Paul and Callum, two of my Scottish mates, and I are trying to set up a 2-day Motivational Light workshop in Schotland. I’ve always been intrigued by Schotland and I wonder what it’s like to shoot wearing a kilt, eating haggis after the shoot and giving a workshop in my best Sean Connery accent.

The idea is to spend two days learning and practicing lighting in a spectacular Scottish setting with a group of fun photographers. We want to make this a wonderful workshop but also an amazing trip to Schotland. Paul and Callum are investigating some amazing locations that are still within easy reach of an airport. A place where we can all stay together for two days of heavy shooting and spend our evenings figuring out how to light a model on the back of the Loch Ness monster.

Let me know in the comments if you are interested in such a workshop/trip-of-a-lifetime and we’ll get in touch with you.

A couple of months ago I went to a lecture by the famous internationally acclaimed editorial and assignment photographer Drew Gardner (and here’s his blog). Even the lecture was only a couple of hours, I was completely blown away. I was so impressed with Drew’s work, his teaching and his funny down-to-earth attitude that we set up a two day workshop in Belgium on 4 and 5 September. This is a unique opportunity if you want to learn from one of the very best. We still got some spots available. Everything about the workshop can be found here.

I first came around Drew’s work when he decided to invade a Polish forest with lots of light, smoke, a waterbuffalo and a naked model. You may find it weird but that combination really got me interested in the man’s work.

View on YouTube

There won’t be any big wildlife in the studio for the workshop but we will make it an amazing hands-on experience and if the weather allows we’ll be shooting on location too. Drew is a true master of light but he’s also going to teach about the planning and logistics involved in location shooting. You may not be shooting an elephant in the jungle next week, but the same principles apply to shooting your cat in the backyard (just don’t put a nude model on top of your cat).

View on YouTube

Drew was a photojournalist for over 20 years before he started doing commercial photography. His ability to improvise is often what makes the shoot. Although we all like to use the best tools available, Drew isn’t about gear, but rather about how to make the best of what you have.

When you hear Drew talking, you can feel his passion for photography and he is great in passing on his passion and knowledge. I will be assisting Drew at the workshop to ensure the best practical experience. As you can tell, I’m extremely excited about having Drew teach a workshop in Belgium and if you want to improve your location photography, I highly recommend you book yourself one of the remaining seats (although you won’t be sitting much) on this workshop. The workshop will be held on 4 and 5 September and costs 560 EUR (including VAT, lunches and drinks). Click here for more info and booking.

Let’s start this post with a bit of (recent) history. (Or you could just skip the first part):

Back in the days when Strobist started the small flash revolution, getting the right gear together wasn’t the easiest thing to do. Basically we mainly adapted pieces of gear that weren’t made for small off-camera flash lighting. No shop could give you a good answer and you had to research what was available, get some parts from your local store, buy the other stuff on eBay and then try to make it fit together. These days every serious store can provide you with all the bits and pieces (even in a kit) and many manufacturers make equipment specially designed for off-camera flash use. One of the first manufacturers that stepped up was MPEX. They started supporting Strobist and stocked up not only the right equipment but also the knowledge about it.

For many the reason to start using small off-camera flashes is that it’s an affordable way of lighting with artificial light. The most expensive part is usually the flash itself. A Canon 580 EXII or a Nikon SB900 doesn’t come cheap so people started looking for cheaper alternatives. You don’t need all the high tech mambo jambo in these state-of-the-art but expensive flashes anyway if you are going to shoot all manual. I’m not saying these flashes aren’t word their money (I even started to become a fan of all the automatic stuff for certain uses) but lighting manually is often still the best way to get the best results. People started to pay ridiculous prices for old Nikon SB flashes and brands like Vivitar revived their old models.
My 3 Vivitar 285HV’s have been my workshorses for a couple of years and I also used some old Nikons but you still sometimes got faced with the fact that these were never really designed as off-camera flashes. No build-in optical slaves on most of them, stupid pc or even more exotic connectors, …

Enter a couple of years later when MPEX decided to start Lumopro, a new brand that makes lots of toys for us small flash lovers. I was pretty impressed with the first flash they made, the LP120. So when they came out with a new and improved version, the LP160, I really needed to take it for a short test drive and took it with me on holiday.

