Maskerade 27-28 November 2010

Fluor paint

Every year there is the Maskerade, this is a big event for bodypainters where they compete in different areas of paint, the organizer is Bert Verstappen (and his family) and he does this with an enormous passion, that’s why I immediately say yes when he asked me if I wanted to judge the competition in 2007 which was the first time I was on the jury of the Maskerade. It was a great experience and we promised to do it again in the future. Due to my schedule however we missed the Maskerade a few times, when I met up with Bert at the Zoom Experience last year we decided to book the date for the Maskerade right away to make sure I could be there, and so it booked, and this weekend it was time for the Maskerade 2010.

Read more

2 Sessions from this weekend

This was a busy week, just the way I love them.
But somehow also some things went wrong, imaging dragging out 2 rangers, a generator and smokemachine to the forest. A beautiful model and a stunning testshot, and then…… the smokemachine explodes… (well ok that sounded better, in reality it just stopped working). Man that’s frustrating but luckily we have photoshop so I managed to shoot a few extra images that I could combine with our testshoot and get something that was acceptable. (see the image later in this post).

I always tell people to test their gear before going to a location but that of course doesn’t work when something breaks down, however you feel rather stupid. The main thing is don’t panic, just say you didn’t like the smoke and continue :), well ok that sometimes works.

As a second part of the session we went inside and did some more standard photos for the models portfolio, I was more than pleased with Petra so I think we will see more of her in the near future.

The next day we had something different planned.
A while ago I got an email from Norina, a very nice looking darkskinned model.
I always tell models that if they want a session in our studio (or location) that they can always send me an email with a nice concept or exclusive clothing, locations etc. As a photographer you always have to keep working at your portfolio and doing that with only commercial jobs will simply not work in most cases. For me that means that app twice a month I will do a TFP session. TFP means Time For Print. With this kind of sessions all parties participate for free, this also means that I really want something that will add something to my portfolio.

Norina send me a moodboard with a very dark fashion atmosphere and to be honest I was hooked from image 1.
Moodboards are of course nice but the main thing for me is to not copy the images but try to give it my own style, luckily that was also the opinion of our MUA and model so we had a deal.

Read more

DIPP associate and Best portfolio 2010

I already blogged a bit about getting the associate level for the DIPP (Dutch Institute of Professional Photography), but there was another surprise for me in store.
During the evening were the certificates for License ship and Associate were given to the photographers (2x Associate 4x License) there also was a price for best portfolio 2010, this is the portfolio the international jury selects as their favorite portfolio. Much to my surprise I could go home with both my certificate for Associate level but also with the award for best portfolio 2010.

Of course this motivates me to push even harder 🙂
Because I just got the pictures today I waited with a blog post about this till now. And yeah like most photographers I hate to be in front of the camera (as you can see 🙂 ), well ok at least I tried to smile.

Some from this weekend

This weekend I started the workshops again after a week of relax time.
We did three sessions on Friday and Saturday from which you can find the results and the videos in this blog post…..

Read more