Today, nine years ago, I became a father. And it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. So whenever there is a birthday we try to come up with something cool to make the birthday party invitation cards. Here is Kobe’s ninth birthday party invitation:

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.

Yesterday, I posted part 1 of my GX1 review, here’s part 2:

As soon as I looked at the first pics I shot with the GX1 on my computer, I got the feeling that the GX1 could possible be more than an even better always-with-you-camera. Therefor I needed to test it in a real life situation: a photoshoot that would require me to create several different looks in a short amount of time.

I had a shoot scheduled with Sofie and she agreed to do it all with the GX1. Sofie runs a great fashion blog called Bien Sucré and needed some images for her business cards and other uses. Lots of different setups in only a couple of hours, seemed like a good stress test for the GX1. We started outdoors but couldn’t really find good locations that went with her outfit. The few decent places we found were so exposed to the cold wind, that we couldn’t shoot more than a couple of minutes. Here’s one of the few keepers:

1/200 – f/5.6 – iso 3200 – 12-42 lens @42mm

The new Panasonic 12-42 vario lens came with the test camera but being used to fast glass with a constant aperture of f/2.8, this f/3.5 to f/5.6 lens couldn’t really convince me. It has an electronic zoom which is probably great for video but not as fast and accurate to use as a good old manual zoom ring. The fact that I wasn’t too crazy about it also has to do with the fact that this must be one of the ugliest lenses I’ve ever seen. But it has to be said that the optical quality is amazing, certainly for that price. So I’m not saying it’s a bad lens, but some nice primes are more interesting (and unfortunately way more expensive) for photographers who want more control over depth-of-field and low light shooting.

After this cold adventure we decided to head back to the studio to come up with something useful. We started with a very basic setup with one speed light and a shoot through umbrella.

1/100 – f/5.6 – iso 160 – 12-42 lens @42mm

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1/100 – f/5.6 – iso 160 – 12-42 lens @42mm

We moved on to a clamshell setup with the speedlite and umbrella straight above the camera and a silver Sunbounce mini under the camera as fill. I like how the clamshell light worked on Sofie’s face in the first picture but I wanted less depth-of-field. Therefor I switched to my Canon 50mm 1.4 with a cheap e-bay adapter. On the GX1, my Canon 50mm, becomes a manual focus 100mm f/1.4. It’s pretty hard to manually focus at that wide open aperture but with lots of shots and a bit of luck, we got the eyelashes in focus like I wanted.

For a bit of a retro look, I wanted to work with a white background. I could have setup a white seamless or my Lastolite HiLite but as we had little time, I just used my big Chimera Octa that was already setup in the studio. There’s an Elinchrom 600RX in the octa and it’s triggered by it’s optical slave. The main light is a speedlite. Some shots with an umbrella, some shots with just the bare flash.

1/100 – f/5.6 – iso 160 – 12-42 lens @36mm

1/100 – f/5.6 – iso 160 – 12-42 lens @36mm

For a fashion blog I thought it might be quite nice to have the setup included in the shot. And it helps you get an idea of how this was shot

I also played around with just the pilot light of the Chimera to see what kind of results I would get at iso6400.

1/125 – f/5.6 – iso 6400 – 12-42 lens @42mm

Looking for a different background, I saw one of my silver Sunbounces and figured it would make a nice background if I could get lots of reflections of it’s surface. I’m not a big ring flash fan and I must admit that I’ve only used my Orbis ring flash adapter one or two times since I got it a couple of years ago. But somehow it seemed like the right thing to do.

1/125 – f/5.6 – iso 200 – 12-42 lens @42mm

I just noticed I’ve written very little about the GX1 in this article and maybe that’s exactly the point. During this shoot and the post processing I hardly noticed that I was not shooting a pro DSLR. This got me thinking about my current gear setup, the kind of work I do, the kind of work I WANT to do more, budgets, investments, options, … but more about that as soon as I’ve figured it out.