Finally the review:

We all know the dynamic range that digital sensors can capture is much less than what we see with our eyes. On a little geocaching trip with Noa and Maya I encountered such a situation. High noon, kids in the shade and some beautiful clouds. Trouble is, you can’t capture it all in a photograph. If you expose for the kids, the background blows out.

And if you expose for the background, the kids become silhouettes.

But hey what does daddy have in his backpack? Diapers, cookies and a first aid kit. But also a couple of pocketwizards and a Lumopro LP160. Noa became the model, Maya acted as a VAL (voice activated light stand) and I shot with the Lumix GF1. It became clear very fast that the LP160 is one helluva powerful flash. It packs about the same power as a 580EX or an SB900. So that’s a step/stop up from the previous model.

Noa is not too much of a poser, so you have to be fast if you want to shoot her, so that was an excellent recycle speed test. Despite the fact that we fired the flash at full power, it recycled really fast. I didn’t measure it but the recycling time seems close or equal to a 580EXII and certainly waaaaay faster than my Vivitars. It also seems pretty friendly to the batteries, I seem to get more flashes out of a set of AA’s than with the Vivitars.

Time for Maya, who DOES like to pose. We went for a slightly larger frame and to get all attention to Maya, I zoomed in the Lumopro. It now has an electronic zoom motor build in which feels a bit more professional than the manual zooming in the previous model.

The only criticism I can think of is the battery door. You have to push the batteries with one hand and slide the door with the other to get it closed. The door also comes off completely so make sure you don’t forget it somewhere. The feel, the controls and the power have certainly improved compared to the LP120. Lumopro clearly listened to their user base and made syncing the flash a breeze. It has a pc sync connector so you can still use your pc cables until they break (which happens usually 2 weeks after you bought them). But it also has a mini-jack connector which is way better suited to the task. It also has a pretty sensitive build-in optical slave that can even set to ignore a pre-flash. Optical slaves can be a very handy and cheap way to sync a flash in controlled environments. In fact I shot a commercial assignment this morning with a Hensel Porty as my main light and the LP160 as a fill light, synced with the optical slave. Worked every time.

So yes, I really like this flash. I can’t predict if it will stand the test of hard use for many years, but it feels like it’s up to the task. I think Lumopro set the new benchmark for affordable off-camera flashes with the LP 160.

By the way, I know that last picture isn’t very impressive but believe me it’s not easy to trigger the 10 second self-timer and race up those rocks in time to have yourself in the picture too. I just couldn’t not include this picture after all the exhausting speed climbing

I just got back from almost two fantastic holiday weeks with the kids. I enjoyed myself a lot and I’m sure the kids did so too. They are really the perfect travel companions. For our first week of holidays we went camping in the Ardennes. This area is only about 90 minutes by car away and I spent a lot of holidays camping there as a child and later as a mountainbiking teenager. The more surprising it is that it took me so long to come back here. I’ve always loved this area with it’s landscapes, textures, light and people. Traveling is not about how many kilometers from home you are, it’s about going somewhere with an open mind.

On our way to the camping we saw some people having a paintball tournament on a soccer field and we stopped to watch for a while. The kids got the VIP seats.

Marshmallows taste only good when cooked over a fire or BBQ.

The first few days it was pretty hot, here’s Kobe seeking some refreshment by the lawn sprinkler.

Pushing the kids to do photography is not something I do, but I admit that I enjoy it very much that they start shooting pictures more and more. Very funny to see them directing people like I sometimes do. Maya took a portrait of me in which she asked me to look angry.

