About technique and more.

Composition, creativity etc. Part II

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Today the second part in this series about creative and composition.

 

I’m a strong advocate for making the composition in the camera, meaning I don’t believe you should crop later in Photoshop. There are of course exceptions but when you have the chance I think you should shoot the image the way you want it to be in the end results. During the Scott Kelby seminar in Amsterdam I shot several images from Corine and explained the difference between shooting in the portrait mode and landscape mode. For me personally the landscape modes creates much more interesting images and draw the viewer more into the image. However after the seminar I did receive a mail from one of the participants asking me why I threw away so many pixels and did not shoot my images with the model full screen, so let me explain …..
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Composition, creativity etc. Part I

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One of the questions that are asked a lot, and hardly ever answered is about composition and creativity.
The reason why there is little to no attention to it can be explained rather simple, it’s something that’s not easy to explain. In my workshops I always have a lot of information about composition and creativity because I strongly believe that it lies in those areas where a standard snapshot is transformed into a story, and in reality we are of course story tellers. However I also feel that I can explain technical stuff to everyone, but “seeing” is something completely different. In other words, everyone will understand that if you press the shutter an image is captures, however not everyone will see the image the way it will be interesting. So today some attention to this part of photography.
The coming days/weeks (depending on your responses) I will be posting several blog posts with sample images all discussing this topic. Feel free to ask questions or add images to the threads, this way I can find examples and explain the techniques behind them.

 

Do remember that this is my personal vision, with creative, humor etc. it’s always very person related, so don’t take everything as being the 100% truth, opinions will vary (and good that they do) however I hope that there will be a lot of elements that will help you improve your own work.

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About the light meter in a quick overview

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On August 12th I joined Scott Kelby during his great “Light it, Shoot it, Retouch it” tour.
If you didn’t already see it, and it’s close to you, make sure you check it out… You’ll love it.
Anyway, during my piece of the seminar I choose to do the high contrast light setup using a deep octa and strip light, during the setup I of course also talked about the use of a light meter and explained some of the theory behind it, however after the seminar I got so many questions from people who never used a meter to people who had problems using one that I decided to dedicate a blog post to it, because really honest… using a meter is like the simplest thing you can do within photography.

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Calibrating the Light meter, some quick notes

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Somehow this topic always raises a lot of questions so I’ve decided to dedicate another blog post on it.
In this blog post I will give you some pointers and tips how to calibrate the light meter.

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