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.

Lately, my buddy Stijn and I have been having conversations about “Why does nobody do any snorkeling in Belgium?” The answer might be that there’s only cold and murky water around here. But as scuba diver who both have been enjoying the Belgian underwater world, we know that it’s actually worth wrestling into a thick wetsuit and still have your ass frozen after two minutes. We also agree that you often see the most interesting things during the shallow part of a dive. So why not leave the heavy scuba gear at home and just go snorkeling?

And that’s exactly what we did on a grey Sunday in November. Finding a suitable snorkeling location was a challenge. We didn’t want to go to the known diving spots and I couldn’t find a single snorkeling location on Google. So we decided to just go to a fishing pond nearby and see if it was worth the plunge.

I must admit that two guys walking towards a fishing pond in wetsuits carrying underwater cameras get some very strange looks from hikers, joggers and dog walkers. But hey, I’m almost unrecognizable with a mask on my face and a snorkel in my mouth.

When I was getting my underwater photography kit ready, I suddenly got the idea to use the SLR Magic 12mm Hyperprime with the Olympus E-PL1, which I use for underwater photography. A quick test, confirmed that the lens actually just fitted my Olympus underwater housing. As you can see from the above the water shots, there’s some vignetting because the housing’s lens port is a bit too small to give the Hyperprime an unobstructed view. But being a vignette-fan, I don’t care.

The biggest challenge was to operate the lens underwater. With gaffer tape and some pieces of old wetsuit, I managed to operate the lens’ focus ring with the housing control that’s usually used to control the zoom settings for the 14-42 Olympus kitlens. I set the aperture somewhere between 2 and 2.8 knowing that I wouldn’t be able to change it once i locked the housing. This improvised setup worked pretty well for 10 minutes but then my construction stopped working and the focus was stuck at around 10cm in front of the lens port. This wasn’t really a problem as the whole reason to use this lens, was to try some close focus wide angle shots. So the rest of the swim, I was convicted to finding subjects and then rock the camera back and forth to get them in focus.

After the initial shock of cold water entering your wetsuit, it was actually rather doable in the water. Visibility was around 1+2 meter, which is pretty good in Belgium.

We figured that as this is a fishing pond, there should be some life in it (or some very stupid fishermen around it). But this time of year, nature goes to sleep and except for some plants, there wasn’t much life to discover. But I believe that there’s always a picture to be found. So I started looking for “dead nature”. Like mussels:

Dead crayfish:

Or submerged leafs and their reflection on the water surface.

I shot al these pictures on manual setting to control the ambient light and I let my Inon S-2000 underwater flash figure out the exposure for the main subject. Usually I set the flash compensation to minus a stop or so, but the Inon actually does a really great job on figuring the right exposure.

If you’ve never enjoyed the temperate underwater world, this might be very strange, but this was actually a very enjoyable experience for both Stijn and me. I will certainly do more of these little snorkeling expeditions. If you got a wetsuit and a mask, feel free to join us.

I’ve been playing around with the SLR Magic 12mm f/1.6 Hyperprime for a couple of weeks now. So what do I think of it after having used it a bit more after my first impressions?

Last week I did a family session with some friends of ours and their four fun kids. I shoot family sessions mostly with my 5D mk2, but I also keep the GF1 with me at all times, because particularly kids respond to that little camera different than to a huge DSLR. We had great hard sun light to play with under a huge viaduct. For the color pictures, I tried to imitate that same kind of light with a single off-camera speedlight in spots that the sun couldn’t reach.

So what about that lens? Well, it does everything the specs promise: it’s fast, more than decent image quality, it’s wide and full manual. For me those two last things are what holds me back to use it very often. First of all, I’m not a wide shooter, except when it’s extremely wide. The 24mm full frame equivalent focal length, is just not my thing. But that’s a very personal thing, I know lots of photographers who swear by that 24mm as the ideal focal length.

The full manual thing is another problem to me. Setting the aperture, is not a problem at all and the fact that it’s a stepless aperture, is nice (specially for video). The manual focussing ring is very smooth and in combination with the zoom function on the GF1’s screen, it isn’t hard to focus manually. But I often use the GF1 for some fast one-handed snapshots from the hip and then the manual focus is just too slow to shoot with a large aperture. But again, that’s a personal thing.

Does that mean that the Hyperprime will gather dust in the cupboard from now on? Well, it will certainly gather dust but only in my jacket pocket when I’m traveling or walking the streets. It’s a great and affordable lens to have with me for those occasions where my favorite 20mm 1.7 pancake lens, just isn’t wide enough. If I shot wide very often, I would probably replace the SLR Magic 12mm with the Olympus 12mm f/2 which is supposed to be a great lens too and it has autofocus. But it’s also more expensive.

Since I wrote the draft for this post, I think I might have found a really good use for the Hyperprime, but that’s for the next time folks.

I just got a mail from the Spanish Mambo magazine to announce they are launching a paper version of their online magazine in January. I didn’t even know the online magazine existed but being in love with the fresh wave of contemporary photography in Spain, I went over to the site for a quick look.

The quick look, turned out to be a pretty long look. The magazine is not about barrel distortions, new toys nor is it about lengthy arty farty interviews. It’s about the pictures and there lots of inspirational ones in there. I really dig the concept and the editors certainly seem to have an idea about who the up and coming photographers are. Very fresh, very inspirational, I’m a fan.