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!
Almost four years ago I started my own YouTube channel. At the moment there are about 30 videos in there. Many of you found their way to my blog and social media profiles through YouTube and over the years it has served me incredibly well. I started it because I wanted to give something back to the photography community but as it often goes with things you do with a passion, it turned out to be something way bigger. The craziest things happened to me and my career (partly) thanks to my YouTube videos.
This was what got it all started:
Many of my friends thought it was crazy and stupid to put so much time and effort in creating these videos while at the same time giving away my knowledge for free. I’m not know for being smart, nor for being a good businessman but what started out as a passion for sharing turned out into so much more. It’s hard to tell how much business these videos create but one thing is sure: it helped my business in a big way. It creates name recognition for me as a photographer and teacher. It helps to convince people that my workshops and DVD are worth it and occasionally I even landed a job only because someone saw one of the videos.
But the most important thing is that these videos help me to grow as a photographer and have gotten me in contact with loads of interesting, great people. Many of them have became friends that supported me when I needed it, invited me into great conversations and made me laugh more often than ever.
It’s passion that made me start sharing these videos and it’s the same passion that made me keep doing it on an irregular bases. I get asked maybe 20 or 30 times a week why I don’t make these kind of videos more often. The answer is simple: it takes an incredible amount of time, energy and gear (aka money) to make a single video however basic they may be. From a business point-of-view it doesn’t make much sense anymore to do more videos. I already got more work than I can handle. The thing is … I love producing these things! It’s not so much the process of making a video that is fun. It’s the part that forces me to do personal work and figure out a way to make a picture that’s hopefully better than any of my previous work. So what do I do?
About six months ago, I sat down and spend a full day trying to answer that question. In short, the answer is:
If I can find a way to keep making photography videos without jeopardizing my business, I’ll do it.
I’m not sure if I can do it but after lots of thinking I decided to invest lots of time and a bit of money in at least giving it a try. How? Well let’s see if I can make it work by producing a combination of free and very affordable videos.
I did a lot of test projects. Some went better than others but I learned from all of them. By now, I think I figured out more or less how to create good content and still keep it manageable. At the moment there are a number of videos in different stages of production. There will be the free classic short YouTube videos but there will also be much more elaborated paid versions. These will deal with the shoot from concept to post processing and will be made available for a surprisingly cheap price. I’m hoping to launch the first new video in a couple of weeks.
Behind-the-scenes of a shoot we did last week with my favorite model. Big thx to Serge for shooting the video on this shoot.
The subject of this video is to see what you can get out of a low end, limited kit of gear (Panasonic GF1, 20mm 1.7, Lumopro LP160 and Cactus triggers. Here are some more pictures of that shoot with my favorite model Erika:
I really hope you are going to like the new Confession videos so I can make a lot more of them.
With all this Facebooking and Twittering, I seem to forget that I still have a blog too. I tell myself a thousand times to blog more but I also forget about it 999 times. I can’t believe that I still haven’t blogged about my fantastic week in Dubai at Gulf Photo Plus Fotoweekend, more than a month ago.
I had so much fun, learned a lot and met a bunch of amazing people in Dubai. To spare you a 15 page written report, I decided to take a video camera and make a movie about this event:
There’s another reason too why I invested in a new small but high quality video camera, took it with me everywhere in Dubai and brushed up on my rusty video editing skills. I’ll tell you about it soon.
I’ll also be posting some how-I’ve-done-this-picture-in-Dubai articles over the next days.
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
It’s been quiet on my blog. It happened before and it will happen again. Usually this happens just because of a very busy time. But the last months it was not just the heavy workload that kept me from blogging, I went through a very dark time in my personal life. After 10 years of marriage my wife decided to move out. I never saw it coming and it was a very hard kick in the face for someone for whom family is the most important thing in life. I won’t pretend that I understand it all and I don’t feel the need to blog the parts that I do understand.
I just know that I have no choice but to move on and start a new chapter of my life. I’m in the clear with myself and I just try to make the best of it. I have the kids every other week and I miss them like crazy when they are not with me. But I can still be the father that I always wanted to be. After my wife moved out, I decided to take the kids on a trip to the coast to get our minds of the big changes and show them that I’ll always be there for them.
We had such an amazing time and all enjoyed every second of it. Even though it was pretty cold, it was dry and the sun was out most of the time. We also had a lot of good conversations on how we have to go from here both emotionally and practically. I’m so proud of the way the kids handle this. Off-course they feel lost sometimes but they don’t hesitate to talk to me. They also understand my situation really well and help me out so well.
