Some more tips from a workshop

Today some more images and tips from the workshop I did last week with Susanne.

I love to play with perspective.
During the workshops it’s fun to see some people looking surprised when they see the difference between an image shot on 100mm and one shot on 200mm. I mostly use a pose like this for the example because you can easily see that the hand with a 200mm will be much smaller than the same hand/pose with the 100mm. Using a wider lens will “stretch” the look of the image and when used creatively you can really have some fun with it.

However using longer lenses also has a very distinct advantage when working in the studio. You will probably have had those days where you run out of background, somehow the model just doesn’t fit on it, and whatever you try with the position it didn’t fit… well probably the solution was much easier, just use a longer lens and move yourself backwards. By using the longer lens you will narrow your field of view and the nice advantage of this is that the model will fit on the background. This is also one of the reason why I always advise to build your studio with a lot of length if possible and when you mount your backgrounds make sure you can move back as far as possible when shooting. You will see that just a few steps will make a huge difference.

When you learn to control your light one of the most fun things is to start playing with lens flares. I just love the “milky” look of the shadows when you get the lens flare in the position you want it. A lot of people think when they hear “lens flare” about the reflections we all know from movies like cars, and although that can indeed happen (and also can be fun) what I mean is more the “infection” in the shadows that you can see when you place your light source just out of sight of the camera when looking through the viewfinder. removing your sun hood can have a great impact in this case… normally I will always advise to keep it up to fight this effect (even in the studio) however for these shots remove it… also using lesser quality lenses will have a huge impact on the achieved effect, worse is actually better in this case.