway)

But a few months ago things started moving, oh-oh-oh big Nikon announcement !!

Nikon D800, D800e and the D4 are announced, D800 with 36Mpix, wow! Nikon D4, the new low-light king, nice job Nikon!

But for me what follows is the weird and illogical part :

I think i can say that Wi-Fi has become a pretty well established standard over the last years, hardware and drivers readily available, to prove this 99% of every laptop, notebook, smart-phone, tablet, ... has on-board Wi-fi and I've seen the chips, they are small, the antenna is another question.

Now the D800 has no networking onboard, if you want to connect it trough Wi-Fi wireless connection you have to purchase the (older) Nikon Wt-4(a), extra cost of about €700 and it's bulky


The D4 has an Ethernet connection, very nice Nikon but if you want to use it trough Wi-Fi, Nikon has the new Wt-5a for you, extra cost about €800, good morning to you sir ...

So if you buy like a D4 and a D800 you got to buy both wireless transmitters because they are not compatible...

But ok, the Wt5 is going to be the new standard? It's smaller and probably faster, so that's a good thing!

( The fact that the D800 uses the older Wt-4 solution proves that this camera should have been released at least 6 month earlier, if it was developed by the same team as the D-4 it would also make use of the newer Wt-5 )

And than a few days ago Nikon announced their new entry-level Dslr, the Nikon D3200.

Oh yes and they did it again... the Nikon D3200 can be connected by Wi-Fi using an EXTERNAL connector, wtf? And logic would assume that it's going to be compatible with the rest, but no, again it's a new design, the Wu-1a, sold for about €50.

I guess the dudes in Sendai just think "oh those clazy plofessional photoglaphels make enough money to spend mole on geal"

Wtf, logic this Mr Spock!

upgrading co$ts

After working for 3 years on the same Windows based system i finally decided to upgrade my system and went for an "Apple".

My first idea was to go for a MacBook pro because i wanted a system i could move to the studio for tethered shooting, after doing some research i found that the MacBook screens are not IPS based technology (almost no laptop has an IPS screen), so if i wanted to get the most out of it i had to buy an additional screen like an Eizo or something = additional costs + more cumbersome setup but easy if i wanted to take the MacBook only..

My second idea was to go for an iMac 21'5 and this is what i finally bought, I ordered a big carrying case at Bigsoso to take the system with me between my working place and the studio, maybe i'll add a MacBook pro next year or so, but for now i got a pretty good solution that went easy on my bank account. (Well easy...)

But (there's always a but) at the studio i used to work tethered on my Windows Machine, for this i bought 2 simple 3meter long USB cables that i connected together (one cable was male -female, second cable was male - male, usb B ).

A perfect 6 meter long connection between the Windows computer with Lightroom and my Nikon D700 :-)

So i tried the same, 2x3m USB cable between the iMAC and the D700 = no connection

hmmm... maybe i should add a powered USB hub?

So i tried = iMac -> powered USB hub -> 2x3m USB cable -> D700 = no connection

hmmm... €20,00 spend on a useless USB hub...

So i tried = iMac -> 1x3m USB cable  -> original Nikon USB cable -> = Hallelujah! Connected, but only a working radius of 4 meter :-(

Then i tried connecting this to the USB connector in the Mac Keyboard to win 0,5m but this again resulted in a "no connection".

I'll try using an active USB cable in a future setup but thought i'll put this online, maybe it's useful for somebody or maybe somebody can explain me why the 6meter solution works on a Windows machine but not on the iMac machine ...

EDIT:

I received a 10 meter active USB cable, works like a charm on the Windows PC, but on the iMAC i can not make a connection, the camera is detected by the system as you can see here :

Edit 2. (18-April-2012)

I was in contact with TetherTools.com about this problem and according to their experiences one should never attempt to use passive USB cables longer than 5 meters on the iMAC.

I ordered pretty expensive USB 3.0 cables, 2 x 16 ft with 2 activators, these shoud do the trick for the D700 and the D800.

