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.

Working with portrait or landscape mode

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Composition is one of the things that is always very important in a shoot, but what is the perfect composition?
Well to be honest… there is no perfect composition.
Of course there are those “rules” like the rule of thirds but let’s be honest they just give you a “this will work” general rule of tumb, but it’s often not the most interesting shot possible. In my opinion it’s incredibly important to play with the way you shoot.

 

Take for example these two shots.
One is shot in the so called portrait mode.
It draws all the attention to the model and to be honest it looks pretty nice.

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However as soon as you change to landscape mode for me the whole image gets way more interesting.

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Shooting through materials….

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One of the things I absolutely love to do is using materials to control my lights in ways that are not “standard”.
You can of course use a metal sheet with holes to create some nice patterns, however if you make the holes “small” enough you can use it to place the model behind it and the reflection of the material will actually bounce back to the model.

 

In this case I used one strobe with a red gel and one standard strobe just for fill in.
Model : Lenaa.

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Mixing strobes with tungsten

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There will be that moment where you have to mix two different light sources in a scene.
Now normally it’s common to gel the strobes to match the color temperature of the other light source, but sometimes it can be very interesting to keep the color temperature different.

 

In this shot (shot during a glamour workshop) I shot our model Lenaa on the chair and lit her with the 70cm deep octa and a custom grid from Honeycombgrids the tungsten lights on the back are in fact 100W bulbs. I made sure that the light sources didn’t really “overlap” but that the tungsten had free play on the background, this way the tungsten lights look really nice and warm and it gives a nice glow to the background. The suitcases gives the shot some extra dimension.

 

When shooting something like this, do make sure that you put the strobes on the LOWEST possible power setting, this way you can actually see the tungsten lights. If you meter everything on 1/125 you can still open up more to let in more of the tungsten bulbs (1/60 or even 1/30). Always remember that the aperture in these cases control the strobe and the shutter speed the tungsten lights.

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Using an old window as a prop

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I know a lot of photographers are looking for interesting things to “spice” up a shoot.
This can be a chair, a guitar etc….. but also think even more simple, what about an old window ?

 

We got this window from the local junkyard for little and it has proved to be an amazing prop that can be used in many different ways, this time we put our model Lenaa behind it, sprayed some water on the window and used a strobe from the back to get the final image you see here (shot during a glamour workshop).

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