Today, nine years ago, I became a father. And it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. So whenever there is a birthday we try to come up with something cool to make the birthday party invitation cards. Here is Kobe’s ninth birthday party invitation:

There was this great haze and beautiful muted colors in the ambient light when Kobe got home from school. From experience I know this kind of light, when underexposed turns into this nice moody shades of blue if you play around with the white balance a bit and use it in combination with an orange gelled soft main light

The first idea was to just make a simple but cool portrait. As I found out last year with his communion photos, Kobe really know how to strike a pose.

In the next picture you can see the setup. Because the ground is muddy and uneven, I took Maya with us to hold the light stand, just in case. As the ambient light levels were really low, I could have done it with just a speedlight but took my Elinchrom Quadra instead. I haven’t used it that much for quick location shoots. It’s very small and light for a rather powerful studio light, but it’s still bulky and unhandy when you are working as a one-man-band and already have a heavy kit of DSLRs and lenses with you. For commercial shoots where there’s time, assistants and dedicated parking spaces that’s not a problem but if I’m out on my own I often find it too much hassle.

But with just the GX1 and the 20mm there’s suddenly a lot of carrying power that becomes available. In combination with the Quadra, an umbrella and a sturdy stand, it’s still a very comfortable kit to lug around. And I got the added benefit of having a more powerful and faster recycling light than a speedlight. But the most important reason why I choose the Quadra is LIGHT QUALITY. The design of a studio light just makes for softer, more even light without the hotspot you get with speedlights. I think I’m going to experiment a bit more with this setup for quick location portraits in the near future.

The portraits turned out quite nice but I felt we could do something more fun. I got the idea to make a picture with nine Kobes in it. By that time the ambient light was starting to disappear so I quickly grabbed my tripod from the car and we started racing the sunset.

I’m certainly not incredibly original with this idea but it’s fun to do. If you don’t know how to do this kind of composite, here’s how I did it for this picture:

- establish your scene and lock down you camera on a tripod
- shoot at least one picture with just the ambient light
- shoot nine different pictures without moving the camera
- don’t worry about the light being in the frame, just make sure you got at least one picture with just the ambient light
- try to previsualize the positions of your subject in the final picture. In this case it could have made a much nicer composition of the nine Kobes but I just didn’t have the time. So this was down and dirty.
- process all RAWs with identical settings open them in one Photoshop file as layers. (In Lightroom that’s selecting the images – right click – edit in – open as layers in Photoshop)
- make sure your ambient light exposure is on the bottom
- make sure all your layers are perfectly aligned. Despite using a sturdy tripod but without a cable release, some of the layers were a couple of pixels off.
- I then added layer masks to each layer to paint in just the subject. If your background exposure is the same in all pictures, you can easily get away with a rough lasso selection. But in this case the ambient light was dropping fast, causing slightly different background exposures for each file. So I had to do some painting in the layer masks to get it right.
- Something I’ve learned from some of the best retouchers is that you often don’t need to spent hours of painstakingly creating perfect cutouts with the pen tool. If all depends on how the picture is going to be used. This picture ended up on a 10×15cm card so nobody is going to see that the selections are a bit rough here and there by quickly doing it with the paint brush in a layer mask.

And there it is after 12 minutes of shooting and about an hour of post processing:

Happy birthday big boy! You’ve already given me so much joy, love, wisdom and a reason to exist.

Yesterday, I posted part 1 of my GX1 review, here’s part 2:

As soon as I looked at the first pics I shot with the GX1 on my computer, I got the feeling that the GX1 could possible be more than an even better always-with-you-camera. Therefor I needed to test it in a real life situation: a photoshoot that would require me to create several different looks in a short amount of time.

