Ine has been helping me out as a model on quite a few workshops and equipment tests but we never really did a proper shoot together. We talked about shooting many times but our agendas seemed to be rather incompatible. But at the end of last year we finally managed to do a shoot. We decided to do a sad story about a lonely girl. So we went outdoors at night and tried to setup some dramatic light. Ine dug deep into herself to get the tears flowing.
To be honest, we settled on no story at all, we both just felt like shooting and experimenting. The tears are from the ice cold wind.
After ten minutes outside in the cold, my trigger finger started trembling so bad that I managed to shoot faster in single shot mode than the motordrive can. Five more cold minutes later, my hands pretty much stopped working and we wisely decided to continue our shoot indoors. Ine kindly agreed to explore and experiment with some ideas I’ve been thinking about for a while.
I’ve always liked to do a lot with little. It was born out of necessity, when I started I just didn’t have much gear so I had to be creative and inventive with what little I had. I slowly started investing in more and better gear but stayed true to the Strobist philosophy of “less gear, more brain”. It suited the kind of assignments I mostly did in those days: annual reports, family portraiture, corporate portraits, weddings, … All work where clients really appreciated my ability to work fast, travel light and yet get good and affordable results. Nowadays I get to do more and more bigger commercial work in which there’s time and budget to work with big lights and crews. I dig the complete control and the freedom to work for hours towards one image. But the more “big” stuff I do, the more I feel the need to counterbalance it somehow with more intuitive, organic personal work with little gear.
For a while I felt really torn between having the complete control of shooting “big” and the intimacy of shooting “small”. A couple of months ago, it struck me that I don’t have to choose between the two. It seems logical but even though I refuse to be pigeon holed into just one little niche of photography, I kept feeling like I should specialize and build my name into just one thing. There are valid commercial reasons to limit yourself to a very defined “look” but I feel that for me these limitations kill my creativity. And isn’t it just that creativity, that is my most valid asset. It’s the only thing in my business nobody else has.
I got lots of creative ideas boiling in my head for personal projects. Some require to be shot “big” and will probably speak to potential commercial clients. But I also feel the need to go back to my roots from time to time and shoot intimate, dramatic portraits with the beauty of the imperfection.
In this shoot with Ine I tried to get a certain atmosphere I’ve been thinking about for a while. I believe it can only be obtained when shooting with minimal gear, so I can focus 95% of my attention on the subject. I’m not quite where I want to be with this, but it’s getting in the right direction. I’m sorry if this blog post is a bit confusing and vague. That’s because I haven’t figured everything out just yet. But I find the whole thought process interesting to share and it will certainly be continued over the next months. I’ll talk about what I want to achieve, what inspired it and how I will eventually make it work.
I got some other shoots planned to explore this atmosphere even more. Big thanks to Ine for a fun shoot without any guarantees to get some good pictures (because I’m working out of my comfort zone). I certainly hope Ine will be willing to do a rematch once I got everything figured out.
The best way to show how I light something is to show the whole process. Whenever I have time during a workshop, I ask the class to give me an assignment. And then walk through the process including the mistakes. You need to understand that it’s a way of thinking combined with lots of screwing up and the ability to fix those screw-ups.
At GPP Fotoweekend one of my classes gave me the assignment to shoot a picture of a girl who’s sad and feels lonely because she just lost her cat. Many people who’ve been to one of my workshops know that I have a thing with dead cats. If you want to know what, you just have to book a spot on my next workshop
I decided that I wanted to show her loneliness by placing her alone and rather small in a pretty empty setting. The auditorium was a great location to do that. First I set my ambient exposure to get some detail but overall it’s underexposed.
The reason why I wanted to underexpose the ambient light, is because I wanted to light her face with a gridded speedlite. This puts all the attention to her and makes it stand out that she’s alone even more.
For the final shot, we added another speedlite behind her for separation and to define the shape of the chairs behind her. All this creates more depth in the picture.