And the GX1, I can be short about that: I bought one and made sure it got delivered before I had to send the test camera back

A little over a week ago, I finally got the very first Confessions XL Video online but didn’t have time to blog about it before leaving for a well needed holiday in Scotland. Most of you probably saw the announcement already on Facebook or Twitter, but for hose who didn’t, here it is:

I while ago I wrote about my plans to get new instructional videos out that would go far beyond my original Confession videos on Youtube. As usual with such plans, even the most pessimistic deadlines proved to be aimed too high as there was a lot of stuff to figure out.  But I’m glad (and proud) that I did push through. In short, in the Confession XL videos, I will take you on a shoot from start to finish, including the post processing.  Here’s the trailer for the new videos:

www.confessionsXL.com is a new site to host the new videos. At the moment it’s still a quickly put together iWeb site, but soon it will be the stylish home of all my instructional activities: blog, videos, workshops, …

The first Confession XL video is titled GF1 Guerilla Style. Here’s the trailer for it:

The video can be purchased on www.confessionsXL.com. The normal price is 9,95 EUR or 12,95 USD but until midnight tomorrow I’m offering it for the special introduction price of 7,95 EUR or 9,95 USD. So if you want to get yourself a last minute New Year’s present, hurry to www.confessionsXL.com.

Big thanks for all the great reactions from the early adopters btw. And I would really appreciate it, if you would spread the word.

Way too long A while ago I announced that I was working on the return of the Confession videos. Due to lots of work and the fact that I keep changing my mind about the best format, it’s all taking a bit longer than expected. But I want these new videos to become a long lasting project, so I figure I better take my time. One of the videos we already shot is about seeing if a digital medium format camera could fit into my often fast and improvised shooting style. Until the video is ready, I thought I’d already write up a review (sort of).

Until now the Pentax 645D was the only MF camera that kind of fitted my requirements. That’s not to say that the other medium format cameras are bad, on the contrary, but I need near DSLR productivity for it to work for ME. When I talked about my requirements for a MF camera, the guys from Servix told me that I wouldn’t be disappointed  with the PhaseOne IQ140. So I borrowed one with an 80mm 2.8 Schneider lens for a personal shoot that would test the camera in a run-and-gun improvised kind of shoot.

We used the PhaseOne in combination with my favorite Elinchrom Ranger Quadra and a Lastolite Easybox and the Quadra Adapter. There will be more technical and why-the-hell-I-choose-this info in the video. But let’s just say that I thought it would be a high end equipment package that fits my shooting style.

I didn’t have time to test the camera or even read the manual before this shoot, but it all felt very familiar. There are no complicated settings, just all the basic stuff I need. The camera is a heavy beast but it didn’t get tiring. It sits very well in my hands and I had no problem shooting handheld for a couple of hours. The IQ140 back is also easy to operate and has a nice iPhone-ish touch screen. And finally I found a MF back with a more than decent LCD-screen. I can really judge my pictures on this screen. Which is an absolute must if I should want to use a MF camera on a daily basis.

When it comes to handling, speed, ergonomics, battery performance, autofocus, … this is probably as good as it gets these days in MF land. It’s not quite as snappy as your normal high end DSLR but good enough for me not to get frustrated about it after an hour of shooting. In fact, for my portrait work I found the camera slowed me down just enough to make better pictures than with a DSLR. I sometimes feel shooting my Canons is a bit like eating at McDonalds: even if you have plenty of time, you still shove your meal in your face way too fast. I know that nobody is forcing me to shoot (too) fast with my Canon, but I can’t help doing it too often.

The huge sensor and the great glass, give you incredible files. I was blown away by the look and the detail of the pictures. It also seems like you can pull and push the RAW-files incredibly far and still retain great image quality. This is the main reason why I’d considering shooting MF and the IQ140 certainly delivers. I think I’m going to have a couple of really big prints made because the small web size certainly doesn’t do the images justice.

