Working with your lights and more PtI

Now one of the things I always try to teach during seminars and demos is creativity.
Now creativity is actually not something that you can easily “catch” in a few words or a simple description, it’s something that I always call “that inner thought process/vision”. Or in other words it’s that thing that makes you go “wow” if you see something.

 

Now everything is done of course now a days, it’s almost impossible to do something that is really and utterly unique, however I still think that you can give certain themes and elements your own personal twist, so in this 2 part blogpost I combine two things, you will probably already have (although maybe not a ring flash, but any flash will do), to create something special.

 

Let’s first start out with the light itself.
Light is what we use to “paint” with, but often we don’t see the light sources in the images right?
Well what will happen if we do?
During the SWPP in London we decided that it would be nice to play around with the Elinchrom ringflash and let our model (Maisy) act with the light source, in other words let her control her own light. The outcome of these kind of shots is always a bit hard to predict because the model actually is in control and the only thing you (as photographer) can do is coach the model and hope that everything works out fine. Metering the light is also a problem because the distance will change often and seeing the fact that the light source is pretty close to the model it’s often wise to just expose for the closest possible position of the light and change the rest in Photoshop, not something I would normally advocate but in this case it’s the best solution (if not the only one).

 

Now how does it look?
Well here are some examples, and do read on tomorrow in Part II because we’re not done yet.

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Guest blog Iden Ford

Today a guestblogger on the blog, and for today it’s photographer Iden Ford, and I think you’re gonna love his views.

 

Toronto, Canada, December 6, 2012.

 

People often ask me who my influences are in Photography, expecting me to list the names of photographers who were around 30 – 50 years ago, like Irving Penn and Mapplethorpe and Leibowitz, and yes they were amazing in their day, Annie is still going strong and making great photos and all are important in the artistic growth of our profession, but the truth is that I am personally more inspired by the current crop of greats. Is this sacrilegious? We all came from those who preceded us in our chosen field but I also get more from watching the old noir films from the 40’s. Lots of shadows and black and white. Aha…Frank’s voice is echoing in my brain….”don’t be afraid of shadows.” Truth is I love shadows….more on this later.

 

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Collection SWPP with Maisy

During the SWPP show last week my model during the demos was no one less than Maisy James, besided modelling she is also active as a designer, actress and does some TV work, a very multitalented person so to say, and I have to add a delight to work with. I already showed you the results from day 1, so today it’s time for day 2 and 3 and I could easily spend two blogposts to the images seeing the amount of keepers I got from Maisy but I decided to do it all at once.
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Now normally during trade-shows you maybe keep 1-2 shots per day but with Maisy it was a bit of a problem to choose just 1-2 because I loved them all, this is the reason why we also booked her for the upcoming Focus on Imaging show and probably my UK tour, which I will do in May and will visit the cities London, Birmingham and Edinburgh.

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New images Esther

Today some new images from Esther, shot during the workshop this weekend.

 

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