This one works pretty well I think but I don’t always succeed in these kind of challenges. And actually I don’t care, I always learn something.
Here are some snapshots taken at the workshop Tom, Pieter and I gave together at Belgium Digital Live. We all took some pics with my Panasonic GF1, so I don’t know who took which picture.
Below you can see the only moment (5 minutes before the start) that Pieter and Tom were acting serious while I got caught without my pants.
Pieter started of with a section on how to pose couples.
Pieter made some great slides to illustrate his points … unfortunately he forgot the slides at home and improvised with post-it notes and alternative presentation screens.
I got myself a new girlfriend out of the audience during a practical posing exercise. Our on stage romance didn’t last long because Tom stole her from me and got to dance with her.
Next up was Tom who gave the 80-people audience 10 tips to bounce better (bouncing light that is).
Last but not least, it was my turn. To end in style, we decided to do a live “Epic Dirt” shoot with Tom as the subject and Pieter as the make-up artist. This is the end result:
But I also like this black and white version:
The people who already knew us, probably expected that this wouldn’t have been your ordinary workshop. But I’m afraid that those who didn’t, ended up on the sofa of a shrink trying to shake off this traumatic experience.
Product photography is not really ‘my thing’ because products usually don’t hold an interesting conversation (not to say that all my human subjects do). Usually I’ll be happy to refer product work to some friends who are good at that kind of stuff. But if it’s part of a bigger assignment, I’m happy to play around with lights to take pics of some products for a couple of hours. Last week I shot annual report / general website pictures for a bio pharma company. It was mostly about capturing people during their work but we also needed some more abstract illustrative pictures. That’s when we made this picture of colorful test tubes.
The colors we got by playing around with simple food coloring products. We shot this in an office that we transformed into a table top studio within ten minutes. In the picture below you can see the setup.
The most important light is the light coming from behind the test tubes. I used two Canon 580EXII flashes with Pocketwizard Flex TT5‘s pointed at 2 sheets of xerox paper taped to the cabinet. The paper becomes a washed out white background AND the main light source as it brings out the colors of the liquid. A Lumopro LP160 (on optical slave) with a translucent umbrella kicks in a tiny bit of fill light. Although I really like the TTL-capabilities of the TT5′s, I set all flashes to manual to make sure I got consistent results frame after frame.
The camera bag in the picture, isn’t there by accident. If you shoot transparent things on a white background, you often don’t see the glass anymore. By adding negative fill (something black) to the sides, the edges of the test tube stand out because they reflect the black object. That’s why I put the bag on the right and on the left (outside of the frame) I’ve placed some black dictionaries that I found in the office.
It’s not a very complicated shot, but if you lack the knowledge about light it can take ages to find a solution through trial and error. And you probably won’t be able to duplicate the effect in other circumstances. You all know that I’m a firm believer in having a sound knowledge about light. Every time I shoot something like this, I want to tell people about the book: Light: Science and Magic. It’s not the easiest book to digest and you will curse the writers for putting so much information into one book. But once you wrestled through it, you will be very thankful that they did.
I’m sure the shot could be even better but sometimes time, budget and situation ask for some improvisation with what you have in handy. This was just one of the 270 final pictures I shot that day.
I’m going to be pretty busy, this is on my schedule:
- 2-day hand-on Motivational Light workshop
- An introduction to my vision on Lighting
- Guerilla shooting workshop
- a talk about my work and my mistakes
I’m sooooo impressed with the professional attitude and hard work that the Gulf Photo Plus team is putting into Fotoweekend. I’m convinced we are going to have a blast. Bookings go really fast apparently so if you want to be part of this adventure, don’t hesitate and book your spot(s) now. Booking and more info about the workshops can be found at the Fotoweekend website.
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
I’m so excited, after six months of blood, sweat and tears my Motivational Light DVD is finally available.
Check out the official trailer that Pieter made.
