The importance of post processing

During my training I refused to use photoshop. During our first year we used film and developped our pictures in the darkroom. I loved the smell ;) and the charm of the darkroom. photoshop was the least of my worries.

The second year however we switched to digital photography. And although photoshop opened up a complete new way of post processing photo's, I refused to use it to its full extend. Nowadays I am using it extensively. I'm however still reluctant to use photoshop when processing weddings, simply because of the amount of photo's I would have to process. A wedding would simply not be commercially viable when having to process every single photo in the album. For weddings I still believe that the photo needs to be created at the moment you press the shutter.

Lately I have been shooting a lot of models in studio... and I have been using photoshop a lot. Setting the  light, making sure the make-up is ok and getting a beautiful model in studio is a very good start, but without photoshop, where would we be;

I tend to use a beauty dish quit a lot.A beauty dish is used to create beauty shots. Beauty shots are not really my cup of tea, but I like doing it (I'm just not good at it). Looking at the unprocessed photo's rarely makes you feel in awe. The beauty dish is really unforgiving, every flaw in the skin is picked-up. So without photoshop, we would not be speaking about a beauty shot. The next picture is a before and after, just to illustrate that we do put some effort in our work. My biggest problem is knowing when to stop?

Or we could add some hair.

NSFW - request

People tell me I don't know how to shoot nudes. I would like to prove them wrong. Any one interested to pose, just let me know :)

Light modifiers

Why light modifiers?

Why would I like to tell you something about light modifiers, aren't light modifiers obvious? At the moment they are to me (almost) but they were not always obvious.

A couple of days ago I got the question: Which studio set should I buy as a starting photographer? To be honest I did not have a ready-made answer. Of course I could have send her a link to one of the starter sets out there. But having been there, I would not recommend it any longer.

Buy the best set you can afford. Don't worry to much about the money. If photography doesn't turn out to be your thing after all, you will still get good money selling your gear on the second hand market.

What could have helped me a lot, and saving me a lot of money in the process, would have been an overview of available light modifiers and how they can dramatically change the outcome of your photo. Although the flash heads themselves are important I do believe however light modifiers will change the way you look at studio photography.

So the next posts will cover the different light modifiers I have been using, hopefully these post can help people make the right choise when standing at servix not knowing what to choose. You can't buy them all, they are way to expensive ;)


The maxi spot reflector

Let us start off with a modifier I personally do not own, the  maxi spot reflector. I was able to use it thanks to Luc Grobben who invited me on one of his test shoots. This reflector will cast some 'interesting' shadows. I have to admit that I still need to practice a little bit more, before I will start liking it.

When used with a grid and I recommend buying the grid straight away, you will get the following results. As said before, shadows all over the place. Vignetting, light fall off at the lower part of the body, shadows at the right hand side, face and body (that is when you place your light at the left hand side ;) )

If these are the kind of photos you are hoping to shoot, then the maxi spot reflector is your tool. Keep in mind though that these kind of photo's are not easy to commercialize. They have more their place in the art world.

Before I forget, a special thanks to Ellen, who was so kind to let me drop in to have a couple of shots. Thank you very much Ellen, I hope to see you again some time soon.

Natural Light II

As promised a small post on usage of natural light indoors.  I do not have that much experience shooting indoors without the use of artificial light. But lately I decided to give it a try. After some experimenting, I came up with a few nice shots and some gained knowledge I would like to share with you.

Shooting indoors using nothing but natural light might look challenging at first, but it actually is fun to do. It gives you so much more possibilities then shooting outdoors. Let me be honest about it, if sharpness is an absolute priority of yours, you will be in for a real challenge even with the newest high ISO cameras.

Using the window in different ways:

The large softbox:

Putting your model next to a large window can function as a large softbox. Keep in mind that on a sunny day you should pick a window facing the north or close the curtains. On a grey day, of which we have got a lot in Belgium, it really does not matter although one facing the south could just give you that stop extra which could come in handy.

Try using the windows as a backdrop, separating your subject from the background.

The maxi spot reflector (with free grid :) )

One of the more popular light modifiers, because of it's price and interesting results. The effect can be more or less achieved using nothing but indoor natural light. Admittedly, this lighting can not be found in every living room, but when walking into a building, search for it. The sun is a very small lighting source ... Yes it is  ... It's just a small dot on the sky. A small lighting source normally will cast nasty shadows. Because the light from the sun is bounced from every possible surface on earth we do get diffused light however. If only we could canalize the sun we would get a perfect maxi spot reflector. We now build small houses with large windows, in the past however we used to build big house with small windows.So search for old buildings ... a church perhaps?

This picture was taken in a church, the only light entering the church was the light falling trough one of the small windows which was placed right in the ridge of the roof. Look out for harsh shadows however, ask your model to look up ;)

There is a lot more you can do using indoor natural light, but for now that's all I wanted to share. See you later.

As always these picture are straight out of camera.

Natural light

When photographers talk about photography, especially when they talk about model photography, they  usually end up in discussions about photography gear .

Off camera flash, ring flash, Sunbounce and the lot. Everybody has his or her own ideas and opinions about what is best and how to use the goodies. I have been one of those guys who was perfectly happy with a simple reflection screen. On a rare occasion I have used off camera flash. But I must admit that using all this stuff is not really my thing.

