Elinchrom meets a new dimension in lighting Photographers play with light, but above all we play with time. Actually for me photography is freezing a unique moment that will never happen again in the exact that same way. In the studio we basically have two ways to use light. The first one is continuous light, the second is with strobes. You can also use both at the same time or mix them. Supporters of continuous light talk about: What you see is what you get. The strobe supporters say: The power of strobes allows us to create stunning freezing action shots. I'm a supporter of the second group. Don't get me wrong, I also often work with continuous light, but with continuous light I don't have the possibility to do a day to night shot with the bright sun, freezing the moment and I cannot play with depth of field (especially creating a deep depth of field) when shooting my medium format camera.

No the real reason I often only use one light is the simple fact that it just does the trick, I love the more darker looking images sometimes and let's be honest when you use one light with for example a grid you are already half way there. The other reason is also a bit "because it's easy" you don't have to drag around a lot of lights, setups are very fast and the results are always great without the chance of double shadows etc. However... and I really want to make this clear, I'm not a 1 light kind of guy, on the contrary I love using multiple light sources to really add mood to a location, pin point the model with one and add the rest with a second (or third), add some accents where I want them, add a splash of color and sometimes.... well I bought a lot of lights and Annewiek wants me to use them at least sometimes (Ok that was a joke.... or was it). Now most people somehow struggle with the use of one light, so today a small sample about how you can learn to master your one light. For this setup I used one striplight with a grid (shot during the workshops in Eersel for Studio76 with Nadine as my model).

Often you hear the question "what's the best lens for...." In my opinion there is not really a best allround lens.... it all depends on creativity, what you want and what you need. In model photography often wide angles are labeled as "not done" and I can understand this, a wide angle distorts the image (if you're not careful) and it's not a lens that will be great for model separation from the background.

Light is our language, it's what we use to tell our stories..... Now there is always a lot of debate about which lights to use, what brand, what quality, what soft box etc. In reality however light can be used from almost everything, as long as you understand what it does and how it behaves you can actually create the looks you want with.... well even a simple lightbulb.

You've asked for it... so you get it. People have asked us time…

Last week I was at the SWPP in London with Nadine and Annewiek. During the SWPP I taught several seminars for the SWPP but was also of course active on the Elinchrom booth for our friends from the flash centre. Today some images from the booth.