Lately I found myself again. And that’s thanks to the incredible amount of help and support I received from my family and friends. I feel very lucky that I can count on so many great people.
My main concern is being a good dad but to do that I need to figure out how to sort out the many practical and financial challenges I’m facing. I really want to keep the house and the studio but that won’t be easy. I’m going to have to refocus on some parts of my business to increase my income substantially. Some things are still a bit vague but every day my plans take more form. You’ll discover them over the next months and I hope I can count on your patience and support.
Here are the pics from day 2-5 from my 50/50 project.
Why the 50mm lens?
I promised to explain this project a bit more so let’s start by the lens choice, why did I choose the 50mm lens? Before (decent) zoom lenses start hitting the market, the 50mm fixed focal lens was considered THE standard lens and it often came bundled with SLR’s like you have kitlenses these days. A 50mm lens on a full frame lens is seen as the most neutral lens that comes close to the way the human eye sees. Our eyes can look at a wider angle but if you don’t count in the blurred edges of our vision, you’ll get a field of view close to that of a 50mm lens. Anything below that focal length can be considered a wide angle lens which distorts the edges and makes things close to the lens look larger than life. Any focal length above 50mm is in the tele range and starts to compress the depth.
I’ve been told that 50mm lenses are about the easiest lenses to construct. Most manufacturers have two or three version of the 50mm in their line-up but there will be at least one affordable lens. The 50mm 1.8 aka plastic fantastic may be flimsy, noisy and feel like a toy you get in your box of cornflakes but it gives you amazing image quality for around 100 EUR/dollars. If your budget is tight, you might at least pick up one of those if you are serious about your photography. On the upper end there are lenses like the 50mm f1.2 L which costs an arm and a leg (and maybe a lung). No doubt they are worth every of the many Euro’s if you use this lens all the time for professional work but I settled for the 50mm f1.4 USM lens. It’s much better build, more accurate in focusing and gives a better bokeh than the 1.8 but costs considerably less than the 1.2.
I used my 50mm mostly when shooting portraits in low light and for portraits with that typical ultra sharp, slightly cold look I find the 50mm gives me. But I never really considered using it a lot for anything else than portraits or for emergency low light work. That’s until I saw Jeff Ascough’s video on Canon’s Professional Network site (his blog is also an interesting read). Jeff says he uses the 50mm for 70% of his wedding images. That really made me smack my forehead repeatedly. Instead of seeing the limitations of this prime lens, I should be using the potential of it. So I started playing with the 50mm a bit in situation where I normally wouldn’t use it and got really excited. It’s wide enough to make establishing shots and it’s long enough to pick out details if you move in a bit closer. Because of the fast aperture you can work in near darkness and isolate subjects from the background. But what I found the biggest asset is that I could work a lot more low profile. I used it mostly on my 5D mkII (without the grip) and noticed that I could get really close to people without drawing too much attention. Try that with a 1D and a 24-70. What I always liked about primes is that they force you to look hard for creative angles that will give you better pictures.
These couple of little experiments tasted like more, so that’s why I came up with the 50/50 project.
After months of hard work and above all a lot of thinking (that really hurts) and changing my mind over and over again, it’s here … my new website. Almost three months ago, I wrote: “my website sucks” and it did … big time. So I’m really happy to announce the birth of my first real site and I would like to thank all of you for your input. It helped me a lot on deciding which way to go.
The biggest thank you should go to Sille who designed and programmed the site from the ground up on the Wordpress platform. The new logo was made by Shiva. Both had to be very patient with me, but did incredibly well.
I’m aware that there are still some minor bugs and typos in there. And I would certainly appreciate your input and remarks on the design, usability, navigation, … I’ll be taking some time off but when I get back into the working mood, we’ll examine all the input and make the site even better. Ideally a website should be a living thing to me and I think I have now a sturdy platform from which I can keep growing the site.
During the whole process of building the site, I’ve learned a lot and I will share it with you in a couple of weeks.
One of my main concerns for the new site was to show the pictures big. After all, taking pictures is what I do. You will have noticed that the blog design also has been changed to allow for way bigger pictures. There’s still a lot of unfinished pictures on my hard drive that aren’t ready to be shown. So to test out the bigger pictures, I’ve just put up some impressions of Oslo on a soaking wet day (the day before the Oslo workshop).
