I know I’ve been neglecting my blog a bit lately and I do apologize for it. But things just keep being so insanely busy here. And the next week will be no exception because:

5 photographers
2 cameramen
24 hours
560 kilometers

No clients, no restrictions and no editors to limit our creativity on this quest for pictures.

Follow our photographic adventure live on www.thebouncesquad.com
starting on Monday 9 march 2009 at 10 am (GMT+1).

If we pass by our neighborhood, feel free to join us for some fun.

I almost forgot to tell you that my Dutch blog came in third on this Belgian annual site of the year competition in the photo blog category. Thanks to all that voted!

This blog made it in the top 100 photography blogs on the photography colleges blog.There are probably some other interesting sites to discover there.

Time flies, we are already a few days into 2009 and I finally found the time and energy to put up a new blogpost in quite some time. Let me wish you and your beloved ones all the best for 2009.

Time Flies! 2008 has been one hell of a rollercoaster. I had so many great moments with my family and friends, I met so many fantastic new people and I was lucky to be able to enjoy so many amazing photographic challenges.

Time Flies and has become a bit of a double edged sword to me too. I rolled from one thing into another and enjoyed every second of it. But I also started to miss some time when nothing happens, some spare hours for Bert, not Bert-the-photographer. I love photography so much that it hardly ever feels like working but the pace I’ve been living at for the last two years has been just a bit faster than my natural clock. I’m not suffering from a burn-out at all but I want to prevent that from happening in a few years time.

Time Flies and my kids grow every day. I feel very lucky to be able to spend so much time with my family. But if I’m honest I’m sometimes just too tired or distracted to enjoy the quality time like I should.

Time Flies and I don’t regret any second or decision. But now it’s time to slow down just a little and focus on the things I like most, both personally and professionally. The problem is that I can’t say ‘no’ and that I feel like I need to be a good father, friend, husband and photographer at the same time. Cutting back on giving back to the photographic community would seem like a logical choice but not for me, I even want to give back more. That’s why I decided to start LIME together with my friend Pieter. We figured that the only way to reserve the time to teach, inspire and motivate other photographers on a regular bases was to join forces and make giving back a little part of our business. That way I can cut back on some assignments I don’t really like and spend that time on LIME. From a business point of view LIME probably isn’t the best idea, there are other ways to make more money more easily. But from my personal point of view it makes a lot of sense. I hope it will allow me to spend more time on doing what I like most without a negative impact on my personal life.

Time Flies and it’s time to lift my photography to a higher level. In 2009 I want to spend some time on reflecting on my creative vision and redesign my business based upon that. I won’t take a 180 degree turn, but some modifications to my services and products are necessary to keep them in line with the evolution I went through since I started as a professional photographer.

Time Flies, so I want to get the most out of it. Organisation, streamlining, workflow management and outsourcing will be my keywords to ensure I spend time on the right things and stop to loose time on unimportant details.

Time Flies but shouldn’t make me forget to thank the people who make me a happy man:
- All of you for your comments, encouragements and critiques. You make me better photographer and person.
- My clients for giving quality photography a chance in a world where many people and companies are cutting back on creativity and quality.
- Fellow photographers for answering my questions and pushing me to new creative heights.
- Pieter for all the energy and humour he has put into a crazy project, and even more for his friendship and the good talks.
- My parents for their endless support and for being such fantastic grand parents to our kids
- My friends for forgiving me for not making enough time for them, for their support and no-nonsense approach to life.
- My kids for loving me with everything they have nomatter how many mistakes I make as a father.
- My wife for putting up with me on my bad days, for believing in everything I do and for making me feel like high school kid in love.

Time Flies, so I really should stop writing and hit my bed so I have the energy to spend a fun day with the family tomorrow.

The flu nor a very painful overstretched muscle between my ribs could stop up. www.squeezethelime.com is online. Go check it out!

