Last year I won the award much to my own surprise.

Photo: Charles Strijd

If you think you can manage to enter a voting site in Dutch, your can support my blog (X-Pose) by voting HERE.

After a glass of bubbles and a chat with some old friends we went to the town hall for a lecture by Filip and Ria.

Filip will probably never be an actor, politician of stand-up comedian, he therefore usually prefers to remain in the shadow (with a camera and a long lens). But if you’re a photographer like Filip, you can have the images speak for themselves and that’s exactly what he did. Especially his personal travel photography was incredibly impressive.

Filip and his wife are completely complementary. I’m sure Ria’s part in the succes of their business is huge. Ria is the kind of person that puts everyone at ease from the first second on.

These kind of lectures are often long and boring ego trips but that was certainly not the case here. Two slideshow of a couple of minutes each, a bit of explenation and some flowers, were all that was needed to make this an interesting evening. An added bonus was that it allowed us to hit the bar pretty early. But first Tom got to show his cathedral of a body to Isabel. 

We also got to see the book about an expo in China with work from a lot of Belgian photographers. Here is  Ake with one of her amazing pictures.

Tom invented a snoot for pop-up flashes.

A professional Association is all about networking and connections. And some seemed to have pretty impressive connection because we’ve spotted this camouflaged (I suspect Nikon) prototype. All references were hidden behind gaffer tape, so we didn’t see much.

But it sure had a huuuuuge lcd.
Edit: Just to make it clear, it’s a FAKE! Tom just spotted two pieces of gaffer tape on my flash (holding a gel, you can see it in the picture above) and wanted to play Chase Jarvis. Sorry if it wasn’t very clear that this was just a little joke. If Tom would have a real secret prototype, I’m sure he would be shouting it of the rooftops. 

And there were even more surprises.

Pieter then tried if the Joe McNally trick. could stabilise a beer instead of a camera.

Jean enjoyed the view.

Right before we drove home, I hopped into a refugee camp to take this National Geographic cover picture.

On this event the new board of the association was presented to the public. Maybe I’ll write something about it later. I can already tell you that you know at least one of the new members of the board

Filip and Ria, keep up the good work and enjoy life!

I’m curious about what you guys think of this combination of photography and live audio.

I’ve always been a big supporter for real documentary photo journalism. Too bad that the traditional media keep cutting in time, budget en exposure for in depth photo stories. Luckily there are people like Brian Storm who offers through mediastorm an alternative channel for storytellers. These stories are sometimes stunningly beautiful but more often they are confronting and hard to digest and that’s the reason why there’s only a small percentage of the people are interested in them.
Through the mix of different media and by using the internet as a distribution platform, you can create a global platform in which a small percentage of the public can still reach the critical mass to make this kind of journalism possible.

Today, I stumble upon the site of the Bombay Flying group, a group of photographers and journalists who have put online one fascinating and two extremely haunting digital stories. It’s amazing yet confronting and a necessary counterweight to the often shallow mainstream media.

My respect for these (photo) journalists is endless. Personally, I tend to hide myself behind the excuse of having not enough time and it’s mostly due to the fact that I feel too responsible for my own family to chase after stories in the world’s danger zones. But I’m sure that in our own area there are enough stories that need to be told. I promised myself I’d try to make my own modest contribution in the future. Maybe you know a story that has to be told too?

This year she is graduating in the academy and she has to make a booklet as a kind of summary of het last year. It’s not a surprise that the booklet task landed on my desk and how could I refuse to give something back for all she did for me.
She needed a portrait for the booklet. No need to tell you that a simple ID picture was out of the question for us.

To link the portrait to ceramics, I asked my mom to put porcelain clay on her face. We waited until it was dry and started to crackle before we started shooting.

After a few experiments, I was most happy with a lighting setup with my two extremely expensive striplights behind and to the side of her head (just out of the frame). To get a minimal depth of field I used the 1Ds mkII at 50 iso with the 50mm lens at f1.6.
At that aperture my Vivitar 285HV flashes (that can be dialed down to only 1/16th) gave way to much light. I could have used my 580 EXII’s (that can be dialed down to 1/128th) but they don’t fit my striplights. I solved this by gaffer taping three layers of white fabric to the front of the striplights.

A Boeing 747 from Kalitta Airways didn’t make it into the air, slide of the runway and broke in two piece. In a journalistic reflex, I grabbed a camera and headed towards the crash site.

Because I was there only minutes after the crash, I managed to talk myself past the police and firemen. A few minutes later, they got their stuff together and everyone had to move.

Their don’t seem to be any victims but the crew member in the picture below seemed a bit shocked.

Another crew member took it easier. He took a deep breath, shrugged and lit a smoke. It looked like he has a crash like this every few weeks. Maybe he was happy to get a smoke much faster than expected.

All in all I think we were all very lucky because this could have been a lot worse. The first picture was taken from my mother-in-law’s front door. The last pic is made 20 meters from a friend’s parents’ house. Imagine what would have happened if the plane got 100 meter further or got on fire …

At least one of the students paid attention to what I said and yelled ‘cover’ the minute we stepped outside. This time it was a large garage with the door open. The open side of the garage (camera left) forms a gigantic softbox. The dark green garage door became our dark background.

The disadvantage of using a dark background is that the shadow side of the subject can get lost in a black hole. To separate the subject from the background, we placed a small flash behind (to camera right) the camera. That tiny bit of light in the hair creates more depth and separation.