Before this shoot I was pretty convinced shooting digital MF was something I’d only do for my high end jobs. But now I’m not so sure about that any more. It’s still not a replacement for my 5D2 when it comes to reportage but I’m going to rent a Phase One more often for portrait and commercial assignments. The big issue is still: can I justify the much higher price for my work and my clients? At this point, I don’t know the answer, but I’m certainly going to give it some more thought.

I’m sorry if I gave away how one of the upcoming videos will end but I really like shooting with the PhaseOne.

Lately, my buddy Stijn and I have been having conversations about “Why does nobody do any snorkeling in Belgium?” The answer might be that there’s only cold and murky water around here. But as scuba diver who both have been enjoying the Belgian underwater world, we know that it’s actually worth wrestling into a thick wetsuit and still have your ass frozen after two minutes. We also agree that you often see the most interesting things during the shallow part of a dive. So why not leave the heavy scuba gear at home and just go snorkeling?

And that’s exactly what we did on a grey Sunday in November. Finding a suitable snorkeling location was a challenge. We didn’t want to go to the known diving spots and I couldn’t find a single snorkeling location on Google. So we decided to just go to a fishing pond nearby and see if it was worth the plunge.

I must admit that two guys walking towards a fishing pond in wetsuits carrying underwater cameras get some very strange looks from hikers, joggers and dog walkers. But hey, I’m almost unrecognizable with a mask on my face and a snorkel in my mouth.

When I was getting my underwater photography kit ready, I suddenly got the idea to use the SLR Magic 12mm Hyperprime with the Olympus E-PL1, which I use for underwater photography. A quick test, confirmed that the lens actually just fitted my Olympus underwater housing. As you can see from the above the water shots, there’s some vignetting because the housing’s lens port is a bit too small to give the Hyperprime an unobstructed view. But being a vignette-fan, I don’t care.

The biggest challenge was to operate the lens underwater. With gaffer tape and some pieces of old wetsuit, I managed to operate the lens’ focus ring with the housing control that’s usually used to control the zoom settings for the 14-42 Olympus kitlens. I set the aperture somewhere between 2 and 2.8 knowing that I wouldn’t be able to change it once i locked the housing. This improvised setup worked pretty well for 10 minutes but then my construction stopped working and the focus was stuck at around 10cm in front of the lens port. This wasn’t really a problem as the whole reason to use this lens, was to try some close focus wide angle shots. So the rest of the swim, I was convicted to finding subjects and then rock the camera back and forth to get them in focus.

After the initial shock of cold water entering your wetsuit, it was actually rather doable in the water. Visibility was around 1+2 meter, which is pretty good in Belgium.

We figured that as this is a fishing pond, there should be some life in it (or some very stupid fishermen around it). But this time of year, nature goes to sleep and except for some plants, there wasn’t much life to discover. But I believe that there’s always a picture to be found. So I started looking for “dead nature”. Like mussels:

Dead crayfish:

Or submerged leafs and their reflection on the water surface.

I shot al these pictures on manual setting to control the ambient light and I let my Inon S-2000 underwater flash figure out the exposure for the main subject. Usually I set the flash compensation to minus a stop or so, but the Inon actually does a really great job on figuring the right exposure.

If you’ve never enjoyed the temperate underwater world, this might be very strange, but this was actually a very enjoyable experience for both Stijn and me. I will certainly do more of these little snorkeling expeditions. If you got a wetsuit and a mask, feel free to join us.

I’ve been playing around with the SLR Magic 12mm f/1.6 Hyperprime for a couple of weeks now. So what do I think of it after having used it a bit more after my first impressions?

Last week I did a family session with some friends of ours and their four fun kids. I shoot family sessions mostly with my 5D mk2, but I also keep the GF1 with me at all times, because particularly kids respond to that little camera different than to a huge DSLR. We had great hard sun light to play with under a huge viaduct. For the color pictures, I tried to imitate that same kind of light with a single off-camera speedlight in spots that the sun couldn’t reach.