I had a shoot scheduled with Sofie and she agreed to do it all with the GX1. Sofie runs a great fashion blog called Bien Sucré and needed some images for her business cards and other uses. Lots of different setups in only a couple of hours, seemed like a good stress test for the GX1. We started outdoors but couldn’t really find good locations that went with her outfit. The few decent places we found were so exposed to the cold wind, that we couldn’t shoot more than a couple of minutes. Here’s one of the few keepers:

1/200 – f/5.6 – iso 3200 – 12-42 lens @42mm

The new Panasonic 12-42 vario lens came with the test camera but being used to fast glass with a constant aperture of f/2.8, this f/3.5 to f/5.6 lens couldn’t really convince me. It has an electronic zoom which is probably great for video but not as fast and accurate to use as a good old manual zoom ring. The fact that I wasn’t too crazy about it also has to do with the fact that this must be one of the ugliest lenses I’ve ever seen. But it has to be said that the optical quality is amazing, certainly for that price. So I’m not saying it’s a bad lens, but some nice primes are more interesting (and unfortunately way more expensive) for photographers who want more control over depth-of-field and low light shooting.

After this cold adventure we decided to head back to the studio to come up with something useful. We started with a very basic setup with one speed light and a shoot through umbrella.

1/100 – f/5.6 – iso 160 – 12-42 lens @42mm

sdf

1/100 – f/5.6 – iso 160 – 12-42 lens @42mm

We moved on to a clamshell setup with the speedlite and umbrella straight above the camera and a silver Sunbounce mini under the camera as fill. I like how the clamshell light worked on Sofie’s face in the first picture but I wanted less depth-of-field. Therefor I switched to my Canon 50mm 1.4 with a cheap e-bay adapter. On the GX1, my Canon 50mm, becomes a manual focus 100mm f/1.4. It’s pretty hard to manually focus at that wide open aperture but with lots of shots and a bit of luck, we got the eyelashes in focus like I wanted.

For a bit of a retro look, I wanted to work with a white background. I could have setup a white seamless or my Lastolite HiLite but as we had little time, I just used my big Chimera Octa that was already setup in the studio. There’s an Elinchrom 600RX in the octa and it’s triggered by it’s optical slave. The main light is a speedlite. Some shots with an umbrella, some shots with just the bare flash.

1/100 – f/5.6 – iso 160 – 12-42 lens @36mm

1/100 – f/5.6 – iso 160 – 12-42 lens @36mm

For a fashion blog I thought it might be quite nice to have the setup included in the shot. And it helps you get an idea of how this was shot

I also played around with just the pilot light of the Chimera to see what kind of results I would get at iso6400.

1/125 – f/5.6 – iso 6400 – 12-42 lens @42mm

Looking for a different background, I saw one of my silver Sunbounces and figured it would make a nice background if I could get lots of reflections of it’s surface. I’m not a big ring flash fan and I must admit that I’ve only used my Orbis ring flash adapter one or two times since I got it a couple of years ago. But somehow it seemed like the right thing to do.

1/125 – f/5.6 – iso 200 – 12-42 lens @42mm

I just noticed I’ve written very little about the GX1 in this article and maybe that’s exactly the point. During this shoot and the post processing I hardly noticed that I was not shooting a pro DSLR. This got me thinking about my current gear setup, the kind of work I do, the kind of work I WANT to do more, budgets, investments, options, … but more about that as soon as I’ve figured it out.

And the GX1, I can be short about that: I bought one and made sure it got delivered before I had to send the test camera back

It’s not a secret that I absolutely looooove my Panasonic GF1 camera. The reason why I bought it is to have a very small camera that is small enough to carry with me all the time and that is a real photographer’s camera with great lens, decent low light capacities, easy manual settings and good image quality. The GF1 ticked all those boxes and surpassed my expectations. I’ve been so happy with that camera that I wasn’t even too excited when Panasonic announced the GX1, the successor of the GF1. On first glance the specs of that little camera offered little or no reason FOR ME to upgrade. But when I was asked to review the GX1 for Shoot magazine, I accepted. My buddies, fellow pro photographers and co-members of the GF1 fan club Rob and Tom also reviewed the camera. Here’s Rob’s review.

I picked up the GX1 with the new 14-42 lens and the EVF2 electronic viewfinder at Shoot magazine about two weeks ago and during the first few days I hardly shot any pictures with it. First of all, it looked ugly. That turned out to be the fault of the new 14-42 lens decorated with something like nine different fonts in three colors. With my good old 20mm 1.7 it looks fine. It may not look as retro-chique as the Fuji X100 or minimalistic design-ish as the Sony NEX but one of the main attractions of having a small camera is to be unobtrusive and that’s a lot harder with a piece of beautiful design. The GX1 is but  sober, maybe even a bit dull but it looks and feels very solid.