I often start with a certain setting and then improvise some variations. By zooming out the flash (to get a wider beam) and placing it a bit further, we still get the hair light and we get some (flash) light on the door too.

Another way to create separation between a subject and a dark background, is simply to light (part of) the background. We put a grind on the flash to create a kind of vignette.

For the pictures above, we used natural light as our main light and flash as a hair/background light. But you can do it the other way around as well. In the picture below the sun is up high and behind the subject. You can see the sunlight on the shoulders. To leave some blue in the sky we had to shoot at 1/250 and f/10. A flash with shoot through umbrella to camera left is powerful enough to balance foreground and background.

To illustrate that those small flashes can be pretty powerful, we took this picture at f/22 and full power on the flash.

Hard light is often difficult to work with, but I wanted to show quickly that you don’t have to leave the camera at home on a sunny day.

Sometimes (California) or often (Belgium) the natural light just isn’t what you want. In those moments, you just create the light yourself. One single flash against a brick wall shows the structure of the background, gives a rich contrast on the subject and draws a line that leads the eye to the subject.

Here’s the setup shot. This picture is made outdoors on a sunny day btw.

Give me some time to evaluate the workshop, so I can announce a new one soon. Thanks to everyone who participated for the fun atmosphere and the hard work.

I deliberately didn’t look for cool spots and great light on the location because I wanted to show how I look for backgrounds etc. With 50 eyes looking over my shoulder that isn’t easy. Especially when you have to explain things that you would normally do instinctively.

We started out with classic soft window light. We talked about the position of the subject and the camera in relation to the light source and we looked at what happened when you change the distance between subject and light source.

By using a shallow depth of field backgrounds turn into abstract patterns. With some experience you will start to see good patterns and be able to se some of the participants of the workshop as a non disturbing background.

In the part about composition, we talked about lines that lead the viewer to the subject. On our walk through the location (and abbey) we saw this spot where the lines of the stairs, rays of sunlight and a shadow on the floor all led to the same point. At 1/100 at f/2.8 the background was the way we wanted it to be.

Because the subject was underexposed, we used a flash to balance the subject with the background.

The cool thing about lighting your subject with a flash is that the exposure of the subject remains unchanged when you change the shutterspeed (as long as the aperture remains the same). By playing with the shutterspeed you can change the brightness (and mood) of the background easily. We shot at 1/40th for the shot below.

Then we shot at 1/250th for a darker background.

We than discovered a long hallway with a wooden floor. The windows on the side take care of the lighting and the window in the back provides a nice frame for the subject and throws a long reflection on the floor. The shadow of our subject becomes a leading line towards the subject. The lines and the frame let the viewer find the subject easily in the pretty wide frame.

Before I made the images above, I took a quick snap to test the light. That testshot became a nice portrait.

We also shot some imags outdoors, I’ll show them next time.

When I look at the words after a few hours, things often become clear to me. It’s not like I know perfectly what I want at this stage (do I ever?) but usually a few words stay in my mind.

The shoot that came out of this creative process was done on monday. We made a lot of pictures and also have pics and video of the making of. There’s probably a new episode of my Confessions-series. Hopefully it will be interesting for you to see what came out of this keywords.

But that will have to wait a little longer because I’m way to busy preparing my first “decisive photographer” workshop on saturday. And before I can show you the final results of the shoot, I need to talk about one more fase in my creative process.

Blogging photographers talk often about the technical stuff and I’m one of those photographers. Technique is important to me but in the end it’s just a set of tools to turn a creative spark into a picture. I don’t know why I don’t write very often about the creative process. It’s hard to capture something like that in words and often I don’t even know how it works, it just happens.

I’m planning a personal shoot soon, and I’m going to try to give you a look at what happens under my scalp.

Usually I first decide on the goal of the shoot. This time I don’t really have a certain picture or story in mind. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the direction I want to head into with my photography. I feel like it’s time to let my stile evolve. I see elements that keep coming back but maybe I don’t do enough with them. Maybe I have to go a bit more extreme, bold and clear. The shoot is a way to (hopefully) clear up things a bit. The end result is of no importance but experimenting and learning are key.

Once the goal for the shoot is set, it’s time for the part I really enjoy: CHAOS. Just let everything go and allow chaos in your head. Many people have a hard time letting go but I’m convinced that chaos stimulates creativity.

Everyone will have to find his way to get into a state of chaos. One of the things that work for me is what I call ‘Photo Surfing’. I have a folder titled ‘inspiration’ on my hard drive that contains several thousands of pictures that spark my imagination. Some of those images are masterpieces but there are also snapshots that contain one little details that captured my attention. It can be light, a background, clothes or whatever. An even more surprising way is to wander through Flickr without thinking.

I start for example with a picture I like and then check out that photographer’s stream. After looking at some of his pictures, I check out his favorites and click on another image that catches my eye. I try not to put a system into it, just clicking where my gut feeling tells me to. If I encounter a really interesting photo stream, I might bookmark it for later but in this chaos phase I really need to surf without thinking.

While I’m photo surfing, I have a sheet of paper and a pen next to me. I write down words and sentences that come to mind (for some reason I do this often in English instead of my native Dutch). When I look at the piece of paper after I returned to earth, thing often become very clear.

Next time, I’ll show you my piece of paper.

If you use other ways to get creative, please hit the comments