Our 60 year old English camping neighbor gave me one of the best compliments possible. He said: “your kids play like we did when we where kids”. I still think about that single phrase a lot. As a parent these days it’s not always easy to give your kids the space to play, explore and make mistakes. So each time I’m capable of doing that, it makes me very proud. It’s often about finding the right surroundings to let kids be kids and this camping was certainly one of those places.

Big thanks by the way to one of my Facebook friends who referred me to camping Try des Baudets. It’s just the right size and has the right atmosphere for a trip with small kids.

My holiday budget is very limited these days but I absolutely wanted the kids to have a couple of great weeks away from home. During this week, I spent just a bit more (mostly on ice cream) than I would spend during a week at home and still it was a true holiday.

One of the best ways to get to some nice spots without spending a lot of money is Geocaching. We found a couple really nice ones in the area around the camping. Kobe and Maya really love hiking in the forest, just like I do. Noa is slowly getting the hang of it too.

Here’s a family shot with the self timer.

On our last day, after packing all our stuff, we took a steam engine to the train museum.

After this week, Kobe went on his first boyscout camp and the girls and I joined some friends in a holiday cottage in another part of the Ardennes. I’ll post some pics of that trip later.

I so enjoyed this quality time with my kids and my batteries are recharged. There’s lots of obstacles ahead of me, but at least I have the energy now to have a good shot at getting where I want.

I must admit, in the aftermath of the incredibly time and energy consuming adventure of creating my own instructional DVD, I got a bit burned out. I loved making it and I’m very proud of the result but it was a huuuuuuge job, certainly combined with my personal situation. It’s not that I had enough of teaching but I felt I needed to focus on my photography again. It’s a great feeling to teach other photographers but I started feeling like I was the only one that didn’t progress as a photographer.

It wasn’t deliberate but for a while, I just had to put my blog, workshops and LIME in the fridge and focus on my own work again. I spent a lot of time studying the work of people that I admire, re-evaluate my own work, meet creative people outside my own little network and did a lot of thinking about the direction I want to go.

You know how important it is to me to master as much techniques as possible but these are just tools to allow you to tell a story or convey an emotion. And I just found that even though my technique is better than ever, I wasn’t very happy with my pictures anymore. So I went back to the roots, keeping it simple, shooting for fun, focusing on feeling rather than detail in the shadows and perfectly level horizons. And I found it back … the amateur photographer in me.

With the changes in my personal life, things have changed pretty dramatically for my financial and business situation too. I’m not ashamed to admit that a visit to my accountant earlier this week wasn’t very motivating. And I would like to thank everyone who bought Motivational Light, because you gave me that little bit of breathing space to dedicate some time to rediscovering my own creativity.
To make things work out, I really need to grow my business faster than what would normally be possible but I believe I can do it thanks to finding myself as a creative photographer again.

I know I need to be more business minded. And I know that I need to make some decisions that I don’t really want to. But I’m still very positive that I can work things out. Last week, with the help of many great friends, I spent the whole time testing out ideas and concepts for a new big project that I will launch in September. I strongly believe that it is going to be a way to be creative and economically viable at the same time. All the images in this post were taken during that creative test week.

The test week was really the the result of all my self rediscovery activities. I’m charged with creative energy and feel like shooting every day again. I feel I’m ready to teach and blog again and all of that is thanks to my friends, family and my kids who have supported me through these difficult times.

I’ll be taking some time off to enjoy the kids but after that I’ll be back at full force! Promise

A couple of weeks ago the kind people of Calumet let me play with the Hasselblad H4D. It wasn’t a real scientific test. Tom and Pieter were trying out some lighting gear and I just snapped away some pics with the Hassy while we acted ridiculous as usual.

We did this just outside the room where Mike Larson was giving one of his great seminars organized by Calumet and Sunbounce. We even borrowed his beautiful model for an hour or so.

So what about the H4D then? First of all, this wasn’t any kind of scientific test. I basically just snapped away some pictures like it was a compact camera and that’s probably not what it was intended for. (Although a friend of mine said he saw a tourist with an H4D in Venice.)

