21 September 2010 Photokina Day 1

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Today it was the time for the first day of Photokina. For me Photokina is something amazing, it’s huge, everyone is there and you get all the news and the new introductions in one place. It’s buzzing with activity, contacts, great photographers and lots and lots of toys….(that’s why I take my wife with me :D).

This Photokina we had Leaf with the 80MP AptusII-12 which I already mentioned, but also Elinchrom had some nice new additions. As you can see in the backstage video at the end of this post you can see the one that really got my attention, the focussing flash tube in the new Ranger heads. It’s gives you some nice new possibilities to really shape your light just that bit further. There will also be some new heads for the powerpacks by the way and some smaller things, the 1.50mtr indirect octa (high on my wish list) is also here and will probably be available in the coming months.

Today I also did some shots with the Phase one vertical grip with build in Profoto Air trigger, to be honest I will probably never use the trigger because I’m using the Elinchrom skyports, but the grip itself will be added to my camera very soon. It makes the camera a lot better ergonomically plus it balances more nicely, it runs on the Leaf accus AND normal batteries and you can switch so when your accupack dies you can switch to the AA batteries and keep on shooting, but maybe most importantly with the grip you can now do the firmware upgrades yourself.

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20 September 2010, pre-day 1 Photokina 2010

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Today we arrived in Koln for the Photokina.

I will be at the Profot booth for the next three days doing some demos and mini workshops for Elinchrom and Leaf, so feel free to drop by and say hi. Being there the pre-opening day is always a weird experience, everything is still in the buildup stages and what looks so nice the following days is now just rubbish and piles of cardboard and paper etc. knowing that just in a few hours everything will be done and neat and nice is just almost like a miracle.

Leaf already had some great news, they are releasing the AptusII 12, a full frame 80MP digital back, yes you read that correctly full frame 80MP’s wow that’s a lot of detail, I think you can see the DNA of the model with a close up, would love to play around with that one 🙂

Here is some information on this great new digital back from Leaf…..http://www.leaf-photography.com/products_aptus212.asp

And some new lenses from Schneider http://www.captureintegration.com/2010/09/19/three-other-new-schneider-lenses/

But there will be much more of course, also from Elinchrom………… I think 😀
Looking forward to meeting up with Joe McNally and see his presentation, but there is so much more going on, I always say when vikings die they go to the walhalla, when photographers die they will probably go the Photokina…. but seeing the size of the photokina you could die if you have to see everything in one day, pffff it’s HUGE. glad we have some parking spaces next to our hall so we don’t have to rush in the morning.

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Workshop Belgium day 2 EL PASO September 18th 2010

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On September 18th it was time for the workshop in El Paso.
El Paso is a small western town (well actually more a street) close to the Dutch border in Belgium. When Johnny asked me if I would like to teach part of the workshop there my response was without hesitation YES. Let’s be honest what is more inspiring than teaching a workshop or doing a photoshoot in a street that is doubling as a filmset…… I know not much.

The only think we needed was good weather, and that was going to be a problem, the weather forecast was Rain, Rain, Rain and then some Rain. However I don’t know how it always play out but always during workshops I’m lucky as it seems, and that day was no exception. In the morning it looked really bad but the more we got to El Paso the weather was looking better (and it was a 15 minute drive), during the day itself it cleared up so much that it could almost be regarded as a cool summers day. In total we only had some slight rain for maybe 10-15 minutes but not even enough to stop the shoots.

So how does a workshop like this look ?

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Day 1 of the Belgium workshops September 17th

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A while ago Johnny van Strijdonck approached me if I would be interested in teaching a two day workshop in Belgium. And because I love to do these location workshops I said yes of course, however (as always) I wanted a nice location, well Johnny delivered 😀
He arranged for the second day to be shot in “El Paso” a western town (street) close to the Dutch border in Belgium. Because I wanted to use the second day to the max I decided to spend the first day only on theory and showing some simple outside setups as discussed in the theory part, but because I choose Nadine as model I could have known that there would be no simple shots, as usual Nadine surprised us all with some amazing outfits and add her posing and expressions with it and you can magically transform even a simple setup into something stunning……

One tip for people planning to go somewhere with a lot of gear to teach….. Make sure you ask if the conference room is on ground level or reachable by elevator. As you might have guessed by now, this one was not and we had to carry a lot of gear two stories high pffffff.

The first day however we did need all the gear for the practice part and you don’t leave that kind of gear in the car overnight.
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