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.
This weekend we were in Belgium for a 2 day demo/workshop series for the Belgium company Servix.
Main attention for me during the demos and workshops were the Elinchrom, Lastolite (backgrounds), Sekonic and of course Phase One products.
Today a small BTS video from day 1.
Video by : Annewiek Doorhof
Editing by : Frank Doorhof
And one of the results from day 1
Including arms in a shot can be a problem, so some people just give the advise to not include them… well that’s too easy.
Let’s look at some tips that I often share during the workshops.
Images are shot with a Beautydish with grid and the Lensbaby 80mm tilt lens.
In my opinion you always should try to include both arms.
In this shot I only included one, and although I like the shot… well there’s something missing.
Also her elbow is on the absolute limit of what I find acceptable, if she would have moved it a bit more towards the left (image left) you would not see the upper arm and that gives a “weird” effect for me. Now I also have to add that all these rules are great, but if you “hit” that perfect image and the arm is a bit…. or the face is a bit ….. well in the end it’s all about the emotion a picture gives you, I have several images in my portfolio that are far from perfect (the perfect image actually doesn’t exist I think) but just gave me the emotion I wanted. So just take these tips as guidelines, to know the rules is also to know when breaking them (or better accepting a technical “error” for emotional perfection)
Last week it was the finale of the big CameraNU.nl 10 year event, a period in which one of the largest camerastore from the Netherlands celebrated their 10th year anniversary.
I’ve know them for a long time, even a bit before the official beginning so to say, so it was cool to be asked to do a seminar and live shoot during the opening of their “toppers weekend” with several speakers, today I share some images I shot during that event. Please do take not that the situation was not ideal so don’t judge these images as portfolio images, it’s just to give you an idea of the results we get during an event like this and for the fun of sharing 🙂
I started out with a seminar on the importance of styling and story telling within a photoshoot. After that it was time for Marie to do some portraits with me, we worked our way up from the boring portrait with flat light to more expression, like this example.
Shooting on location is still one of the best things to do, however not everyone will have the budget to buy into 2 systems, one for the studio and one for on location. In our studio we use a mix of Elinchrom units in the studio and 2 Elinchrom Rangers and a Quadra for the location work, but I have to be honest it’s quite an investment of course, especially when you don’t shoot on location for your work (get paid) or if you just shoot on location a few times. In the past there have been some solutions to get your “studio” strobes working on location but I have to be honest that I never really was truly excited about them, well that has changed. Let me start with how this story evolved…..
I love to use smoke on location, to get the smoke working we always bring a Kipor gas generator which works very well, and it can even power your strobes (make sure you get a clear Sinus version because otherwise it will fry your strobes) but let’s be honest it’s noisy and especially in locations where there are houses close by and you shoot at night well let’s say that it’s better to have something silent, so I started researching a portable accupack to power my smoke machine. Very soon I ended up with the company Innovatronix, in the past I already used one of their battery powered packs and sold it when I switched to rangers, at that point it was an ok solution but it was not perfect (far from), the guys at Innovatronix were so kind to send me their XT-3 for a review to see if it worked on the smoke machines and to let me play with it, what follows is purely my opinion so don’t read it as an in depth look at the system, just my working experience with it.
![xt3 230v50hz 300x300 schuko [a]5](https://frankdoorhof.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/xt3-230v50hz-300x300-schuko-a5.jpg)
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