1/60 – f/3.5 – iso800 – 14-42 lens @14mm

At first I used the GX1 pretty much like my GF1 (and it’s limitations), meaning I shot mostly black and white up to 800 iso. The GX1 performed flawlessly and the extra megapixels are nice to have (but not a reason for me to upgrade). It wasn’t until I reviewed some really high iso test shots on my computer that I got blown away. That’s right BLOWN AWAY! It immediately became clear that Panasonic has concentrated on a better sensor and processing engine because the image quality took a massive leap forwards.

1/100 – f/1.7 – iso3200 – 20mm

With the GF1 I’d rather not go higher than iso 800 but with the GX1 I won’t hesitate to take it two stops further to iso 3200. Another thing that struck me is that the colors are really good, even at high iso’s. The color rendering in the GF1 was not very impressive.

1/100 – f/1.7 – iso3200 – 20mm

The first shots I took at iso 3200 were just taken for testing purposes. I didn’t believe it would be usable. But I was proven wrong. So let’s try to go even higher, iso 6400.

1/80 – f/1.7 – iso6400 – 20mm

Noise becomes pretty visible at iso 6400 but with just a touch of noise reduction in Lightroom, the pictures are actually usable.

1/80 – f/1.7 – iso6400 – 20mm

When you do a lab test, the images out of the GX1 may not be the cleanest when it comes to noise. There’s even some noise visible at lower iso’s. But it never becomes disturbing to me. It’s more like film grain than noise. It may be very personal but I really like the “look” of the GX1’s images.

With every images I looked at on my computer I’ve grown more enthusiastic about the GX1. To the point that it’s probably going to play a key part in some of my future work and projects. But that’s for part 2 of this review.

About a month ago, I posted about a studio experiment inspired by Matthew Jordan Smith. Some people requested some more info about the gear used on part 1, so let me go over it, before jumping to part 2.

Here’s the setup:

In the studio I use mainly Elinchrom monoblocs because I find them the best studio flashes for a realistic budget. I’m also very happy with the support and the rental possibilities from Servix & Partners, the Belgian Elinchrom importer. For this shoot, I used a single Elinchrom Style RX300 monobloc. The RX300/600 ’s are the reliable, fast syncing workhorses in my studio. The strobe is fitted with the small white Elinchrom beauty dish (with the silver deflector and the white “sock” to diffuse the light as much as possible). A silver California Sunbounce Mini reflector is placed under the camera for some fill from below. And that’s it. All the rest is just a matter of testing, metering, fine tuning and more fine tuning.

For the second part of the shoot I wanted to shoot half to full body with just one single hard light. Instead of going for a standard reflector, I got out my Elinchrom Maxi Spot reflector aka The Sun. This reflector is designed to bundle the light and throw it as far as possible rather than creating an even spread of light. I often used it on location with my Quadra when I need more power than I can get out of a standard reflector at full power. The Maxi Spot squeezes close to two extra stops of light out of the same full power pop of light than a standard reflector. The price you pay for the extra power is a less even light but I actually like the less perfect light from the Maxi Spot better because it looks more natural. Prior to this shoot, I’d never used it in the studio, but I will certainly start using it more. I loved the light it created. We placed it pretty far and high (about 6 meters away from the model and 3,5 meters high).

Sylviane is the most professional commercial/lifestyle model, I’ve ever worked with. She plays every role you want … except herself. It’s not that she doesn’t want to, she’s just so used to be asked to give the lifestyle smile and the commercial poses. The biggest challenge I’ve set myself for this shoot is to shoot PORTRAITS of Sylviane, pictures that say something about who she really is. I think I managed to get that. And the main reason why I got it, is that we took our time to set up and test our lights. And once we were happy with it, we forgot about it and focussed on getting Sylviane out of Sylviane.

Lucie surprised me with the intensity she threw herself into the second part of the shoot. Her energy blew me away. This was one of those few instances where you just have to concentrate on preventing your jaw to drop onto the floor and push the shutter button.

It helps that Lucie has lots of experience at high end fashion shoots. But she also told me afterwards that the atmosphere has to be right to reach her full potential. That made me realize to pay even more attention to setting the mood: music, drinks, a warm studio and even more important … the right team.

