About technique and more.

Duo shoots

I always say :
“shooting one person is easy”
“shooting two people is terribly difficult”
“shooting three people is easier”
“shooting four people can be a disaster”
“shooting more get’s easier”

 

Now why is that?
When I shoot 2 people you very quickly get into the “boyfriend/girlfriend” kind of posing, now it’s not bad… but sometimes I think it’s just a bit “boring” and I want something more. When shooting three you can actually build something with balance, but with four I always feel like it’s easy to create two groups of two… Most of the times it will go ok but I always find that I love to work with three or five and more people if I do groups.

 

Now when shooting a duo shoot it always wise to plan ahead.
Let’s say you want a cool duo shoot in your portfolio but you don’t want that “boyfriend/girlfriend” kind of shoot, a good tip can be to shoot dancers, they are often way more flexible than the average run of the mill person, although I’m pretty flexible I have seen these two do things…. well it hurts me when I think about it. The fun part about shooting with dancers is that they are often very creative with poses, and they will actually pretty well interact with each other.

 

The following shots were taken during a workshop motion last week and feature models : Marvin and Sharda.
I also included some images you’ve already seen, just to give you and idea of the other crazy duo stuff we did, but I shared that during another blogpost about these two.

 

The idea of the shot was to give the images some “tension” but also a lot of power. I think they pretty much aced it.

Marvin en Sharda Maart 12 2014 (46 of 69)-Edit

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Dancers

If I had to choose one type of shoots I really like the most….. for me that would be working with dancers.
Now don’t get me wrong I love shooting celebrities for their character and models for their poses, good looks etc. but when working with dancers it just brings something completely new to the table, action, motion but most of all power and passion.

 

All the dancers I’ve worked with so far are passionate about what they do, when you ask them to jump they don’t say “but will I look good” but they just jump and give you the best performance they can, if you want a jump to look about the same twice… no problem (for most), but most of all…. most dancers (or performing artists) will also bring you creativity, they will not just jump but they will help you as a photographer to tell a story.

 

Photography is acting on a 1/5000 of a second, freezing an unique moment in time that will never come back the same way and with dancers this is all maximized in one shoot. So when I was looking for “models” for a 2 day 1:1 workshop with the theme motion, my first idea was of course “dancers”. Thanks to the power of social media I got into contact with this duo, Marvin and Sharda, two amazingly talented people and very enthusiastic. Today some of the images from that workshop.

 

Marvin en Sharda Maart 12 2014 (39 of 69)-Edit

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Cool deal on Topaz De-noise

COOL.
Topaz has a great 50% discount on DeNoise  running at the moment.
It has a new user interface, and it’s a great “noise” plugin.

Safari

Highly recommended, and with this discount a no-brainer.
http://www.topazlabs.com/aff/idevaffiliate.php?id=716&url=http://www.topazlabs.com/denoise

 

Fast shutter speeds with strobes…..

I get this question a lot so a little post about it:

“Frank can I sync up to 1/8000 with xxxxx on Elinchrom (or any other brand)”

Marie fotoflits ELC Maart 8 2014 (35 of 56)-Edit
1. No you can’t and it will never happen.
Simple reason 1/8000 is the shutter speed and even if it was possible with a mirror less/leafshutter lens the flash duration is not 1/8000 so even with the new ELC you would be “stuck” at app 1/5000 and that’s not even true because there is a raise of the strobe so think more about 1/3000-1/4000 without loss of power.

 
2. No you can’t.
I know PW is doing a so called hyper sync but this will often only work with the slow strobes, like D-lites, S heads etc. and yes you can sync much higher but you will loose some output, but they are pretty unique with that feature and it has a lot of “things” that you have to make sure off, like camera brand, strobes, settings etc.

 

3. In short.
the limitation is NOT the strobes, it’s the camera and the way it operates. In the camera there is a shutter curtain which travels across the sensor, this is the black bar you see when shooting too fast.

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