At this moment i'm pretty sure my next laptop will not be a Macbook but probably a simple Windows machine with USB 3.0 support, time will tell...

Edit 3 (06-June-2012)

Today I received 2 brand new USB3.0 gold plated active cables from Tethertools.com

1)
Imac <-> usb 2.0 port <-> nikon usb 2.0 cable <-> Nikon D700

Import Works
Tethering Works

2)
Imac <-> usb 2.0 port <-> Tethertools 5meter USB 3.0 cable <-> nikon usb 2.0 cable <-> Nikon D700

Import Works
Tethering Works

3)
Imac <-> usb 2.0 port <-> Tethertools 5meter USB 3.0 cable <-> Tethertools 5meter USB 3.0 cable <-> nikon usb 2.0 cable <-> Nikon D700

No Camera detected

4)
Imac <-> usb 2.0 port <-> nikon usb 2.0 cable <-> Nikon D800e

Import Works
Tethering not yet supported bij Adobe Lightroom

5)
Imac <-> usb 2.0 port <-> Tethertools 5meter USB 3.0 cable <-> nikon usb 2.0 cable <-> Nikon D800e

Import = Camera appears for 1 or 2 seconds in the Lightroom interface and than it disappears = No Camera detected (very weird)
Tethering not yet supported bij Adobe Lightroom

6)
Imac <-> usb 2.0 port <-> Tethertools 5meter USB 3.0cable <-> Tethertools 5meter USB 3.0 cable <-> nikon usb 2.0 cable <-> Nikon D800e

No Camera detected



To be continued ...

Kelly (partly NSFW)

This is Mission #1 part 2 "Thy Shall only use available light, again"

It was such a nice warm en sunny day, the light was just perfect for what we had in mind but the problem was that our chosen location was not available because of some festivities.. So: change of plans and improvisation @100%

One thing about this shoot was easy, the styling! Kelly agreed to pose nude for me and i have to say her body made my job easy. Images are out of cam, just pumped up the saturation a bit and shot on the cloudy white balance to warm up the skintones.

NSFW warning if you take the read more jump :

The more you photograph the more you realize it's not easy. It's not easy to make "wow" pictures every time, it's not easy getting what you thought you should get, it's not easy dealing with light that sucks, but the most difficult thing is growing, growing in what you do, getting better at it.



So to grow sometimes you have to take a step back and try to look at things from a different angle and therefore I assigned myself a mission!



Mission #1 "Thy shall only use available light"



This Lady was very helpful and lend me some of her precious time to go out on a photo-shoot from which we did not know the outcome and I have to say that at first I was not pleased with the results but I've taking enough peace with it to share them with you and add my thoughts about this Mission.

Please keep in mind: we had no Makeup-artist and there is no retouch on the pictures, I only used the D700 with the 85mm f:1.4 lens.

The day started out sunny, then we got a little bit of rain and too end with some beautiful clouds in the sky ( I love looking at clouds)

The Sun as a light source: it's not too bad when the angle is low (less than 30°) and you can position your subject looking straight in the direction of the sun (to steep angles like 45 of 60 will result in ugly shadows and probably too much contrast for the sensor to deal with in an elegant way)


The Clouds as a light source: if the clouds are too equal, the light sucks, really, there's no contrast making everything evenly lit, it's boring and gray, so you have to look for natural elements that will force light to take a direction, an opening in a row of trees could be a perfect example, but still you have to look out that not too much light is coming in from right above because this will cast shadows in the eye sockets, under the nose and the chin, also you will probably have to much light in the bridge of the nose and the forehead.

Look, it's my shadow :-p

The trick is too look out for directional light and to place yourself and your subject accordingly, the directional light is the same as the light coming from a soft-box but far less consistent. If the quality of the light allows it I found that placing the light source at 5 to 15 degrees behind you works best (working with the direction of the light) everything behind your subject will normally be lit in the range of your sensor, some white clouds might be a bit overexposed nonetheless

I wonder what could be Mission #2...