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.

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.

In a dimly lit environment, flash will freeze the action at lower shutter speeds but on this bright day, with the sky as the backdrop, you would see movement if you had to shoot within the normal sync speed range. With the new TTL PocketWizards you can sync at any shutter speed with the help of High Speed Sync (FP Sync for Nikon, I believe). I’ve never used High Speed Sync that much but it seemed perfect for the shot I had in mind on this very sunny day. For those who don’t know what High Speed Sync is: it’s basically a way to use flash above the maximum sync speed. These shots are taken just before noon at ISO100, f/4 and 1/4000.

The downside of High Speed Sync is that your speedlights loos quite a bit of power. Because I wanted to underexpose the huge amount of ambient light, I had to use two 580EXII’s on full power. Both flashes, slightly apart, are placed to camera right just outside the frame.

The secret to make this shot work was to get Kobe high enough so the sky could be the background. It’s easy if you have a trampoline in the backyard.
We tried a couple of shots with Kobe really kicking a ball. It soon became clear that it was possible … but it would take a lot of jumps to get it right. So I opted for shooting the jump and the ball separately and composite them together in Photoshop. I like to get things right in camera but if it’s faster and easier in Photoshop, I have no ethical objections to it.

The girls also wanted to have their own trampoline picture:

I’ll be doing a Pocketwizard TT1/TT5/AC3 workshop on November 13th. So if you want to know about the advantages of this system, book your spot.

THE IDEA
The plan is to combine a family weekend trip with a hands-on family photography workshop. Not only does this allow you to learn a lot in a relaxed environment but you get to make tons of great pictures of your own family. The other photographers will also add their style, talent and creativity to your family album.
We’ll start by meeting up and getting to know each other on Friday night and talk about vision and how to translate it into your style of telling the story of a family. Over the next two days, the photographers will get together for a number of practical and theoretical sessions about: working with families, natural light techniques, off-camera flash techniques, documentary style photography, conceptual family portraiture, … Between those sessions you are free to practice what you’ve learned.
It’s not like your family will have to be on posing duty the whole weekend. It’s up to you to do things together with other members of the group or on your own.

PRACTICAL

- When: November 27-29
- Max 4 participants and their families
- Where: I was thinking about going to Centerparcs De Haan because it’s along the beautiful Belgian coast and I know the area pretty good. This kind of bungalow park is also suited for kids of all ages.
- Price: The workshop fee will be probably around 400 – 450 EUR (excl. VAT). You’ll have to take care of food and accommodation. A cottage is around 250-500 EUR (depending on the type of cottage).  I’ll contact the park to see if we can get a group reduction.

Click here if you are interested so we can get everything in motion ASAP.

In fact scuba diving isn’t the reason why I bought the E-PL1 and the underwater housing. I got it because I’ve always had this special thing with water and I got frustrated with the fact that cameras don’t like to get wet. There’s lots of stuff I want to shoot in, on and near the water without having to worry about my expensive gear. Kobe and Maya, me two eldest kids, are crazy about being in the water. So I took the E-PL1 with me to the beach to see if I could have some fun with it.

Kobe and his buddy Cedric had loads of fun, jumping into the waves.

Maya and Cedric also had a lot of fun posing for the camera.

At one time we were on the beach, heavy clouds came rolling in. While everyone else was scrambling our beach gear together, I went into the pretty heavy surf to shoot some dramatic seascapes.

On the last two days of our holiday Kobe and May took their first surfing lessons. The weather wasn’t very good but the surf was.

Kobe did extremely well for his first time on the surfboard.

Maya even managed to surprise everyone by standing up on her very first run on the board.

Here’s another one of Maya and one from another girl in her group.

And here’s Cedric with the surfing teacher:

The shot below is probably my favorite of this really great holiday with the kids.

You can probably tell that I’m really digging this h2o thing. It’s so challenging and I got so much to learn and discover. At the moment I’m editing a pretty extensive “educational” behind-the-scenes video of an underwater pool shoot. So if you don’t like my water stuff, stay away from the blog for a while.

I spent pretty much every minute of this holiday with the kids but Lente and Mario, didn’t just let us stay at their house, they also offered to watch the kids for a day, so I could go diving. I went on a 2-dive daytrip with the Haliotis Dive Center to a group of off-shore Islands, The Berlengas. After my first scuba photography experiment in our local zero visibility waters, I was dying to see how much easier it is to shoot in relative clear waters. That’s why I took my E-PL1 with me.

The 40-minute ride over the rought Atlantic on the high powered RIB (Rigid Inflatable Boat) was quite spectacular and fun but once anchored the choppy sea made half of the divers feed their breakfast to the fish. I felt reasonably well but after a pretty adventurous way of entering the water, I was glad to be in the peaceful underwater world.

I was surprised by the abundance of color on the rocks and used this as a background for my first subject: a decent sized crab. Not the best picture but it’s a great illustration on how a flash can bring back the colors underwater. Water absorbs color: the deeper you go, the more colors disappear. At 20 meters most of the red, yellow and orange is gone … unless you take a light or flash. I was so excited with my subject that I forgot to aim my flash well. The flash only illuminates the top left corner of the image. The other parts are lit with ambient light only. See the difference in color. Unfortunately I didn’t get a second chance to take the shot because I got overrun by a group of frantic divers.

