Shooting on location with Marie

Today some new images from Marie.
These were shot during a 1:2 workshop with our friends from Armee design (the “guru” who designed the leaders for our webpodcast “The DOORhof is always open”). All images were shot on location.

One of the things I love to do is include a lot of the surrounding area when shooting on location. A lot of photographers will somehow get into the “close up mode” whenever they shoot on location, resulting in images shot on the most beautiful locations which in fact could have been shot in not so beautiful locations, or even the studio or set. So when you’re on location always try to also show some of the area.

Using a good composition, and leading lines can be an incredible aid to get an image to “talk” to your viewers, but takes some practice, and sometimes (well actually a lot of times) it happens that I shoot something on location and think “WOW” and when I look on the computer back in the studio think “what was I thinking” the process of seeing compositions is a long one and you will never nail every shot, but when you start out try to focus on repeating patterns, leading lines and don’t over pose the model. If you look at the first image in this blog post you see a good example of what I mean. The road, the trees and the pose of the model all work for me to make the shot stronger. But in fact it’s a very simple setup and shot.

But don’t forget the close ups of course, because they can really rock….. 😀

The next shot was shot in two stages.
Marie was shot in the studio, and the landscape was shot on location.
Now you might wonder why I did not shoot it at the moment in the field, well…. one of the questions the students asked me was to do a composite, and because I wanted to show my think process I did it this way.

Now you do have to realize that my composites are not intended to look real, I love the more surreal look with composites, because my motto is still “why fake it when you can create it” 😀 The way I try to shoot the composites is to app the same focal length and angle. In Photoshop it’s after that a simple fact of adding the two together (well simple… you know what I mean with CS5-6 it’s not a lot of work) and colorbalance the shots to fit and of course play with the DOF.