Let’s start with the bad news: ergonomics, build quality and handling sucks big time. And I mean really big time, my 450D feels a lot more professional. The H4D looks and feels like it’s made of the same plastic as my first DSLR, the 300D (aka the digital rebel). It’s very slow in writing pics to the card (not even 1 pic/second). I do understand that these are very large files but then the camera should have a larger buffer / more processing power. The autofocus is slow and simply doesn’t work at all if the subject is backlit. The menus seem to be designed in the 90’s. The LCD-screen is plain rubbish. If Canon would fit such a bad screen on an entry level DSLR, the forums would be filled with complaints. I could not tell anything about the pictures when watching them on the lcd.

Is there anything good to say about the H4D? Well, it has something that my 5D mkII nor my 1D-bodies have … a pop-up flash. Yes, that’s right, a pop-up flash.

But wait, there’s more: Once you download the huge files to your computer, you finally discover what Hasselblad has been famous for during decades: SUPER QUALITY. The resolution is just mind blowing. If I zoom a picture to 100% in Lightroom on my rather recent Macbook Pro, I can go and make myself a coffee while it’s rendering. To some this resolution is essential for their work but most of us can easily get by with a Canon or Nikon. To me, the biggest advantage of the Hasselblad files is the depth. The gradients are way smoother than any digital camera I’ve ever seen.

Since I met him for the first time, I’ve been wanting to take a portrait of Waldemar. You may not know him, but he’s the one that drives the van on the European Sunbounce workshop tours. He’s also the one that bends the ultra strong German steel in the Sun-Movers. He looks like a very tough guy (and I’m sure he is when needed) but he’s also a very generous man. And he’s the owner of a face that just screams to be taken a portrait of.

These were shot outside in the middle of the day. I underexposed the ambient so it didn’t play any role in the picture. We lit this with just one beautydish overhead.

I know the H4D is not supposed to be a replacement for a 5D mkII. It’s probably expected to be used tethered to a computer, in a controlled environment. But still, for that price I would have expected a decent construction, good lcd and excellent ergonomics. I wouldn’t even mind if they would have to drop the pop-up flash for that. If you need the resolution and/or the depth it’s probably still worth the hefty price tag and I’m not sure if the other digital medium format solutions are any better.

Conclusion: The H4D is certainly “haute cuisine” when it comes to image quality, too bad you have to consume it with a plastic fork on a cardboard plate. But still, I wouldn’t hesitate to rent one, if I need the image quality.

My buddies at California Sunbounce are organizing 6 days of workshops with Greg Gorman and Mike Larson in Zingst, Germany from 1-6 June. I’ve done some workshops together with Mike and he certainly inspired me in many ways. I’m looking into changing my schedule so I can drive to Zingst to attend at least one day of workshops. If anyone would be interested to join me / drive with me, let me know.

For those who haven’t seen Mike in action yet, I can tell you that this guy really knows how to motivate people to make better pictures, improve your business and balance it out with a personal life. I highly recommend his workshops for every professional photographer, not only wedding photographers.

Here’s a video they did last year with Mike:

View on YouTube

I’ve been a big fan of Greg Gorman since I first discovered his work. His celebrity portraits are simply stunning. But this workshop is about his second passion: fine art nude photography.

Here’s a link to a video about a similar workshop he gave. NSFW unless you have a very liberal boss I guess.

If you are anyway close to Zingst or have the time to travel, I think you won’t regret following these workshops. More info here.

Almost forgot … I was going to post some scans from the past every now and then.

1996, Luxembourg – Echternach

This is my cousin Jef and he used to be my partner in crime in many of my teenage adventures. Our friendship really took off on family parties when we were kids. While the adults and the little kids were eating pancakes indoors we went for a walk in the streets around my grandparents’ house to discover that if you kicked the poles of the street lights hard enough, they went out for a couple of minutes. The challenge was to get the whole street into darkness before the first lamp went back on.