I’m sorry if I’ve neglected my blog a bit during the last weeks but it was a real race to get the new house more or less ready to move in. It took blood, sweat, tears, buckets of paint and lots of friends to get it done. There’s still a lot to do but for now we’re fine.

We officially moved in two days ago and so far things seem to work out really well. The kids love their new rooms and are very excited about having a dedicated playroom. I was a bit afraid about how the kids would feel but it looks like that wasn’t necessary at all.

I’ll try to pick up blogging again and show you some pics of the new house soon. But be patient with me since I still have a huge backlog.

An incredible big thanks to all the fantastic friends who helped us realize this dream. Photographers and models make great painters/movers. We owe you a big party guys!

The last months have been so insanely busy for our family and the business. That’s why this blog isn’t updated as much as it once was. There are lots of things I want to write about, but I can’t seem to find the time nor the energy. Today I’ll try to make it up to you by writing a little update on the plans for the new house/studio.

We bought our current house about eight years ago. There was some paperwork involved at that time but not nearly as much as we get now. Luckily we can count on the help of the accountant and the bank. But even then, this whole paperwork mountain has been a horror experience for the paperofobian I am. Not even two days go past without a mail or call from the bank, acccountant, … These messages usually tend to eat up at least half a day of my already busy schedule. Incredible how complicated things are in Belgium.

The last weeks things seem to start rolling and it all becomes a bit more real. Since last week I’m not an independent freelance photographer anymore, now I’m the CEO of my own business (where did I leave my tie?). Things are also arranged with the bank and it shouldn’t take much longer before we can finally sign the final documents for the house. My wife Nancy has a painting holiday scheduled for next week. Let’s hope she can actually get started too.

This morning I came to the conclusion that it’s going to be really weird to leave our current house behind. It is after all the place where we lived for more than seven of the most decisive years of our lives. It’s not that we are moving to another country but we’ll still have to build up kind of a new life there. I also have mixed feelings about this new adventure for the kids. One of the main reasons to move was to give the kids more space and a better environment but I also know that Kobe in particular will have some difficulties to adapt. My heart bleeds when I have to have these long conversations with him every few nights about how moving is not a bad thing. Hopefully he can look at it with better feelings once the house has a fresh coat of color and he sees his own cool boys room. I’m sure it will be ok.

Let’s talk about the future studio then. At the moment it’s kind of a barn measuring roughly 12 by 16 meters. That’s a pretty big space already but things get even better when you know that it has two floors for almost the complete surface. The goal is to transform the ground floor into a big open multifunctional space. We’ll have to steal some square meters for restrooms, storage and a small kitchen (or a bar). In the image below you see how it looks now from the second floor. The walls that you can see on the left and on the right will be slammed down.

And here’s an image from the first/second floor. The roof will be replaced by an insulated metal roof with skylights. The left half will be a huge sitting space/lounge area and the ‘stage’ you see in the back will be closed off (probably by glass walls) to form my office. That way I only have to heat a small space (that’s still 3x larger than my current office) on cold days when the studio is not in use. On the right you see another slightly higher ‘stage’ (about the same size as the future office). I’m not sure what to do with it, so if you have any ideas, let me know.

I’m sure you can tell that we have a lot to do to get the studio up and running by march/april. So don’t be surprised if things are a bit slow on the blog from time to time.

Twitter,I had my reservations about what it can do for me but my nerdy friends tell me that NOT being on Twitter is like wearing white socks in sandals.

Determined not to become a social lowlife and motivated by a new mobile phone, I decided to check it out. I’m still not yet fully convinced it has any real use but boy is it fun. At least Twitter allows me to put out some proof of life in those weeks that I don’t have the time to write long blog entries.

My Twitter account is http://twitter.com/bertstephani. What’s yours?

I haven’t spoiled you with pictures lately although my camera’s aren’t on strike and my schedule is pretty filled up for the next months. There must be a few dozen pictures on my hard drive dying to race to my Flickr account. But I’m afraid that I’m in a huge work-in-progress-fase. Some pics, I don’t want to show yet, others I can’t show or I’m not allowed to.