This trip was for experienced divers only. I consider myself to be a diver that just fits into this category but I found out that this was a huge underestimation of my skills if compared with those of most of the other divers on the boat. It’s not that they were really bad (ok, some sucked) but it’s not the kind of relaxed diving you do with divers who take their time to explore the area without kicking a fin too much. There were divers everywhere, swinging arms and fins into my face and camera. On top of that, they went way too fast to enjoy the fauna and flora. So I decided to position myself as the last person in the group. That way nobody would bump into me, if I stopped for a second to take a picture. But after each picture I took the group was just a hazy couple of fins and bubbles in the distance and I had to swim hard to catch up.

I guess it’s pretty clear by now that this kind of diving is not very well suited for photographers. But I enjoyed the dive and tried to make some halfway decent snapshots of things that I saw, like this nudibranch.

I’m sure it would have been an amazing dive if we had the time to peek into cracks and holes but the speed made it not much more than an average dive. Luckily we got a nice surprise during our ascent to the surface. A big school of gray triggerfish suddenly appeared right in front of us. They stayed just long enough to fire of a couple of shots.

After lunch break (luckily ashore) we went for our second dive. The sea got even more agitated (at 8 meters depth we still got thrown around by the swell) and so got most of the divers. So there was even less chance to take some pictures. I didn’t get to shoot anything but a couple of nudibranches.

Nudibranches comes in many colors and patterns. I really like this little splashes of color. These were smaller than 2cm so ideally I would need a macrolens to shoot them. All kinds of lenses are used for underwater photography but the practical consequences of shooting under water make extreme wide angle lenses (including fisheye lenses) or macro lenses the best options. At the moment I only got the 14-42 kitlens (equivalent to 28-84 on full frame) which is not wide enough for wide angle work and it doesn’t focus close enough for real macro. But that doesn’t bother me. I’m still very new to underwater photography, so I better experiment some more with the cheap kitlens before I spend a ton of money on other lenses.

Anyway, I tried to make the best of it by photographing the nudibranches in their environment and choosing the right background and light to make them stand out from the background.

I wish I could have experimented much more but I still enjoyed the dives. I learned some valuable lessons from watching all the crappy images on my computer and the few decent ones, motivate me to keep improving my underwater photography skills.

Since I took the Olympus with me, I thought I might as well try to make some other pictures in the water with it, but that’s for the next blog post.

The little Ixus has a pretty respectable age in terms of digital cameras. A while ago I conducted a workshop for Canon with the new Ixus range. Oh man, they have certainly come a long way since my 860IS. But still, as long as it takes pictures it’s the photographer’s challenge to make good ones with it, no matter how old the camera is.

Since I got the GF1, the old Ixus doesn’t get used very often anymore. The reason why I took it with me on holiday is for the kids. It has become their camera (mostly Kobe is the shooter). With the Canon waterproof housing, I don’t have to worry even if they want to make pictures on the beach or in the pool.

The first few days of our holiday, I spent quite some time on the beach as the only adult watching my three kids and Cedric, the son of our kind host. Leaving without a camera is rather unthinkable for me but I was a bit worried about getting too much sand in my GF1 and my Olympus E-PL1 with underwater housing was a bit too bulky (more about the Olympus later). So I took the Ixus and kind of rediscovered the joy of a waterproofed point-and-shoot.

When I got home and I started processing the pictures I was rather disappointed with the lack of detail in the JPEG-files after being used for a while to the GF1-RAWs. But then I remembered that I used to like black and white combined with going wild on the black- and contrast slider in Lightroom with the Ixus files.

Screw detail, I like black!

Screw noise, it gives you images character!

Screw burned out highlights, white is a color too! (I know, technically it’s not)

Screw cleaning the water drops from your lens, it’s fun to see what the light will do with it!

Despite the lack of control and image quality, I’m truly happy that I brought that old Ixus. I shot lots of great memories that I wouldn’t have shot if I didn’t bring a camera that I’m not too concerned about. I may not be the most careful photographer when it comes to my gear. But I know how hard I have to work to pay for the toys so I don’t want anything to happen to the tools of my business. But an old camera that’s just gathering dust serves nothing. It’s not that I want to break it but it wouldn’t be a disaster if it died while shooting family memories.

My advice: look into your cupboard for that old camera that you aren’t using anymore and take it on your next trip to shoot in places where you don’t want to take your darling camera.

Those of you who follow me on Facebook won’t be surprised that I picked the GF1 as my primary camera for this trip. Most of my family pictures are taken with that little camera. With the risk of sounding like a Panasonic missionary, I’ll say it time and time again: The GF1 is an amazing camera that offers near DSLR quality in a near compact camera size.

For this year’s holiday we went to the area of Peniche, Portugal. Our friends Lente, Mario, Cedric and Claudia were so kind to let us stay in their fantastic new house. I’m sure they will think twice next time they invite two adults and three kids to stay for 12 days at their place. It was my first time in Portugal and I really like the area. It’s still wild and largely untouched by tourism. It’s amazing to have a spectacular beach all for yourself.

