City light guestblog

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Today a very interesting guestblog about shooting cities.
I’m sure you gonna love this one.

City Light
First of all, I feel very priviliged to be given the opportunity to write this guest blog at Franks’ website. Thanks a lot!

 

All visitors of this website will know that photography is about the Quest for The Light. When thinking about cities, your best chances for finding The Light are dawn and dusk. Each with their own character: dawn for the best available natural light, and dusk for the often astonishing combination of city lights against a dark blue, red, or pink sky. I will now focus on dawn in cities.

 

I love wandering around in big cities, as there are always so many objects to capture creatively. Preferably, I’ll do that very early. Temperatures are nice in warm summers, not too many people around, and quite a chance to find The Light. I would like to share some of my learnings of my photo safaris.

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Styling by Nadine

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Sometimes as a photographer (or any other creative profession) you find people that are just plain awesome, they help you develop as a creative person and push you forward to get better results. A few years ago a model named Nadine started modeling for me and at one point we really felt that connection you sometimes have. A few years later she made me a promise “Frank, every shoot from now on I will improve and surprise you”, well she already did before that so I wondered how long she would keep this up..
And if you have been reading this blog for some time you already know the answer…. she is still keeping it up, in fact Nadine is growing into a (in my opinion) great stylist. So it’s no real surprise that today she is joining the blog as a guest blogger about…. styling.
Why styling?
Styling can make or break a shoot. A model can be absolutely stunning, which makes every shot successful, even if it’s styled pretty basic. But if the model has guts and the styling is top-knotch then everyone can be a model. Even if you’re one of those absolutely stunning models, after 5000 photo’s it does get boring.
Of course you will always have enough photographers that will demand a perfectly beautiful model, especially for glamour and lingerie work. In that case you usually won’t need and extreme styling effort. But if we’re talking about modelphotography in general then you (as a photographer) would usually want to see a form of creativity, something that sticks, something with a story.

Why you should trust the meter

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After my workshops a lot of students switch to the use of a light meter.
They see how quick it is to setup the lights, meter the background, make sure there is detail in whites or blacks and much much more but that’s “only” part of the story. Let me tell you two stories that are real life stories and will show you a different side of why to use a meter….

 

The workshop story
A while ago I taught a workshop for a group of professional photographers (always a tough crowd), most of them (to my surprise) did not use a meter. After my story about why to use a meter and telling them that it was really a great tool to make sure you get what you want it was time for my photoshoot. Now believe it or not but the first shot I took was terrible, whites were all blown, blacks were blocked up and it was just plain terrible….. Some of the people in the crowd were a bit like “yeah, sure that’s why we don’t use a meter”, and some asked “ok, so now you’re gonna tweak the lights, right ?”

 

I surprised I think the whole crowd when I did not change anything on the lights but asked for the remote of the projector. In a few seconds I changed the brightness and contrast settings and the image looked the way I intended, now I hear you think “yeah sure, that’s not the way to do it”, well actually they also asked me about that (of course), so to prove my point I reset the projector and showed a grayscale 10 step bar. On the non adjusted settings there were only a few bars visible. And after setting the brightness and contrast all bars were shown, and also the image was showing up correctly.

 

The Glyn Dewis lens story
During the first “Frank Doorhof and Friends” workshop there was a small problem with one of the light setups.
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New images Simone

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Some images shot during the workshop I from last week.
Model : Simone.

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