I hope you like the new site and like I said before: feel free to comment!
As a blogging photographer who’s blog is mostly read by other photographers, I probably focus a bit too much on the more technical shoots. I’ll keep posting the geeky stuff but I will try to remind myself to post some of my other work too.
Here are some of the results from a fashion shoot I did for Enolah a while ago:
I once spoke at a photo club with a very conservative view on the art of photography. Their response to my work: colors are unnatural, no detail in the shadows, blown highlights and way too little depth-of-field. I’m sure my strange crops and weird locations made some of them throw up in their camera bags. And you know what … I don’t care. I even tend to refuse those jobs where I have to keep within strict technical guidelines.
Too be honest, I wasn’t sure I was the perfect match for this shoot. But then lightning struck me. Refusing this assignment wouldn’t make me any better than the photo club guys. For a moment I was too arrogant to see this. But my job is to tell stories in the best possible way and for my client that was the way these pictures are. My challenge was to do the best possible job within a tight framework. The fact that my favorite model Erika, was going to be the model for this job and that I liked the clothes helped to take on the job too.
Soft light, detail in the shadows and highlights, working on a tripod, white seamless, f8, … it seemed so unlike me but to my surprise I really enjoyed this shoot. I enjoyed the challenge of lighting the details and structure of the fabrics without making the pictures look flat.
Once the lights, the background and the camera were set and Erika’s spot was marked we didn’t change the setup for the rest of the shoot (except for some minor adjustments). A lot of the atmosphere had to come from the poses and working in such a fixed setup allowed me to completely concentrate on posing. I found that to be extremely rewarding.
I adore the clothes and when I started talking to Griet, the designer, I immediately felt a connection. The philosophy behind her designs are very close to my views on photography. She also knew very well what she wanted and didn’t loose any time on changing her mind. I was shooting tethered (wifi) and once Griet saw the image she wanted appear on the laptop, we could move on to the next setup very fast. Nicki could have been a model herself but on this job she did a fantastic job with the make-up and styling. And Erika … well, she keeps amazing me.
I really enjoyed working with such a creative team. No ego’s, just working together to get the best results.
Check out the complete collection at the Enolah website.
I haven’t been blogging much lately (and that’s an understatement). The plan is to get up to speed again soon, but construction works, workshops and assignments take lots of my time these days. I also started the preparations for a reïncarnation of my website.
A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege, and it really was a privilege, to document the baptism and welcoming party of Tigist. This little girl shouldn’t be allowed to smile near the North Pole to prevent icebergs from melting and significantly raising sea levels.
Since she was only a few weeks in Belgium, I expected a shy, maybe even a bit scared, child. Instead, I met a funny, cute and lively princess. It was like she was putting me at ease instead of the other way around. It clicked from the first moment.
Tigist really enjoyed the calming presence of her big sister.
I was amazed by the strong family ties they created in such a short time.
A couple of weeks after the baptism, I also shot the welcoming party of Tigist. It was held in a very cozy venue but as usual with this kind of spaces, it’s not easy to photograph. The 5D mkII made it possible to get great quality images in the mostly very dim situations.
Tigist is a real artist that loves drawing.
She practically decorated the whole space in just a couple of hours.
I’ve been moved by the warmth of this family. I’m sure that they have a very bright future ahead of them and I wish them an amazing journey together.
And to end this post, this is my favorite picture of the set:
I know … my website sucks … BIG TIME. It made it in an hour or two in iWeb just to put something online. It’s buggy, ugly, very outdated and doesn’t even work properly in some browsers. I really want to do something about it and I want to do it as soon as possible. I’d love to have your input on things.
I’m very tempted to use something like Bluedomain or Bigfolio. Their sites look pretty cool and easy to use. But most of their templates are flash-only. I hear it’s not great for your ranking in Google and it can’t be displayed on an Iphone.
Livebooks and a photo folio seem to have solutions for it but Livebooks looks a bit too expensive and I’m not crazy about the designs of A Photo Folio.
A custom made website might be the best solution, but will it still be affordable? Or maybe have a Wordpress site designed. I’m familiar with the interface and the blog is the most important part of my site anyway. If I go for a custom build site, I want a local company so we can sit together in person.
Here’s what I absolutely want:
- fast loading portfolio site with huge images
- a couple of info-pages
- integration of my blog
- easy content management
- password protected client proofing
Optional:
- online ordering module
Do you have any experiences, comments, … Please let me know.