It’s not a secret that I’m a hardcore advocate of taking time to play and for photographers to work together. But in reality it’s not always that easy. A while ago I was talking to a few friends and fellow photographers and Pieter, Ake, Tom, Serge and I decided it would be fun to do a shoot together. It took a while before we found a blank space in all our schedules but in the end we set a date to go shooting at the Belgian coast. But as the day of the shoot approached, I started doubting if I would participate. It’s not that I didn’t want to go, not at all. But because of all the stuff that comes with buying the new house/studio, the kids’ holidays and the huge amount of work, I’m finding it pretty hard to treat myself to a day off. But I bit the bullet and decided to go anyway, and I’m happy I did.

We also joined forces with Yvan (fourth from the left). Yvan makes impressive panoramic pictures and makes aerial pictures with a remotely operated camera attached to a kite. I’ll tell you more about it in the next blogpost.

I once, by accident, made this incredibly terrible picture of Pieter and he accuses me of finding pleasure in putting it on display for a huge audience. But honestly, all I do is trying to make him look good.

Serge aka ‘the Shadow’ captured some of our crazy experiments on video, so maybe we’ll make a video of this day out.

It’s impressive how Ake as the only female photographer in the party, coped with all the testosteron.

Tom made sure that my jaws still hurt from laughing.

No matter how impressive our group of photographers looks, we still decided to get some models involved. Fauve is without any doubt on of the most natural models I ever shot.

Annelien is only 14 but she’s got the talent, experience and motivation to go a long way. She was fantastic to work with.

Lien, a friend of Pieter, did really well as a first time model too.

The ladies where in good hands with our make up artist.

We planned to develop a concept and everything but because of lack of time, we ended up improvising. The only part of our original plans we stuck to, was making fun.

Tom wanted to experiment with studio strobes on location. After sending my old studio strobe to flash heaven, he managed to get two of Pieter’s flashes working of a generator. No idea about the final pics, but the show Tom gave us, setting up the gear was hilarious.

After Tom’s studio strobe adventures, I jumped behind the surf club with Lien. That was followed by a 10 minute cooldown in the sea with Fauve and Ake. I’ll show you the results later.

Then Fauve, me and a Sunbounce reflector headed into the dunes under the direction of Ake. Ake did a fantastic re-enactment of the landing in Normandy on D-Day. If there had been cleavages like that in WWII, I’m sure the war would have ended much sooner.

Tom arranged pizza delivery on the beach. While we were waiting I took out my lensbaby for a test drive. I’ve had it for a few months now, but never really got to experimenting with it. It became clear that it’s not easy to focus on action with this thing.

Pieter used the down time to improve his camera tossing skills. The goal is to put the camera on self timer and throw it up at the right time (and the right angle) to make an aerial pic.

But it was Tom who smashed Pieter’s record with an amazing throw.

After the delicious pizza we enjoyed the beautiful sunset until we realised that we were loosing precious minutes of fantastic light.

Lien was the queen of the world.

And Tom was the king of the world.

I think I only shot the models for half an hour in total but I had so much fun that I still thrive of the energy I got out of this half day of fun.