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.

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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.

Walking around at a congress for professional photographers with a 25 Euro plastic toy camera, provokes some strange looks sometimes. I only had time to shoot one roll of Kodak Portra 160NC film (medium format). Looking at the very particular look the Holga gives these pictures, I should have shot a lot more frames. It’s not that these are great pictures, but I still like them.

The first picture was shot from my hotel room balcony and all the others were shot during a 15-minute walk.

During my lecture at the congress I showed some of my pictures and briefly touched on my lighting style on location but there was no time to really explain. Because I got a lot of questions from people who wanted more info on how I combine flash with ambient light, we setup up a short improvised lighting demo on the last day of the congress.

I only had my 50mm lens with me, time was limited and I had to borrow a flash so I guess I have an excuse for not being entirely happy with how the pictures came out.

During one of his workshops, Pieter learned me to always start with an anchor point when posing couples. When he explained that, I realized that looking for an anchor point is exactly what I do when lighting a picture. So I explained how you just have to pick a starting point. This can be a background, main light, accent light, texture, … whatever. As long as it gets you going. Don’t worry too much about how it will work out. It’s OK to make mistakes as long as they lead you to a final picture. I consider most of the pictures in this post to be in that beta-stage. Normally I would work further to get a final result but this demo was not about the final picture, it was about my workflow when shooting on location.

For the first setup, I picked a background scene with a palm tree, blue sky and some ugly buildings as my anchor point. I manually set my camera to expose that background like I wanted it too look. It didn’t bother me that these settings left Carol, a very talented young Spanish photographer, in the darkness because I know I can add light on her. We only had a battery powered studio flash with a standard reflector at our disposal. We placed it to camera right and adjusted the power until the flash and the ambient were nicely balanced.

Being a model when some 60 people are watching you is never easy but it’s even harder when you are unexpectedly picked out of an audience to be the subject of a weird photographer. But Carol did this with grace and her smile more than makes up for my crappy lighting. Italian wedding photographer Antonio Fascicolo did everything he could to keep the smile going. He even did a very good Tarzan imitation when we moved to the second setup. This was basically a corner of the hotel’s garden where guests are not supposed to come. I explained how it’s often the imperfection of natural light that makes it look natural. This area was completely covered in shade, so we directed the light of the flash through the leaves of the tree. The point I was trying to make is that you don’t have to depend on where the sun is to create a sunny look. In the picture on the left you see Carol’s reaction on Antonio’s Tarzan imitation. On the right (blurry) is Antonio after he almost fell out of the tree.

The next setup is one of my all time favorite tricks: Look for nice soft ambient light and then add a little hair light to create a more open, happy atmosphere. It’s not that the pictures would be bad without that hair light but it’s a small detail that creates depth and atmosphere to the picture. This is a technique that I use very often. Most of the time I have someone hold the flash behind and to the side of the subject. This allows the subject to move as long as the person holding the flash keeps aiming it at her.

Another way to create more depth and separation in a portrait that is mainly lit with natural light, is to use flash to create some light in the background. During our last setup, we moved indoors and used the big windows as our main light. The background was pretty dark, so we added just a touch of flash to it.

I often try to generate some kind of light pattern in the background. Here, the flash is to camera left, aimed at the floor behind Carol. I put a chair in front of the flash. The back of the chair acts as a gobo and creates the streaks of light on the floor. It’s often those small details that give something extra to a picture.

A big thanks to all those who attended the demo and made it such a funny experience, thanks to Carol for being a patient model, thanks to Luc for live translation and to Antonio for being his silly self.

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.

We get to see some snow pretty much every winter in Belgium but most often that is limited to a couple of days here and there. This winter we got already two pretty lengthy snow stretches (for Belgium). People even get used to it and don’t crash their cars anymore when driving over a snowball. I actually like the snow, beats those rainy, windy winters. But now the snow started to melt at a fast pace, I’m also looking forward to spring because I’m experiencing a bit of the winter blues. I need light, sun and warmth to get my energy levels back to normal.