Inge Van den Broeck is more than a make-up artist. She does hair too and has a great sense of styling. On top of that she’s just great fun to hang out with. She certainly had a big part in making these pictures more than just a lighting experiment. Steve Bayens had the most unglamorous job on the set: the assistant. But his eagerness to learn, kept me focussed not to make stupid mistakes and his hard work, let me focus on the big picture and not on all the small but important details.

This was such an interesting experiment and lots of the things I’ve learned will find a way into my daily work. This proves to me again, that as a photographer you’ve always have to keep pushing yourself. What was the last time, you did a shoot, just to learn something new?

Last week I was invited at the launch event for the Nikon D4 at Nikon Belgium’s HQ. It’s great to see that Nikon Belgium is making an effort to get in touch with their customer base and photographers in general. Reaching out to the world of bloggers isn’t easy if you are used to dealing with the traditional media. But they coped well with the sometimes tough questions and general disrespect of age old media conventions by us bloggers.

Am I in the market for a Nikon? I’m sure they make great stuff but so does Canon, so … not really. But I always try to look at new releases from the point of someone who’s looking for the best tools to perform his craft within a reasonable budget. My 5D2 is nearing the end of it’s lifecycle, it’s actually outlasting my best expectations. As long as it works fine, I’m not looking to replace it but chances are high, that I’ll have to invest in a new camera body this year. I was pretty exited when I had some brief quality time with the Canon 1Dx, and I still am. But I’ve also been thinking about the cost of such an upgrade. The D4 seems to be developed from the same strategy as the 1Dx: making the best possible all-round camera.

I don’t have enough hands-on experience with Nikon cameras to judge all the the practical improvements of the D4 over it’s predecessors. But my buddy (despite the fact he’s a Nikon user) Rob, wrote an interesting blog post about his first impressions.

What I see is that Nikon has clearly listened to the needs of today’s professional photographers. Lots of photography and marketing gurus advocate to specialize in one niche but the reality is that most professional photographers would return to being amateur photographers if they weren’t decent all-rounders. With their new flagship cameras Nikon and Canon seem to acknowledge this and focus on:

- Having enough pixels for most uses
- Not having too much pixels so they avoid excessive noise at high iso’s, compromise on speed and keep files small enough to manage
- good video options
- sturdy construction
- easy to operate
- fast and reliable autofocus
- building a camera that feels at home in a studio as well as in the desert of Iraq

This is all great news, except for one thing … price. At around 5.000 EUR these cameras are bloody expensive. Certainly now that many professionals are using 5D mark 2’s or D700’s that are only slightly less powerful than their big brothers but cost less than half. I’m pretty sure that the 5D mark 3 and the D800 will be announced soon. I’m damned sure they will be amazing but I’m not so sure they will be amazing for me and lots of photographers in a similar position. Rumors make us believe that there will be lots of megapixels (30+) which I don’t really need very often but will compromise high iso’s (which are way more important to me).

One side of me wants to pre-order a 1Dx because I’m pretty sure it will be the best all-round camera for me. But the other side of me just wrote “spending less money on gear” high on the list of goals for 2012. We’ll have to wait until we know more about the successors of the 5D mk2 and the D700.

That’s it for 2011. No looking back on 2011, no best-ofs and no resolutions for 2012. Just a couple of days of time for myself and my loved ones.

I’ve got a lot of big plans for 2012, see you then!

A little over a week ago, I finally got the very first Confessions XL Video online but didn’t have time to blog about it before leaving for a well needed holiday in Scotland. Most of you probably saw the announcement already on Facebook or Twitter, but for hose who didn’t, here it is:

I while ago I wrote about my plans to get new instructional videos out that would go far beyond my original Confession videos on Youtube. As usual with such plans, even the most pessimistic deadlines proved to be aimed too high as there was a lot of stuff to figure out.  But I’m glad (and proud) that I did push through. In short, in the Confession XL videos, I will take you on a shoot from start to finish, including the post processing.  Here’s the trailer for the new videos:

www.confessionsXL.com is a new site to host the new videos. At the moment it’s still a quickly put together iWeb site, but soon it will be the stylish home of all my instructional activities: blog, videos, workshops, …

The first Confession XL video is titled GF1 Guerilla Style. Here’s the trailer for it:

The video can be purchased on www.confessionsXL.com. The normal price is 9,95 EUR or 12,95 USD but until midnight tomorrow I’m offering it for the special introduction price of 7,95 EUR or 9,95 USD. So if you want to get yourself a last minute New Year’s present, hurry to www.confessionsXL.com.