During school holidays I always stayed over at his place for a couple of days and he with me. We spent most of our time playing games on the Commodore C64 (remember Kung Fu Master, Hero and Frogger), watching ninja movies and making shurikens out of Mercedes badges. We learned to play campfire guitar together. There must be some tapes of our famous concerts, but I won’t torture you with it. We even started doing some photography at the same time.

For a couple of years our families went camping together for a couple of days each August. Jef and I explored the forests around Dinant on our own and after a few years we got permission to go out on a two day trip. That was only the start of many outdoor trips. We both discovered mountain biking and combined our love for camping in the wild (illegal in Belgium) with the adrenalin rush of the bike during countless trips to the south of Belgium.

This picture must have been taken during one of the last trips we did together, maybe even the last. After that we still went biking pretty often but only for one day. Now we both have our own busy lives. When we see each other on a family reunion, we don’t go kicking streetlights anymore but we always plan to go biking again … one day.

As you know I’m very much in favor of photographers getting together and sharing their knowledge over a few beers. But don’t just stick to the beers and shooting for fun. One of the best ways to learn something is to join other photographers on real assignments. And if you’re there you might as well assist too.

Pieter dropped by for a coffee and a chat because he had to shoot one of his famous L-style Sessions in my neighborhood. We meet pretty often but I’ve only seen him at work a few times. Since I’ve had nothing to do and needed some fresh air anyway, I just invited myself to trail along on his shoot. I operated the Sunbounce a couple of times but I also had some time to fire off a couple of shots of Pieter at work with the Leica M4-2, I borrowed from Wilhelm.

Although I know Pieter’s style pretty well, it was still very interesting to see how he gets those pictures. The other thing that’s always interesting is to see how other photographers interact with their clients. You can’t just copy someone else but there are always a couple of things that are worth trying out to incorporate in your own style.

So what did I learn? No big secrets but the way Pieter directs and poses his subjects is phenomenal. I also really like how he frees his mind and back by working mainly with one camera, one lens and natural light. That might give him less technical options but also lets him work fast and concentrate on the subject.

Assisting fellow photographers benefits both the photographer and the assistant. The assistant learns something and the photographer has an extra pair of hands available. And if he’s lucky he’ll get some very flattering behind-the-scenes pictures when the assistant takes out his Hasselblad and concentrates on the photographer’s best part.

I’m certainly going to assist more in the future. What about you, do you ever assist? What did you learn?

Can I fall in love? Considering my previous post, a title like this could make you think this blog post is about women. Well it’s not but if the newspapers can use misleading headlines, so can I. This is about lenses, the Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L USM in particular. I’ve had it for a couple of years (it’s actually my second one as the first got stolen 13 days after I bought it) and it’s always been my least favorite lens.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great lens: well built, the perfect all-round focal length (on full frame), it’s fast and accurate. It’s good at almost anything … but great at nothing. It just isn’t as edgy, extreme or special than any of my other lenses.

Come to think of it, it’s not that different from falling in love with a woman. You just don’t fall in love with a girl because she’s moderately interesting, slightly intelligent, not ugly and reasonable in everything. You fall in love because you get a kick out of Nobel prize winners or because she makes you laugh every minute (or just because she has the perfect boobs).

But in the end you might be probably better of with that first girl who can be trusted every time. I got a similar feeling with the 24-70. That lens has been my must-have/go-to lens when I need to play it safe. But to see if I can fall in love with it, I’m going to use it more often for a while during those times where I don’t have to play it safe and would normally choose another lens. Yesterday I took it with me on a long Geocaching walk with the kids and some friends.

Because the weather forecast was far from great, I used my bulletproof vintage 1Ds mkII. In combination with the 24-70 that’s a heavy beast to lug around for a long walk during which you need to operate a hand held GPS and a bunch of kids. But I don’t regret it as I’m pretty happy with the souvenirs I was able to make of this great day. I’ll keep committing myself to using the 24-70 more often for some time and I’ll report in later.