Getting outside is the only thing that helps, so when fellow photographer Kristof asked me to join him and his friends for a short photowalk, I dragged myself out of my office chair, left all the work at home and enjoyed just being outdoors.

All the pictures where taken with just my 5D mkII and the 50mm except for the last four images, who were shot on my Hasselblad with the 80mm.

Here it is, finally, the final part of my 50/50 project. The pictures have been processed for months but I just didn’t find the time to put the last slideshow together.

I must admit that the last two weeks of the project were the hardest, I really had to keep pushing myself to make some pictures and on some days I didn’t produce anything that’s worth keeping really. But then again, that’s probably the most interesting part of the project.

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After the last day of the 50/50 project I was relieved that it was over but much to my surprise I didn’t feel like putting away the 50mm lens for 6 months. I use it now much more than before. My 70-200 probably saw most action before, but now the 50 is my most used lens.

I’ve learned so much from this project. If I would put it all on the blog, I’d probably have to rename it to the 50/50 blog. I was also pleasantly surprised that so many people gave feedback and got inspired by the project to start their own personal project. A few people even suggested to make a book out of it and I’m considering to do just that. My idea would be to to show my 50 favorite pictures and tell you 50 things I’ve learned. Let me know if you would consider buying a decent priced (e-)book with that kind of content.

Thanks for all your support on the 50/50 project.

It doesn’t happen too often here in Belgium that we get a nice layer of snow that pretty much covers everything. And when it happens it usually doesn’t take more than a few days before it’s gone. So I did absolutely want to do a shoot in the snow.  I had this image in my head of a guy in a suit in the snowy fields. (Don’t ask me why, that’s just the way my chaotic brain works.) My friend David offered to pose so a couple of days ago we went for a quick improvised 20 minute shoot in the fields behind my house.
I could have shot this digitally of course but I’ve been dying to shoot some posed portraits with the Hasselblad.

Loading film into the Hasselblad back is getting better and faster every time. Only this time … ok it’s the second time it happened, I forgot to advance the film after it was loaded. No harm done, just some lost frames but I really need to focus more when shooting film.

Except for the picture above, all the pics were shot with the sun behind David. The snow reacts as a giant Sunbounce giving fill light everywhere.
The vignetting in the picture below looks a bit too much. It looks ok at full size but I really have to watch out when resizing these kind of vignetted pictures.

It was pretty cold, certainly for David in his suit, so we only shot 3 rolls of film. It’s amazing how many kinds of films that exist and all of them have different characteristics. Until now I pretty much bought the films that were available in local stores but I really want to start trying out different films to see which ones suit me best. One of the films I really wanted to test out was Kodak Tri-X. It’s maybe not the technically best film but I discoverd with this shoot that it has a lot of character.

It seems more contrasty and has more grain (which doesn’t have to be a bad thing). When I saw these scans I just had to think about Reservoir Dogs and decided to call David, Mr. White from now on.

And I promise I will post some digital images sometimes soon
Merry Christmas to you all!

Here’s the final part of the Mike Larson/Sunbounce/Calumet trilogy. But before we move on to the bride pictures, I’d like to give a big thanks to two new friends. Waldemar (or something like that) and Stefan from Sunbounce worked sooooo hard to make everything go smooth for Mike and me. While we were enjoying breakfast, these guys were setting up everything each morning. Waldemar (or something like that) is a former police officer from Kazachstan who’s normally in charge of manually bending German steel and putting it in the SunMover reflectors. We decided to call him the real Sun Sniper. Stefan is only 14 years old (or something like that) but seems to manage the traveling Sunbounce circus like he was born in that same circus. As you can tell, they are both big fans of Fotofolio.

In Amsterdam the weather wasn’t great but at least it didn’t rain. I felt I needed some air, so I decided to move outside for my speedlight/sunbounce demo. In this kind of industrial area, there’s lots of nice background to be found but maybe not suited for pictures of a bride. But the blue sky with some fluffy clouds seemed suitable. Backgrounds don’t always have to be vertical things. Don’t forget to look up and down when searching for backgrounds too. I needed to raise the fantastic model Julia a bit to get rid of the buildings in the background so Stefan and Waldemar (or something like that) went asking for some pallets at the nearby Calumet store.