So, I can just give you an appetizer:

I’m sure I’ll have some more time to bomb you with pics, once the kids can go back to school.

Our current house is practical, modern and pretty OK looking but it has become too small. Our three rascals need space and so do my wife and I. It has also been a dream to have my own big space for my photography.

We have been searching for a long time but this, my friends, is the gate to a bright and spacious future for my family and my business. It may not look impressive right now, but wait until we are finished.

Our list of demands was pretty long and it was really hard to find a place that fitted our demands in this area (near Brussels).

We discovered the house two weeks before our vacation. The timing was far from perfect as I was already burried in work. And then all of a sudden, I had to fit in a lot of thinking, talking and neggociating. We bit the bullet pretty fast but that was just the beginning: meetings with the bank manager, my accountant, architect, my parents, … It’s a substantial investment so a new businessplan had to be made and then we still needed to finalise it all. The day before we left on holiday I was physically and mentally empty but the fact that it’s all official now, makes it all worthwile.

Now you also know, why I’ve neglected my blog a bit lately. And with all the stuff that still has to be done over the next months, there will be probably some periods wherein I can’t blog at full force. But after that things are going to be better, WAAAAAYYYYYY better.

I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve been having some issues with the host of my sites. Their databases have been down pretty often (and for long times) recently. I talked to them and they are working on it (or so they say). I hope those downtimes will be a thing of the past soon. The host issues are the reason why I couldn’t keep my promise to post more of Suzanne in the weekend, but here they are.

Since it was only the second time Suzanne posed for a camera (and the first time wasn’t a succes), I thought it would be important to start in a way that would make her feel comfortable. Usually that means keeping it simple. So we started out without make-up, casual clothes, interesting location, natural poses, …

Having a relaxed subject is so important to me that I wouldn’t have minded if we didn’t make any usable pictures in the first hour. But I didn’t have to worry anyway, Suzanne turned out to be a natural.

To keep the lighting simple as well, we just looked for the best spots of natural light. The picture below is done with my ‘under cover technique’. The dense canopy is the cover and blocks any direct light coming from above. That way only directional yet soft light gets too Suzanne.

A small wardrobe change later, we let the sun provide a nice hair light. You just need to expose for the face (in the shadow) and NOT for the direct sunlight in the hair. Your camera’s light meter might have some trouble with the bright highlights and wants to underexpose in those circumstances. That’s why I usually work in manual mode (using spot metering might help too).
This kind of setup usually works best when the model is standing on a bright surface. The light that reflects of this surface fills in the shadows in the face. If you’d take the same picture on a dark surface, you’d get a bit more shadow under the nose and eyes).

Don’t worry if the surface your model is standing on isn’t bright. You can still use the technique by putting a reflector, bed sheet, piece of styrofoam, … on the ground. I personally think that this looks way more natural and subtle than holding a reflector under the model’s face.

A club sandwich later, we were joined by the fantastic make-up artist Inge VDB who performed some of her magic. I don’t work with MUA’s that often but I do realise that a good MUA provides an added value to my work. Just like in photography, technique is important in make-up. But the real talent of someone like Inge is that she uses her techniques to improve the story that I want to tell in the picture.

During this whole day, I used mainly available light only but I couldn’t resist making a few with flash anyway. In the picture below, we used a speedlight with shoot through umbrella to camera left for the main light and a second speedlight with grid on the opposite side for a hair light. This picture was shot a bit after noon on the street.

The speedlights got back in the bag because it would be stupid not to use the fantastic light conditions mother nature provided us with on this day.

None of these pictures went through photoshop yet, just a touch of Lightroom 2.0.

We finished with a bit of an edgier look in clothing and make-up to get some more variation in the set of pictures.

Inge, thanks for your magic
My Egyptian friend, thanks for referring Suzanne to me.
And Suzanne, thanks for this fantastic and fun shoot.