So what about that lens? Well, it does everything the specs promise: it’s fast, more than decent image quality, it’s wide and full manual. For me those two last things are what holds me back to use it very often. First of all, I’m not a wide shooter, except when it’s extremely wide. The 24mm full frame equivalent focal length, is just not my thing. But that’s a very personal thing, I know lots of photographers who swear by that 24mm as the ideal focal length.

The full manual thing is another problem to me. Setting the aperture, is not a problem at all and the fact that it’s a stepless aperture, is nice (specially for video). The manual focussing ring is very smooth and in combination with the zoom function on the GF1’s screen, it isn’t hard to focus manually. But I often use the GF1 for some fast one-handed snapshots from the hip and then the manual focus is just too slow to shoot with a large aperture. But again, that’s a personal thing.

Does that mean that the Hyperprime will gather dust in the cupboard from now on? Well, it will certainly gather dust but only in my jacket pocket when I’m traveling or walking the streets. It’s a great and affordable lens to have with me for those occasions where my favorite 20mm 1.7 pancake lens, just isn’t wide enough. If I shot wide very often, I would probably replace the SLR Magic 12mm with the Olympus 12mm f/2 which is supposed to be a great lens too and it has autofocus. But it’s also more expensive.

Since I wrote the draft for this post, I think I might have found a really good use for the Hyperprime, but that’s for the next time folks.

A while ago I wrote about Piet Van den Eynde’s Craft & Vision e-book “Making Light”. I also wrote that Piet interviewed me (and 4 other Belgian photographers) for the sequel of that e-book. And now it’s here: Making Light 2

Piet really has a way to accumulate lots of information and then distill in into a clear e-book. When I started out using off-camera flash, the challenge was to FIND the information. These days all the info is readily available on the internet but the challenge is to find the right information and connect the dots between all these fragmented snippets of information. These two books can certainly save you a lot of time and frustration by giving you a shortcut in your learning curve.

All the Craft & Vision E-books are only 5$ a piece which in many cases is a steal. For the next couple of days Making Light 2 will only be 4$ if you use the code MAKINGLIGHT4 when ordering. Or you can temporary buy both books together for 8$ by going to this link.

I’m proud to be in this well written book together with some of my friends and fellow Belgian photographers. The guys at Craft & Vision also allow me to give away 10 copies of this e-book. I only need to figure out some kind of silly competition to determine who’ll get them. Any ideas?

This must be the most uninspiring and boring picture I’ve ever posted on my blog. Yet I want to share it with you because it reminded me about the gift of being a photographer. We often tend to underestimate the power of photography and the impact it can make on people just because we know we can make a decent picture.

My neighbor is half paralyzed and sits in a wheelchair. I admire her husband for his strength to support her and create quality to their lives. The sad thing is that my relation with the husband is limited to saying hi when I see him across the street. And I’ve only saw his wife once before … when an ambulance came to get her. Last week the man comes up to me and says he heard I’m a photographer and asks me if I do ID pictures on location. His wife needed some new ones but can’t get out of the house.

I don’t do ID pictures but I gladly made an exception for my neighbor. I could have referred her to a photographer in the are that does ID pics on location, except I don’t know any. It took only five minutes of my time to pull off this easy shot. In return I made some people happy and got the chance to know two warm people.

This weekend we finally got a bit of summer here in Belgium. Our backyard was filled with action from my own kids and some of their friends. And Kobe asked me if we could make a cool soccer picture of him. So we did a short improvised shoot to create some spectacular images. I grabbed my 5Dmk2, my 17-40, two 580EXII speedlights, some stands and my Pocketwizard TT1/TT5/AC3.

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.

I’m trying to work out a one weekend family photography workshop with four photographers AND THEIR FAMILIES. At the moment, this workshop is still in the planning phase but I’m pretty sure it will happen although the details might still change a bit. If you’re interested, let me know as I have quite a lot of planning to do for this one.

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.