Exposing for the sky gave me a nice background but turned the model into a silhouette. Sunbounce Pro and speedlight to the rescue. The flash was set to full power to get enough light on the model. We choose the gold/silver zebra fabric to warm up the skin tones a bit. The warm light contrasts nicely with the blue tones of the sky.

Thanks to Mike for taking these setup shots.

And here are the results:

I had an amazing four days on the road but I must admit that after the long drive home from Amsterdam I was absolutely exhausted. I’m still looking for my usual energy levels. Big thanks for all who helped organizing these workshops and to all the people who attended.

Here are the pictures from the Calumet / Sunbounce workshop in Antwerp. The day started with cold and rain but after lunch the skies cleared up and we even got some sun. It seems a bit silly to start my demonstration with the words “imagine there’s no good light” when you have this great low standing sun projecting the finest orange glow on our model. But because in our country a wedding photographer more often than not has to deal with less then ideal light. So I wanted to show in my short live shooting demo how to MAKE beautiful natural looking sunlight. So we moved into the shadow.

Off-camera flash speedlights are a good match for photographers who have to work without assistants, under time pressure and on a tight schedule in situations they don’t control. I think that’s pretty much the definition of a wedding photographer. Direct bare flash would be the easiest to use but it’s often way too harsh. Umbrella’s and small softboxes make the light softer and more pleasing but to me they often look just a bit too perfect. That’s why in those circumstances I often bounce the flash into a reflector. This creates the soft light of a bigger lightsource but it still allows the light to influence and be influenced by external factors. The catchlights also look more natural.

For these pictures we used a Sunbounce Mini reflector as this is to me the most versatile size. As you can see you can light a headshot to a 3/4 shot.
I often get the question on which Sunbounce reflector to buy: well, I think the mini (which is not so “mini” by the way) is a good choice for most photographers. I’d buy it with the zebra/white fabric (that’s what we used here). The zebra gently warms the light up without going over the top.

I finished my session with a couple of quick shots without flash. Just the sun as a hair/back light and the Mini reflector to light the face from camera left. Judging by the catchlights we might have used another reflector to fill in the shadow side, but I forgot.

It’s always difficult to get thrown in front of a crowd and perform some tricks but I guess that again is what wedding photography is all about.

For four days I’m being immersed in the magical world of wedding photography workshops. My favorite brand of reflectors California Sunbounce is doing a European workshop tour with the famous wedding photographer Mike Larson. I joined them for a four days and I’m currently writing this blog post from my hotel room in Amsterdam (btw, never every eat at the Golden Tulip hotel in Amsterdam). I’m too tired to write much, so I’m not going to write too much.

On Saturday Calumet hosted a workshop in Antwerp with Mike where Fotofolio and I also gave a little demo of how we use reflectors (pics are coming later). Yesterday Mike and our own Pieter Van Impe, joined forces for an orgasm of wedding photography information during a LIME workshop in “the Barn”. It was nice to welcome lots of new and old friends from Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Russia and the USA.

Mike framed by Filip and Sarah during a live engagement shoot:

Mike even took the participants to my back yard for the shoot:

Sunbounce guru Peter Geller is shorter than the models:

Peter documenting the workshop on the left. A reunion of the Blues Brothers on the right:

Mike stresses out the importance of building a friendship with your clients:

Today the circus moved to the Rotterdam in the Netherlands. I gave a little demo of how I use Sunbounce Reflectors in combination with off-camera flash to create natural looking light. The workshop was held in a big studio that’s great for … well … studio photography but doesn’t offer much available light. I only found some small tungsten lights aimed at photographs and used these as an out of focus background. I lit the model with a single speedlight bounced into a Sunbounce Pro Zebra. We also added a silver Mini on the right as fill.

Let’s catch some sleep because tomorrow we have another workshop in Amsterdam.