My blog, although I don’t see myself as a blogger but as a Photographer I will try to blog some interesting material during the weeks.
Expect at least 2 updates a week.

Tip about posing and motion

Often people think that when you shoot an image you have to “pose” the model, and although this is true in some cases, for me it often works best to let the model pose “freely” let her/him find the poses that are comfortable and from there on I will slightly adjust the pose to make it “work” for me.
Adding motion brings in a whole new dimension, don’t let the model jump, but ask her to very slightly move her body away from the floor (yeah I know it sounds weird) this will not only give her/him a good laugh but also actually says exactly what she/he has to do.
Now if the model has a problem with the mouth (often it can be a bit “weird”) tell them to scream (without making sound) or shout “Shabang” (LOL) this will help enormously with relaxing the mouth or in other words not making it look funky.

 

An extra benefit of the small “jumps” is that it can also be done with strobes that have a slightly slower flash duration or if the model is wearing high-heels, because trust me… you don’t want a model to jump high with high-heels…. well actually the jump is not the problem but the coming down 😀

 

Good luck.
Manon October 3 2014 0874

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Tip for light meters and ambient light

Often I get messages from people that their light meter is not reliable outside, inside no problem but outside…..
Do always remember that outside there is also ambient light.

Let’s say you have a small flash system (the system flashes like Canon/Nikon/Sony) and your shooting full manual and get a reading of F5.6 inside, now when you go outside a day later and you get F11 don’t expect that the strobe is actually on F11, it could very well be that the strobe is outputting only F8 or lower.

8 Juni 2014 Marie 0066 1

The meter works very simple
When you press the button to meter in strobe mode (the lighting bolt) it will actually wait for a pulse and start metering, now the pulse from the strobe is registered of course and the meter does it’s work BUT if the ambient light (on the giving shutter speed) is higher than the strobe the meter will of course give you the F stop for the ambient light (since it overpowers the strobe).
So the next time you’re outside and want to check if your strobe is registering, or if you suspect a problem…. first set the strobe on the lowest setting and meter, now start raising the strobe and if the meter value doesn’t change you know you’re metering ambient (or in other words, ambient is overpowering the strobe).

 

So don’t bash the meter, understand how it works 😀

now let’s look at some solutions….

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Photokina Photowalk for X-rite

During one evening at Photokina I hosted a small photo walk for X-rite.
We had an awesome group so I hardly got into shooting myself 😀
But here are some images that I think are fun for the blog to share.

Photokina 2014  (59 of 307)_DxO

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Photokina Elinchrom


The first 2 days at Photokina I was asked to demo at the Elinchrom booth.
And that was more than just fun for the simple reason that Elinchrom had their new FS30 modifier (Fresnel) on the booth, so of course I needed to play with that one (can’t wait to get one myself).

 

Today on the blog some images from the Elinchrom demos.

Marina Day 1 September 16 2014 0002

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