Frank Doorhof

Critique day results

March 2, 2011/8 Comments/in blog, guests, Visions and technique/by Frank Doorhof

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.

First workshop Small Flash

February 20, 2011/14 Comments/in Light meter, Visions and technique/by Frank Doorhof

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.

Why getting the shot is not everything

February 18, 2011/22 Comments/in Visions and technique/by Frank Doorhof

We all read a lot of stuff about lighting and coaching the models, and although this still is the main thing of course there is also a part that is often forgotten or is even regarded as being old fashioned or limiting creativity.

Meters
Don’t even start about how many times I hear that using a lightmeter is old fashioned, it’s really weird because almost everyone who I teach how to use a lightmeter never wants to shoot without any more.
Some myths about the lightmeter is that it’s never 100% accurate and that with the histogram you can easily see what you’re doing, well sorry to burst that bubble, the histogram is not correct.

First of all the histogram doesn’t show you the RAW data, it shows you the JPEG thumbnail, for example change the settings in your camera from neutral to for example full contrast and full brightness and you can see that the histogram changes while the RAW file is still correct, so the histogram is not accurate when you want to check your RAW. You can get it very close by setting the contrast to -2 which will mimic the RAW a bit better than the neutral setting, although I have to add that this can change in the future and per camera, which in fact strengthens my point that you can’t trust the histogram…. But there is more.

Lets look at your own skintone and now look at the skintone of your friend, partner or anyone, are they all the same ? No they are not…. So where should your skintone be in the histogram, and were that of your friend or partner ? I guess you already figured out that also here the histogram is useless.