Tag Archive for: strobe

Digital classroom episode

Every month we broadcast live from our studio for a 2 hour photoshoot/instructional session.
For years I’ve been thinking about the perfect mix between a real workshop (with loads of personal attention) and a video (you get … well what you get), and Digital Classroom is that “thing” for me.
During the broadcast people can interact with the session, ask questions etc.
It’s of course no where NEAR a real workshop, where there is much more personal attention and the topics are more advanced of course, but it’s I think a very interesting concept that perfectly fills the gap between our instructional videos and being at a real workshop.

Today the link to the new Digital classroom broadcast, this time with our model Lenaa.
Topic for this one was working with cheap modifiers, or in other words the modifiers that everyone probably has from when they bought their flash set.
Enjoy.

 

And please comment, subscribe and share the broadcast.
Digital Classroom is not cheap to make and involves actually a lot of hard work and investments, but thanks to BenQ and Rogue/Expo imaging this dream of mine was made possible.

TIP : Not everything is Photoshop

TIP :
Not everything is Photoshop.



A lot of the shots I post online are 99% in camera shots. For some people this is very hard to believe, I sometimes think that if someone sees something that “looks hard” they always think it’s Photoshop.



In my opinion this is limiting yourself, always believe in the power of timing and of course planning ahead. Although it sometimes seems like I just throw together some lights, place a model and shout some funny remarks to my models and press the shutter the truth is very far from that.

Every shot I take I plan ahead, I carefully place the lights under the exact right angle and move my model in the angle so that he/she is hitting the light just perfectly (or as good as you can get it).

This however doesn’t mean I plan a shot ahead in the studio, during my workshops it has become a personal challenge to NOT plan anything, in fact I often let Annewiek or organizers pick the spots for the locations and I don’t want to see anything from it (except a general idea), this way I can be 100% creative on the day itself, and I strongly believe that by showing it this way to the students also gives them the confidence that they can actually pull this off if they understand their light.

Light is our language as photographers, this is where we create our poems/photographs and this is how we tell our stories.

Photoshop for me is an awesome tool but I always get way more satisfaction when I “nail” something in the camera instead of add stuff in Photoshop.

let’s take this example.

Enka workshops Augustus 15 2014    222

This was shot during the Enka factory workshops last friday.
This shot was 100% unplanned, we saw the pool of water and 45 minutes before the end of the workshop I thought it would be cool if we would do something with this water, so I asked our model Lenaa if she would mind to get wet (and I checked with Nadine if the clothing was allowed to get wet, another tip.. always keep your models and stylist on your good side).

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Tip : using strobes and natural light

The difference between strobes and natural light.

 

I always tell my students during workshops that when they are shooting with strobes they should always also shoot some images with natural light, this way you can deliver many different looks from the same location to your client.

 

During the workshops in New York I shot this example which I like to share with you guys.

 

The first image is without strobes.
To meter this correctly I metered (incident) in front of the models face to get a proper exposure on the face, this meant that the windows would blow out to pure white, in the final tinting I toned down the highlights slightly for a more vintage look.

Workshops 5thfloor NY 29-30 August 2014  (6 of 277)

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The change that a strobe can make

During the location workshops one of the things I always show is the difference between natural light and strobe.
Normally people think that the natural light shots will be much less interesting than the strobe ones, however the end result mostly surprises people.
in this blog post two examples of natural light shots followed by the strobe ones.

 

Enka workshops Augustus 20 2014    274

Enka workshops Augustus 20 2014    280

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