Day 1 Professional imaging

First day of the Professional imaging is always very busy, but this year…. Oh my.. they had to open a few minutes earlier because it was too busy outside, I never heard that before, and I know why… Matt Kloskowski openend the day with a wonderful keynote about compositing where he shot a model and within the hour he created a stunning image with a simple backdrop he shot the day before. And don’t think it took him an hour to work on the image, that went lighting fast, in that hour he explained something about compositing, did the shoot and did the editing of both the background as the model, very cool stuff. If you did not plan on visiting the Professional Imaging, make sure you do, this keynote alone is worth it (well and my demos also of course), I immensely enjoyed it.

After that it was time for my first workshop at the Elinchrom booth.

I used three different models for today, Nadine, Alice and Myrthe.
All three are different so the people who visited several of the workshops (I taught 3 in total and did several small demos) always saw something new. Also in the teaching material I tried to experiment a bit with different topics during the different workshops because it was clear that some people were there for every workshop and doing the same thing over and over is no fun of course.

In short I explained the working of the light meter for incident readings and a quick demonstration about how to measure backgrounds with the reflective readings. For the demos I used the Deep Octa, a small strip and a reflector with grid. With these I showed some one light setups were it was easily to see what happens when you take care of choosing your angles, but also how you can light the background without adding a second strobe.
The most fun was to show our wallpaper stone wall background that looked very fake when shot with the wrong light transform into something that was 100% believable just by choosing the right angle for the light and photographer, this set got the most Aws en Ows from the crowd.

For the second and third set I also added some wind and firecloth as you can see in the next video which gives you a small impression of day 1. Remember that the images I shoot these days and post and the videos are all shot with the iPhone4 and are just for fun, there is no top quality of course.
We are also filming some material with the Canon HF11 (link to the camera I would buy now because the HF11 is not longer delivered) which will be edited next week and will be better quality. Still I hope you enjoy them they are edited very quickly in our hotel room on the iPhone with iMovie.

 

2 replies
  1. Martijn
    Martijn says:

    Hi Frank,

    You are so right: Matt rocked the keynote! Great topic and very fun to watch him do the shoot, retouching and compositing live. That’s actually my wife and I in your picture sitting front row (center of the picture), enjoying Matt’s balancing act… uh… photoshoot.

    We rushed to your first demo, but we were not alone… Same goes for your second demo. Wow… the Foto Flits booth was so crowded, you could have easily filled the Adobe Theater with your demos! 🙂 But I understand you have to work with what you are given and I loved the way you showed how to create stunning images in a tight space. It was very inspirational.

    The vibe at PI2011 was great. I am sure you will have a lot of fun these next 2 days!

    Take care,

    Martijn

  2. Frank Doorhof
    Frank Doorhof says:

    Matt’s hilarious but above all a GREAT instructor, heck he even convinced me last night to do some compositing in the near future and that says a lot because I never wanted to do it, I want to shoot it real or not. So now he got me shooting clouds, structures etc. (yeah thank you Matt).

    The demos and workshops I did were indeed incredibly crowded much more than previous years (I’ve been doing Pro imaging for some years).

    Some people have been trying to get me on the main stage, so who knows 😀 for the moment we don’t have good contacts with Adobe NL which arranges that.

    The whole setup was changed and I’m still in doubt if I like it more or less, I THINK I like the old setup more, but now there is much more room for the exhibitors, which I do like. It also seems there is MUCH more activity than previous years when the Pro Imaging was more a look and static show now I saw a lot of demos, seminars etc. going on so that was fun.

    Today I hope to also have some time to walk around and meet people, yesterday they had to drag me away from the booth to get something to eat and I didn’t even make the restaurant in time because all the people stopped me 😀 but Sunday is of course the most busy day.
    Today it will be more schools, which could draw some attention to our booth. We will have to go till 22:00 tonight so I hope I will find some time to make the video in between sessions.

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