About technique and more.

Many different looks from one setup

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Often I’m asked what kind of setups I use and what kind of modifiers.
What people often don’t realize is that with only one modifier you can chance a lot just by playing with the angles and controlling the contrast/lightfall off. In fact placing a light closer or further away also makes a huge impact on the image look, add to this the option to feather a light source (using the sides of the light) and you know that there is a lot possible with one modifier and light.

 

It gets even more interesting when you are combining two strobes and for example add a gel to one of them.
During the workshop this weekend I made a setup like this with our model Lennaa and decided it would be a cool thing to share on the blog.

 

I started out with one strobe with a red gel.

Lenaa Juli 25 20142025

To get a bit more “punch” in the image I added another strobe without gel under the same angle to mix the two.

Lenaa Juli 25 20142035 Read more

Tips on styling

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Styling is one of the most important parts in a successful photoshoot.
If you shoot a model in jeans and tanktop, you’d better be a lighting wizard because there is not much else going on…..
This is one of the quotes from my book “Mastering the modelshoot” (which recently got the label bestseller :D).

 

Now for some people the term styling already gives them a panic attack… styling is difficult, impossible to do yourself etc.
Well…. let’s be realistic, for a good styling project you will need a professional stylist, they really have “the eye” and know what goes together and will work in a photo, but don’t worry if you can’t afford one, there are some simple things you can do yourself.

Anna Juli 9 2014 452-Edit

1. Don’t overthink, but DO overthink
Sounds weird right?
Well it is.
What I mean is that sometimes people already think “I can never do it, so I won’t even start” and that’s the first overthink. The second one is much more important… when you start doing the styling for a shoot do it with care, make sure that everything goes together, match colors and match the styling to the model and the look of the set you’re gonna use, you really have to think about this over and over again, a styling idea can fall flat on it’s face by small mistakes.

 

2. It’s always personal
You can create the most amazing outfit and look, but always remember that as soon as you steer away from “standard” people will either like it or hate it, and the more extreme you go the more extreme the reactions will be, be prepared for some intense flaming online, especially from people who don’t do it themselves 🙂

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Light can be very simple

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As photographers we have to realize that light is our language, it’s the paint we work with to tell the story.
Now for most photographers light is something they can control as long as it’s something familiar and something that…. well has a label which states what it does.

 

Light however can be so many things, in my opinion (and I really mean this) there is no light source that can’t be used to create a nice image. So during a workshop I got some questions about different light sources and we did a part of the workshop with just one (well actually 3) light source, an old chandelier. The only thing we modified from this chandelier is that we use 100W light bulbs instead of the much lower in power bulbs you would normally use. This helps to keep the ISO a bit lower.
Oh and don’t worry if your camera shoots on ISO1600 or ISO2000, when you zoom in you indeed see some noise, but trust me… when you print or publish for the net you won’t see the noise anymore, or at least it won’t bother you.

 

Now the fun thing about shooting with these kind of light sources is that you really learn to control your light and see what light does, for example placing it closer to the model will give you totally different look than when you place it further away. Today I show you two sets we did with the chandelier. On the first one we had the lights really close to the model while on the last set my assistent actually swung the lights above the model (Manon). As you can see… the same light source but two totally different looks.

Manon Juli 5 2014 (82 of 153)_DxO

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Working with portrait or landscape mode

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Composition is one of the things that is always very important in a shoot, but what is the perfect composition?
Well to be honest… there is no perfect composition.
Of course there are those “rules” like the rule of thirds but let’s be honest they just give you a “this will work” general rule of tumb, but it’s often not the most interesting shot possible. In my opinion it’s incredibly important to play with the way you shoot.

 

Take for example these two shots.
One is shot in the so called portrait mode.
It draws all the attention to the model and to be honest it looks pretty nice.

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However as soon as you change to landscape mode for me the whole image gets way more interesting.

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