I like the black & white images out of the GF1 so much that I rarely use them in color. But I found out that the colors are actually pretty nice once I got a feel of how to handle them in Lightroom. I know the colors in these pictures are all but “correct”, but to me it’s about creating a certain mood.

One of the nice things about the GF1 is that it looks like a compact camera to the untrained eye. I hate looking like an ordinary tourist but sometimes it’s the best way to shoot strangers without attracting attention. The focus and shooting speed of the GF1 makes it even easier to capture a scene.

The 20mm 1.7 pancake lens is the perfect travel companion for the GF1. It’s size and weight make the camera pocketable (that’s if you have large pockets). With the Micro 4/3 format and it’s 2x crop factor, the 20mm becomes a 40mm. That’s still wide enough to capture and overview and doesn’t distort much if you use it up close for a portrait. So even though it’s a prime lens, I find it to be a good all-rounder. Image quality is great and with a maximum aperture of 1.7 you don’t need much light and you can throw the background out of focus.

I won’t say that the GF1’s dynamic range is at the same level as a full frame DSLR but it handles contrasty scenes surprisingly well. It never ceases to amaze me about how much image info you can still get out of a RAW-file.

High ISO performance might not be amazing but I won’t hesitate to use the camera at ISO 800 and for black & white, I’ll use ISO 1600 without worrying about getting too much noise.

For such a small camera it’s amazing how easy and fast you can control all the settings. I really think it’s a photographer’s camera. At the same time the automatic functions perform pretty well. I always shoot full manual on my DSLR’s and with the GF1 I also like the full control of manual. But I put it more and more in aperture priority mode to have it always ready.

With a twist of the mode dial, the GF1 becomes a simple point-and-shoot. Panasonic Intelligent Automatic mode (iA) does a really great job in getting a decent full auto exposure. We call it the Donkey Mode (i-A) and that’s the mode the kids use or what we set the camera when a random dorky tourist takes a dorky picture about our family.

In the next articles I will explain you why I also took some other cameras with me, but if I had to take just one, it would be my GF1.

I always adapt my gear needs to the subject and the circumstances trying to find a balance between having enough technical options and avoid having too much gear that can disturb the flow of a shoot. Sometimes that means giving up some technical options to ensure good interaction, certainly if the attention span of your subject is pretty short.

Here are some of the communion pics of Kobe. I’ve shot all the images in 15 minutes around my house. Maya assisted me by preventing my light stand from getting blown over by the wind.

So what gear did I use?

I shot everything with the 5D mkII and the 70-200 2.8 L IS. This camera keeps giving me great image quality and the 70-200 is the perfect portrait companion. Thanks to the long and fast lens, I get good backgrounds pretty much everywhere. The fast glass allows me to throw the background out of focus and thanks to the narrow angle of a long lens, I can find many different backgrounds in one spot by just moving my camera a couple degrees. When slightly overexposed I find the 70-200 gives me nice creamy skintones while keeping the facial features sharp.

Lighting wise I took a single 580EX II with an umbrella, mounted on a lightstand. It’s small, light and gives me lots of options if I can combine it with available light. I can use it without an umbrella to create a sunny hair light or use it as a soft main lightsource.

The 580EX II is triggered by a Pocketwizard TT5 with a TT1 and AC3 zone-controller on top of my camera. Although the TTL works pretty well in these circumstances I shoot mostly full manual on my camera and flash for ultimate control over my exposures. After lots of practice I’m pretty good at guessing aperture, shutterspeed, iso and flash power, so I don’t loose any time with it. By shooting full manual the exposures are also consistent which cuts down a lot of time in post processing. The nice thing about the TT5/TT1 combo is that I can control everything from the camera and I don’t have to worry about max sync speed, as the pocketwizards will automatically switch to high speed sync when I go over my max sync speed.

It’s usually not hard to find some soft ambient light if you know where to look. It’s way harder to find soft light with the RIGHT DIRECTION. On overcast days like here, the biggest amount of light comes from straight above which puts the eyes in the shadow and creates shadows under the nose and chin. They might be less ugly than with hard light from above but they still are not very flattering. I often alter the direction of the light by blocking the light that comes from above. It’s simple but not always practical. Another option, and the one I used here, is to use a flash to give the light some direction. The first picture below is takes with only ambient light. For the second picture, I added a speedlight, to camera left.

As you can see from the un-flashed picture, I’m only shooting the ambient light slightly under exposed, probably not even a full stop. By adding a flash, slightly above the ambient light levels, you maintain the soft light feel of the overcast sky but you add direction to the light creating more pleasing shadows and sparkles in the eyes.

This might not be a spectacular dramatic technique but it helps to keep a rather natural soft feel to the portraits.

Being on the receiving end of photography was a humbling experience that made me understand once more how privileged it is to be a photographer and be part of other people’s lives.

This is the reason why we forget about the low pay, countless hours and fierce competition in our industry. This is why we keep learning, practicing and redefining our creative vision.

This is why I became a photographer.

Let’s just go out and shoot our clients, families and friends and share with them the gift of photography.