Big thanks for all the great reactions from the early adopters btw. And I would really appreciate it, if you would spread the word.

A couple of days ago I got an e-mail from the Imperial War Museums about a Don McCullin exhibition in London. I have a huge respect for war photographers. I believe documentary photography is the most relevant genre in photography and I wish I had the balls and commitment to be a documentary photographer.

McCullin is no doubt one of the best ever to document conflicts and their impact around the world. And the Shaped by War is an exhibition with the largest collection of his work ever.

A lone anti-war protester confronts police in Whitehall during the Cuban Missile Crisis, London, 1962 - Copyright Don McCullin

The people from IWM London were so nice to provide a promo voucher for you. Download and print this voucher to get two adult price tickets for the price of one (valid until 31 January 2012).

I’m currently looking for an excuse to travel to London (maybe do a workshop) so I can visit this exhibition myself. If you go, let us know in the comments, how it is.

Having a personal style is important as a photographer but it’s probably harder to achieve than gaining good technical working knowledge. It takes years of hard work to find and then perfect your own style and vision. I’ve come to the point that I sort of know what I stand for and I think my clients recognize that too.

So style is important but to me it’s also a dangerous thing to have. You can get too confident and too experienced. It’s at that point that your style stops evolving. I can only talk for myself but I’m pretty sure a lot of my friends face the same problem. We’ve build a large comfort zone and the larger it gets, the harder it is to get out of it. It’s the been-there-done-that-got-the-t-shirt disease. But it’s an imagined disease. You may have been there and done that but there’s always another higher level at which you can be there and do it.

A long introduction to tell you that I did a test shoot which contained pretty much all things that I already knew how to do and a number of things that I don’t like. The inspiration to do this anyway was the Creative Live class by renowned beauty/fashion/celebrity photographer Matthew Jordan Smith.

The first part of the course is build up largely about a relatively simple beautylight/clamshell setup (see above): with a beautydish above the camera and a silver reflector below. This setup gives you very even light that makes every woman shine. The background is a white seamless and is let with the same single light source We moved our whole setup (including model) back and forth until we got the right amount of light on the background.

I’ve never been a big beautydish fan, it’s not that it’s bad but it’s just not my taste … or haven’t I tried hard enough to master it? The answer is … YES. It’s just easier to go back to the umbrellas and softboxes I know so well. It took some time of experimenting with all the possible variations in the setup but eventually we settled for the small Elinchrom white beautydish with the white deflector and the diffuser fabric (aka “sock”). I needed to push myself hard to try to make it work and I needed to push myself even hard to admit to myself that the beautydish can actually produce a kind of light that I like.

Does that mean a beautydish always works? Hell no, it depends on the model, the make-up, the story and the feeling. And that brings me to the TEAM. Most of my assignments (and budgets) dictate me to work alone (or with one assistant), without make-up artist, hair stylist and usually I work with “regular people” (no models). I’m good at getting good results by improvising. But if I want EXCELLENT results, you sometimes need to assemble the best possible team around you. So I called out for help on Facebook and got myself a real dream team.

I’ve been working with models Lucie Goossens and Sylviane Alliet before and experienced their combination of a great personality with great modeling skills. Both are very experienced models but they are still driven by a passion to create better and different images. It’s that passion that got them to drive over 100 kilometers to an unpaid test shoot with knowing any decent pictures would come out of it.

The same is true for make-up artist Inge Van den Broeck who performed her magic on Lucie and Sylviane. And she brings so much more to the shoot than just a case full of expensive make-up products. She brings vision, style and creativity to the shoot. Stylish and fashionable as I am, my directions didn’t go much further than: “uhm, yeah … I want that kinda sorta commercial beauty look … but not really commercial, you know … just a bit different … uhm … edgy without being edgy …” But Inge somehow understood my idea and did truly amazing things.

