Tag Archive for: photography

Some tips for travel photography

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Let me start off by telling you that I don’t think of myself as a great travel photographer, my main focus is fashion/glamour and teaching those areas of photography. However thanks to my work I do travel a lot and over the years I’ve been building a portfolio from the shots I take during the trips that I even feature on my website, meaning that I really like those shots. Of course most of the images I took 2-3 years ago are now replaced by new ones, and the new ones I like a lot better so I’m learning every trip.

 

During my seminar “being creative and getting the shot” there is a lot of attention for some parts of travel/street photography and people respond very positive to this part of the seminar, so I thought it would be fun to share some tips on the blog, I hope it will help you out on your next trip/vacation to take better shots. And remember that ALL these techniques also translate to model/fashion/glamour photography.

 

Find reflections
Reflections are found everywhere, you can start out with some reflections of yourself in sunglasses or in windows, but it gets more interesting when the reflections are getting bigger and what is better for this than huge skyscrapers. Play a bit with the tilt of your camera (angle) and you can create some very interesting looking images.

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View from the window

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Although we do fly a lot, the views you “can” get from the airplane window stay magical.
Today a few shots we (Annewiek and I) did from the window of the airplane on the way back from LA to Amsterdam. All shot with the Fuji X-pro 1 with the 35mm lens. I absolutely love that camera.

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Get your kicks on Route 66

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Ever since I was a young boy I dreamt of going to America.
Somehow the country had an enormous draw on me, I loved the 50-60’s, R&R, the muscle cars (even owned a 1970 Pontiac Firebird Formule 400 for a few years) and of course the legendary Route66. Every chance I get I will try to see documentaries about this amazing travel from one side of the states to the other, the mother road.

The first time we visited Los Angeles we tried to find some of this road, but we were not that lucky, due to time stress and simply put lack of information we had to do with just a few landmarks but nothing spectacular, and the second time we visited LA it was also not doable due to again time stress, but I still wanted to do some of the route… so when we booked our flight to PhotoshopWorld Las Vegas this time we decided to fly into LAX and drive to Vegas. And I mean not the 3-4 hour drive… no we planned on doing the 7-9 hour drive (including stops etc.) In this blogpost some images from that drive and some behind the scenes stories.

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Why you should trust the meter

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After my workshops a lot of students switch to the use of a light meter.
They see how quick it is to setup the lights, meter the background, make sure there is detail in whites or blacks and much much more but that’s “only” part of the story. Let me tell you two stories that are real life stories and will show you a different side of why to use a meter….

 

The workshop story
A while ago I taught a workshop for a group of professional photographers (always a tough crowd), most of them (to my surprise) did not use a meter. After my story about why to use a meter and telling them that it was really a great tool to make sure you get what you want it was time for my photoshoot. Now believe it or not but the first shot I took was terrible, whites were all blown, blacks were blocked up and it was just plain terrible….. Some of the people in the crowd were a bit like “yeah, sure that’s why we don’t use a meter”, and some asked “ok, so now you’re gonna tweak the lights, right ?”

 

I surprised I think the whole crowd when I did not change anything on the lights but asked for the remote of the projector. In a few seconds I changed the brightness and contrast settings and the image looked the way I intended, now I hear you think “yeah sure, that’s not the way to do it”, well actually they also asked me about that (of course), so to prove my point I reset the projector and showed a grayscale 10 step bar. On the non adjusted settings there were only a few bars visible. And after setting the brightness and contrast all bars were shown, and also the image was showing up correctly.

 

The Glyn Dewis lens story
During the first “Frank Doorhof and Friends” workshop there was a small problem with one of the light setups.
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