About technique and more.

Duin en kruidberg Pt I

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Shooting on location is always a huge challenge and often the location throws you a lot of curveballs, so how do you solve all this and come home with some cool shots?

 

This was one of the most heard questions during seminars and workshops the last few years.
In previous years we already taught some workshops on location but for 2015 we decided we needed to take it up a notch, and a HUGE notch, so we started the “Mastering the model shoot on location workshops”. Thanks to some very special friends of us we are now booking the most awesome locations to teach workshops and to be honest I think I’m just as enthusiastic as the attendees, because most of the locations are normally not open for workshops or even photoshoots.

 

This weekend I taught a very special workshop in this tour.
This workshop was in the beautiful “Duin en Kruidberg hotel” and for a select group of ESA employees.
In 4 blogposts I will show some of the setups and explain a bit about the techniques I’ve used.

 

Today it’s time for the first setup.
In this setup I started with natural light to create a nice wrap around effect around our model Manon.

 

Model: Manon
Styling: Nadine
MUA: Christa
Assistants : Annewiek & Chaim

Manon Duin en Kruidberg 7 - March 14 2015

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Expression…..

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As you know I’m always very much an advocate of using expression to spice a shot up, but in all honesty some people just have a more expressive face than others. Now one of the things I love to do is sometimes just ask one of the attendees to my workshops to stand in front of my camera, and this can often give you some awesome results.

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Now the question is of course…. how the heck do you get expressions like this?
Well…. I’m a talker, I don’t ever shut up when I’m shooting a model, I keep talking, talking and talking and in my opinion this is where you get that extra little bit that makes an image stand out, and in all honestly sometimes I don’t even know what I’m telling them to do… which sometimes gets me very surprised reactions…. and that was…. well exactly what I wanted him to do (at least I tell them that)…..

 

 

Many thanks to Jurjen for being my model.

 

 

If you want more information and much more in depth techniques etc, get my book “Mastering the model shoot” or one of my instructional videos via this website.

Radio triggers and if they don’t work

/in , /by

Radio triggers are awesome, they will trigger your strobes without needing a “line of sight” and they should work for 99% of the shots without a problem, so in theory one could say “you never loose a shot with radio triggers”, but……… sometimes there are problems.
Problem with your radio triggers?
We hear this a lot, people having trouble with their radio triggers in the studio or on location, here are some tips we found out can make a HUGE difference.

 

1. WiFi
This is the biggest problem.
If you have a lot of WiFi traffic in your area this can interfere with your system, in fact we installed a WiFi security camera and this rendered our complete setup almost useless, we changed the camera from WiFi to wired and everything worked again.


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2. Antenna
They are not there for show, make sure to aim them up and you will get that little bit of extra range.

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Adding props like a megaphone

/in , /by

For me a good photo isn’t just about lighting but also about expression, movement and of course story telling.
I’ve already posted some tips about this, but people keep asking me how to set it up….

 

Well there isn’t a real 100% solution, but I can tell you how this image came to life.
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