The last crucial member of the team was assistant Steve Bayens (who also assisted and shot video on the 70 EUR Studio shoot). Steve is a young photographer who’s just starting out with studio work. What he lacks in experience, is easily made up with spirit, a good eye and his ability to ask questions that challenge me.

I should have added another member to the team to really pull this off: a professional retoucher. I’m sure I could have found someone to retouch these pictures to perfection. But I just needed to get some quality time in Photoshop. I’m pretty good with Lightroom and about 95% of my work is Lightroom only. It suits my love for the beauty of the small imperfections and it allows me to work really fast.

But I wanted to go for this crisp commercial look and it requires lots of small corrections in Photoshop. I figured it would be a good challenge to brush up on my rusty (and limited) Photoshop skills. On the commercial jobs I can rely on professional retouchers but I have some personal projects coming up which will require me to do my own Photoshop work, so this was a good exercise.

I pushed myself so far out of my comfort zone for this shoot, that I was actually pretty nervous at the start although I would be working with all people that I know and like. But in the end I’m pretty pleased with the results. It’s not that I will suddenly shoot nothing but this kind of pictures but I learned a lot that will certainly have an impact on my work.

This was just the first part of the shoot. I’ll keep the second part for a future blog post.

Way too long A while ago I announced that I was working on the return of the Confession videos. Due to lots of work and the fact that I keep changing my mind about the best format, it’s all taking a bit longer than expected. But I want these new videos to become a long lasting project, so I figure I better take my time. One of the videos we already shot is about seeing if a digital medium format camera could fit into my often fast and improvised shooting style. Until the video is ready, I thought I’d already write up a review (sort of).

Until now the Pentax 645D was the only MF camera that kind of fitted my requirements. That’s not to say that the other medium format cameras are bad, on the contrary, but I need near DSLR productivity for it to work for ME. When I talked about my requirements for a MF camera, the guys from Servix told me that I wouldn’t be disappointed  with the PhaseOne IQ140. So I borrowed one with an 80mm 2.8 Schneider lens for a personal shoot that would test the camera in a run-and-gun improvised kind of shoot.

We used the PhaseOne in combination with my favorite Elinchrom Ranger Quadra and a Lastolite Easybox and the Quadra Adapter. There will be more technical and why-the-hell-I-choose-this info in the video. But let’s just say that I thought it would be a high end equipment package that fits my shooting style.

I didn’t have time to test the camera or even read the manual before this shoot, but it all felt very familiar. There are no complicated settings, just all the basic stuff I need. The camera is a heavy beast but it didn’t get tiring. It sits very well in my hands and I had no problem shooting handheld for a couple of hours. The IQ140 back is also easy to operate and has a nice iPhone-ish touch screen. And finally I found a MF back with a more than decent LCD-screen. I can really judge my pictures on this screen. Which is an absolute must if I should want to use a MF camera on a daily basis.

When it comes to handling, speed, ergonomics, battery performance, autofocus, … this is probably as good as it gets these days in MF land. It’s not quite as snappy as your normal high end DSLR but good enough for me not to get frustrated about it after an hour of shooting. In fact, for my portrait work I found the camera slowed me down just enough to make better pictures than with a DSLR. I sometimes feel shooting my Canons is a bit like eating at McDonalds: even if you have plenty of time, you still shove your meal in your face way too fast. I know that nobody is forcing me to shoot (too) fast with my Canon, but I can’t help doing it too often.

The huge sensor and the great glass, give you incredible files. I was blown away by the look and the detail of the pictures. It also seems like you can pull and push the RAW-files incredibly far and still retain great image quality. This is the main reason why I’d considering shooting MF and the IQ140 certainly delivers. I think I’m going to have a couple of really big prints made because the small web size certainly doesn’t do the images justice.

Before this shoot I was pretty convinced shooting digital MF was something I’d only do for my high end jobs. But now I’m not so sure about that any more. It’s still not a replacement for my 5D2 when it comes to reportage but I’m going to rent a Phase One more often for portrait and commercial assignments. The big issue is still: can I justify the much higher price for my work and my clients? At this point, I don’t know the answer, but I’m certainly going to give it some more thought.

I’m sorry if I gave away how one of the upcoming videos will end but I really like shooting with the PhaseOne.