About technique and more.

Nature photowalk

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As you might know there is one thing I love to do besides photography and that is teach.
In our studio in Emmeloord I teach approximately two workshops each week, and they all have the theme “model photography”. So much to my surprise I got a call a few weeks ago from a company organizing the yearly “look in Flevoland” day. On these days our local areas of interest are shown to people and there is a lot of extra activity like workshops cooking, Wubbo Ockels was telling people about energy/space etc., and much more. One of the activities for Almere would be a nature photowalk/workshop were people were guided through nature and inspired to shoot nature in a different way than just shooting it like a snap shot.

At first I was a little in doubt if I would be the right person but because the walks were just an hour and aimed at the beginning photographers I thought “why not”. As some of you might know I once started out with a lot of nature shooting, I loved shooting birds and landscapes so for me it was also a little bit back to the roots. Although I have to add that I see myself as a mediocre nature photographer, however explaining people how the camera works and showing them how to see differently that is something that is universal for photography.

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Wanna see Studio FD ?

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A lot of people ask us if we want to show how our studio looks.
Well to be honest that’s difficult because it changes a lot, but we decided to make a small impression from how it looks now and give you some measurements and gear guide information.

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Critique day results

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On Monday I asked people on twitter if they wanted to tweet an image for critique by DM.
The responses were more than expected so I guess we’ll do that again.
When I saw some of the images I thought I could not just let them be part of twitter alone and disappear after that, so I decided to ask a few photographers to send their image to me with a small description to be featured on my blog.
This is that post.
Feel free to comment, share or ask questions, the photographers will be online also and if they want they can answer your questions.

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First workshop Small Flash

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As you might have figured out by now I love to work with light, but I’m also a photographer that strongly believes that a setup should be measured and stable, meaning that you can deliver a system that works over and over again regardless of your own position, composition etc. I mainly work with studio/location strobes separate from the camera which I always call “big strobes” even thought the Elinchrom Quadras are in fact rather small still they have to be operated separate from the camera and measured with the light meter. Setting the “big strobes” up takes some time (although when you know what you’re doing it can be very fast) and in some situations there are simply put limitations to what you can do on location. Also take into account that when you travel, travel with the “big strobes” can be very limiting, not to say expensive.

But luckily there is an alternative the so called “system strobes” or what I call them (and many others) “small flash).
When I was demoing on Photokina last year I met up with Joe McNally (one of my absolute heroes) and somehow he triggered me to start looking into the “small flash” area again for the workshops, and to be honest he was 100% right. I teach the workshops a lot but mostly aimed at the “big flash” and there are of course a lot of people out there who are shooting with the “small flash” system, and since the theory behind light is exactly the same it should be a small change to include a workshop about the “small flash” into the program, this bugged me for some time and in my head I was thinking about the options and what I wanted to teach, because to put it mildly, to just put some strobes there and let people work with E-TTL would not cut if for me as an instructor, I really want my students to leave the workshop with some knowledges and tricks they did not think off before. Also because there are so many books out there and sites aimed at “strobist” style shooting I wanted something that would trigger people to think about the “small flash” differently than they are now.

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