About technique and more.

Who needs expensive lights

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You know….. sometimes we are so caught up in our work that we forget to think about how things can be different. We as humans are “beasts of habit” meaning that we will figure something out, and if that something works really well for us we will always get back to that. And we photographers… well sorry to say it…. we are also that way.

 

That’s why sometimes it’s so incredibly important to make sure that you do a what I call “hard reset” and don’t get me wrong, I don’t want you guys (and girls) to bang your head against the wall until you pass out and wake up, so please don’t do that. What I do mean is that you should sometimes literally just pull the plug out of your strobes, put everything aside that has anything to do with “studio technique” and get back to the basics. Learn how to “see the light” but most of all “to understand the light”. And there is hardly any better tool to do this than the good old fashioned (and oops indeed it’s old fashioned, we stocked up on some because over here they are not sold anymore in the higher watts) lightbulb.

 

During the glamour workshop I will often grab my lighbulb fixture, it was the most bare bone fixture I could buy, and hang it from a boom stand, tell the students “this is the new setup” and watch how their jaws drop and their expressions go like “the what, the who, are you nuts”….. well yes and no (but you already know that). No really…. a lightbulb when used the right way is one of the most awesome light sources there is. So in this blog post some explanation and images from that simple lightbulb session….

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Don’t try this at home,….. well actually do

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Sometimes the best thing you can do is think…..
Sometimes the best thing you can do is not think…..
Well in short, every situation is different.

 

We as photographers are story tellers, we only have one limitation and that’s that we have to tell the story with one image, or a series of stills. This seems very limiting, however in my opinion it isn’t. As you might know I also do some video next to my photography, and don’t get me wrong I LOVE video, but I think Photography for ME is a stronger story telling medium. Or maybe I’m just lazy 🙂

 

During the workshop last week with Carmen we ended up on a road close to our studio and we did a so called “bare shoot” there, meaning no extra styling, no lights, no nothing…. try to tell the story with just that… nothing. This might sound easy, but trust me it isn’t…. however when you master the technique it’s something that you can really benefit from A LOT.

 

In these cases I always let the student shoot first, and in 99% of the cases they will go low on the ground and make some nice natural light images, well that’s ok. When I shoot I will start with the model in the middle of the road (like they do) and point out that although it’s a nice image, it can be much stronger if you just pose the model on the lines on the road, like this:
Let the model pose a bit compact and crop real tight, and it’s ok…. however when you start working the story it can be so much stronger.

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Give me a smile….. please

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We all know the drill, you shoot a certain look and you’ve done it a million times… so how do you keep it fresh. Well very simple change the expression, pose, angle etc. The following shot I’ve done many times during our glamour workshops, even with the same model. But people loves this setup and it’s a great conversation piece for choosing angles, composition etc. but somehow I always try to do it differently, and today we decided it was time for some fun and shoot the model full out laughing.

Always remember that images can be boring without any expression and be transformed to something completely different with just a little change in expression. So your assignment for this week :-), do the shoots with different expressions 🙂

 

 

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Inspired by Gia

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I think we all sometimes have that moment where you watch a movie, a videoclip or whatever and that something hits you like a brick wall…. whatever you do the image is BURNED in your mind…. this can be a bad thing (oh man I saw some scenes that I wish that didn’t burned into my mind) but in this case it was a positive thing.

 

Gia tells the life story of Gia Marie Carangi a stunning model with a tragic life story.
Somehow Gia has an incredible appeal to me, maybe it’s the way she is portrayed in the movie by Angelina Jolie, but I think it’s everything put together. As many of you know I don’t particularly like the “posed” images, sometimes I do, but most of the time I love movement, passion, speed and “style”. And Gia…. well she had it all and I agree with the idea that she is indeed the first real super model.

 

Now I’ve talked before in the past about being inspired and shooting something that inspires you. However I also strongly believe that there is always something that you have to change, making a 1:1 copy is a great learning tool, but if you want to do something for your portfolio I believe you have to make it “your own”, give it a twist, change it……. now in the movie there is a scene where Gia puts on mens underwear and poses for her boyfriend, this scene has actually nothing that could be considered “flat” or “unrated”. But it stuck in my mind like bubblegum. So when Lisanne was in the studio for a glamour workshop I asked her to bring mens underwear (which in fact she had to borrow from her dad because I wanted the really old fashioned ones), and Lissanne of course delivered.

 

I did not want to copy the scene of course, I wanted to give it some “swung”, some “fashion” but keep it “dated” to that period. Now I’m also a fan of the work of Avedon, Newton etc. and somehow I decided it would be cool to mix everything up and create the following look. Now the images you can see when clicking the link below because I know in some countries they MIGHT be considered “not safe for work” although (as you know by now) I disagree 😀

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