We drove ourselves to exhaustion to get it finished but that’s easily forgotten when I look at the end result. The goal was to make a 90 minute instructional DVD, but we ended up with two and a half hours of video about learning how to light. We also tried to squeeze in as much small practical hints and tips as possible. On top of that, there’s an hour of video about how I post processed a number of pictures I shot for the DVD. And then we still have a long section about gear that we just couldn’t fit into the DVD. We’ll release those videos and some more unused footage soon as free online bonus material.
I’m very curious about your reviews, comments and reactions, so please let me know what you think in the comments.
We also would be very thankful if you would help us to spread the news about Motivational Light.
The wait is almost over … we are almost there. If we don’t encounter any unexpected setbacks my lighting DVD should be available by the end of this month. I’ve been thinking, writing, studying, testing and investigating the content of this DVD ever since I got the idea to do a DVD a few years ago. I’ve been analyzing what information photographers really need to bring their lighting to a whole new level. And I’ve been working very hard to find the best form of getting that information and vision across.
And even then, it took Pieter and me many months of hard work to plan, shoot and edit all this together. Right now we are editing like crazy to get the final details right. I’m extremely happy and proud about the way it all comes together in the editing booth. So I’m very excited that it will be available really soon now.
Here’s another sneak peek that will give you an idea of what we got out of our first days of recording.
We are flooded with questions about the DVD, so let me give you some answers:
- The DVD is in English (or at least my interpretation of English).
- We are still editing but the final result will run somewhere between two and three hours. The biggest part is about lighting but there will be also some sections on gear and postprocessing. We also tried to squeeze in as much small practical tips as possible.
- We’ll offer the DVD as a download. That way you can access your purchase immediately and we avoid having to ask a higher price to cover costs like handling, disks, packaging, shipping, taxes, … We also shot everything in High Definiton and with the download you can enjoy the full quality. For those who want to have a physical disc, we’ll offer a slightly more expensive download + double DVD version. So as long as you have an internet account and a credit card, you can buy it anywhere in the world.
- We still need to finalize some last calculations but the final price for the download version of the DVD will be around 125 EUR / 175 USD
- We are honored that so many of you want to preorder but since you can have immediate access to the download, there’s no need to preorder.
If you have any more questions about the DVD, I’ll be happy to answer them in the comments.
For the last couple of months I’ve been working countless hours on an instructional DVD about lighting. This week we entered the final post processing stage and I’m very thrilled to see all the hard work come together in the editing suite. The DVD should be available worldwide in a couple of weeks. In the mean time, let’s entertain you with some outtakes/bloopers:
The idea of doing a DVD has been ripening for about two years now. I didn’t want to start it head over heels. Instead I’ve been writing and rewriting the script many times just to make sure that it’s a useful addition to the lighting videos that are already out there.
Here are already a couple of shots we made for the DVD.
Shared fun is doubled fun, so I’m really happy that my friend Pieter also got himself a medium format film camera. I’m sure that if an experienced film shooter would overhear our conversations, he would shake his head but it’s a lot of fun sharing the little knowledge and the bags of bullshit we think we know about film. Pieter got himself a Mamiya C3 which makes my Hassy look like a very modern camera. The Mamiya is even more counter intuitive than the Hassy but at the same time it’s such a nice piece of machinery. Pieter’s first two test rolls didn’t came out so well (ok they weren’t exposed at all) but then he discovered a small dial that solved the problem. So when I visited him for recording the LIME podcast, we went outside and shot another test roll in five minutes.
This is one I made of Pieter:
And this is one he made of me:
Next time we got together, Pieter showed up with a roll of Ilford Delta 3200 (iso) film. Underexposed shots showed a lot of grain after pulling the exposure up during scanning.
But when metered correctly (yes, this is the way to do it), the grain is really fine and actually pleasing:
Here are some more Hassy scans from the kids:
And here’s a pic of my fantastic grandmother who’s still going strong:
I’m really happy (actually I’m jealous) to see what Pieter is squeezing out of his Mamiya. He just started a personal website where he’s posting his non-wedding work like snowboard photography and amazing pictures of puddles.
