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.
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.
When I started this personal project, I did expect it would be hard on some days but I didn’t anticipate the difficult days to turn up so soon. The previous week I’ve been to London and visited the traffic control tower but at the moment I’m spending most of my days at home postprocessing, writing, doing paperwork, finishing up projects, … All important stuff but not really visually stimulating. I can hardly take screenshots all day. We also entered the last big phase in the construction works on our house (new roof on the house) which requires me to be home most of the time. There’s a lot to photograph in this daily routine but I start to feel that I did it all. Don’t mistake a “desk period” for a quiet one, lots of deadlines to meet. So it’s not like I have the time to schedule photo trips and TFCD shoots.
It is to be expected that a project like this puts some strain on your daily life and I’m fine with that but not to the point where it disturbs my family life. So sometimes I put the camera away on what is probably the best moment of the day to take pictures.
But you know what, I don’t care. In fact, I’m happy with these difficult days. These are the times when I grow the most as a photographer. I have to improvise, look for another angle on something I’ve shot many times before or go out at 11pm because I haven’t made a decent picture yet that day. I’m perfectly fine with some bad picture days as long as they push me forward as a photographer.
So how is the project going? Let me tell you that on some days it’s hard to keep it up. It’s pretty easy on days that I’m doing interesting stuff and/or have time to go for a mini photowalk. But at the moment I’m spending most of my time behind the computer and I’m so busy that during the day I usually don’t have time to go out and shoot. Those days may not get me the best pictures in this project but are probably the most interesting ones because I have to get really creative to get some decent shots. That’s when I really have to step out of my comfort zone and do stuff I usually don’t do.
I’m really happy (and surprised) that many of you seem to like the project and some get inspired to do their own project but I’m actually not very concerned about the quality of my images like I would in my usual blogging. Being able to mess up creates the freedom that I need to become a better photographer. I don’t put the images online to show off, it is just a way to force myself to keep shooting every day and I secretly hoped it would inspire a couple of people to do a personal project themselves.
I made the picture above during a tour of our new town (well it was new to us almost a year ago). We got the exceptional chance to visit the traffic control tower of Brussels Airport. This picture alone, makes the 50/50 project worth all the time and effort I’m putting into it. This is not just a picture of a kid in a spot with a nice view. This is a PORTRAIT of my son. I admit it almost physically hurts to decide not to take a wide angle and a fisheye knowing that you’ll have a probably once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get that amazing view combined with fantastic architectural lines. But if I had done that (even with the 50mm in my camera bag) I would never have made this image.
To me it’s the best capture of my son’s personality I made in a very long time. So even if I don’t make a decent image during the rest of the project, it exceeded my expectations.
If I had to sum up my two day workshop in London in two words I’d say: EXHAUSTING FUN. Too be honest I’m still not completely recovered from my stay there. Getting dropped in a pile of work when you get home doesn’t really help either. I’ll post some more images soon but for now you’ll have to do with these three.
We spent the first couple of hours of the workshop going over the technical aspect of lighting and the basics of light. Most of the guys were already pretty advanced in that subject but it’s always good to freshen up your knowledge and that way we are sure to talk about the same things during the rest of the workshop. We also discussed going pro.
After that we proceed into the art of not knowing what the f#ck you are doing into a picture. The technical part of lighting really isn’t that difficult to master. Just add/substract, move, color the light until you get what you want. ‘Getting what you want’ is hard if you don’t know what you want. My experience is that many photographers forget one very important step in the process of taking a picture: the story or emotion. That’s why I like to go through the whole picture taking process with the participants. I asked them to come up with some assignments for me. The first one was to make a portrait of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor for a fictive interview in the Times wherein she denies she has anything to do with a chocolate smuggling scandal (yeah, I know). Since Angela was busy, Prabha was so kind to step in as our subject.
Next up they wanted me to do an advertising campaign for a manufacturer of glasses with Paris Hilton. After some brainstorming we decided to opt for a tagline like “Get good glasses to avoid embarrassing mistakes”. We waited for Paris for a while but since she didn’t showed up, Prabha was so kind to step in. And no, I don’t usually have a horse’s head in my lighting bag.
On the second day, it was my turn to come up with crazy assignments for the participants and give a few words of advice here and there. Check out the workshop’s Flickr group to see what the guys came up with. By the end of the day (that proved to be not anywhere near the end of the day), I was asked to do a mini-shoot with our model Nick to show how I work with a model. Nick said he could use some ‘darker’ pictures for his book, so we went to a tunnel and came up with this:
I had tons of fun and met lots of great people. Thanks for having me guys and a big thanks to Callum who organized everything perfectly.
On September the 7th and 8th I’ll be giving a 2-day Portrait Lighting on Location workshop in London, UK. I’m very much looking forward to it. Big thanks to LIME-reader Callum Winton for taking care of the organizational part in London. I love doing workshops abroad but it’s really only possible with a lot of local help, so thanks a lot Callum.
THE WORKSHOP
On Monday, we’ll start out by going over the basics of light. We’re going to learn to recognize good light and shape bad light into good light.
In the afternoon we are going to learn how to MAKE the light with small flashes and mix ambient light with flash.
Bert will also discuss equipment choices and will squeeze in lots of tricks of the trade. With lots of real life examples and mini-shoots, we’ll make the theoretical part easy to digest.
On Tuesday, you’ll get the chance to put everything you’ve learned into practice on a location shooting day. You’ll get some fun assignments, that you will work on in small groups under Bert’s guidance.
You don’t need any experience with flash, tons of expensive gear or a degree in photography to benefit from this workshop. A decent knowledge of the basics like shutter speed / aperture and the motivation to improve your photography, is all you need. If those attending are a bit more advanced with lighting then we’ll quickly progress to advanced techniques over the days.
WORKSHOP LOCATION
We’re aiming to host the workshop in or near to Richmond† which is easily accessible by road, rail and tube. The first day will be in a conference room or hall and the second day we’ll be exploring different locations in a walking distance in and around Richmond or Twickenham. On both days the workshop will start at 10:00 and finish around 18:00.
Directions and other information will be emailed to each participant prior to the Workshop
WORKSHOP PRICING
To celebrate first classes with Bert in the UK, this workshop is temporarily offered at the introductory price of 220GBP*. This offer is valid until midnight on August 16th 2009, after which the price will be 250GBP*
We have some models as well as a young and talented make-up artist lined up for our practical day. They’re coming on a TFCD basis, so it’ll be courteous to supply to them some polished images for their portfolio to thank them for their time
* All prices include UK VAT
If you are interested in attending this workshop, please visit the workshop website that Callum has set up as soon as possible to secure your seat. There’s also a Facebook event page where you can find the latest news on this workshop. It will be possible to sign up from Saturday, the 25th of July at 16.00 hours (London time).