Why not, well because of a number of reasons.

• I always had the feeling I was missing some goodies, triggers, light modifiers, light stands, CB ... you can never have enough goodies :)
• I felt limited by the goodies, having to put my model on the exact spot, telling her not to move.
• Every shot asked for a complete new setup, losing out on valuable time.
• Having to rely on assistance to setup and hold screens and/or flashes. 
• ...

So why was I still doing this? Probably because we humans have the urge to follow the mainstream. Everybody is doing it, so it must be good. And do not get me wrong when properly applied it is good. Unfortunately there is a lot of crap out there as well. And I strongly got the feeling I was part of the crap. So I decided to go back to the roots, learn model photography in  the simplest possible way. Me, myself and I Canon ... and of course a model :)

Following shots are made with nothing but natural light. Are they ok? Judge for yourself. I have my doubts, which I've added after every section.

Last Saturday we had a nice sunny day in Belgium, The ideal weather for a great shoot ... NOT

Lets see what we can do. Everyone knows you have to put the sun in the models back so lets try that.

bwa ... not too bad, we do have some disturbing high lights in the hair, the contrast between the sunny side and the dark side are quite challenging, but I do not mind the high lights, it adds some atmosphere to the photo's so ... yeah it's ok. What however bothers me are the gray skin tones.

Rules are there to be broken, let's go to the sunny side.

Nice saturated colors, enhanced in the second photo by setting the white balance to shade. And although this is nice, it does come with some other challenges, not so much for the photographer as for the model. Looking into the sun for too long, will blind any human being. Shooting from this angle is really harsh on the model.

Shade, the solution? shades come in all kind of shapes. Moving into the dense woods, a step into the dark. But make sure you have got some light in the background, to keep it interesting.

 

I kind of liked it, skin tones were not to bad, although not perfect. Problem I did encounter, I had to pump up the ISO to 400 and shoot at 2.8 which left me with a not so perfect sharpness :(

Foliage matters. I was looking for some nice diffuse light on this perfectly sunny day. Going into the woods was a good idea but not just any tree will do. Foliage matters, to thick foliage will leave you with to little light. To thin Foliage will leave you with high lights on more or less unpredictable places. So find yourself a nice tree which will render you the perfect diffuse light. The following photo's were all taken while the model was shielded from the sun by the trees. I guess it is just a matter of finding the right tree.

 

In general I was happy with the outcome, perhaps one could argue that some of the photo's are a little bit dull ...But then again a photo is more than perfect lighting. With the right model at hand, even when the light is not perfect, you can still get the viewers attention. Eve certainly had my attention, by the way thanks again for the lovely shoot Eve.

Living on the edge. There was just one other thing I needed to do. I had some shots in the sun and I had some in the shade. Now it was time to shoot in the twilight zone. Where the sun meets the shade, I tried two different settings, again using trees and other flora. Stand in front of the tree compared with the sun that is, Let the model approach the border between shade and sun. Do the same but this time stand behind the tree compared to the sun. It does create some high lights which are evil for most photographers. I happen to like evil :)

This sums it up for now. Next post will be one about natural light when shooting indoors. That's going to be a nice one :)

In case anyone is wondering, these photo's have not been post processed except for some minor modifications, mainly white balance and some slight exposure adjustments. The normal 1 minute stuff :)

USB drive gone bad

And yet again a non photography related post. I'll try not to make a habit out of it.

Yesterday I was copying some stuff onto my USB drive when all of the sudden it stop and told me the drive was write protected ???? WTF !!!

First I tried to format it, but windows would not let me, because ... well you know ... the drive is write protected (windows is consistent, you have to give them that much credit)

So I started googling, read a lot of stuff about installing tools (probably full of spyware and other unwanted stuff) which could fix the problem or others telling me to modify the registry using regedit. I did not take the time to try these things out since most people who did try ended up with a USB stick which was still not writable.

After an hour or so I stumbled upon a useful blog, explaining what could be the problem, Some hidden program on the USB drive  was probably responsible for the problem, this program is always launched at start-up. making the USB drive write protected.

The simple trick is to prevent windows from launching the program at start-up. And sometimes things can be easy. Insert the stick while holding down the shift key. The USB drive will be recognized and no programs will be started. In my case, the USB drive was no longer write protected. I was able to format it without a problem. Of course this might not work for all of you, but it did work for me :)

Next post will be about photography again, I promiss.

Concert Photography

Concert photography, although one of the reasons why I started out with photography, is one of those segments of photography I hardly ever practice anymore.

Why? Well because of a number of reasons.

1. It's not easy to get into the big concerts with great headliners.
2. It's a lot of work, The smaller concerts let you in but usually expect hundreds of photo's in return.
3. It's not so much about photography, timing and composition will make you stand out from the rest.
4. It is much more about, equipment and politics.

I know it's a bit short sighted but I am just trying to make a point. As a concert photographer you are an observer not a director. The better you observe, the better your photo's will get. Knowing all the little habbits of the artist or getting to know the lighting designer, can help you to push the shutter at the exact right moment.

But if you are not really into people, I am not, concert photography just boils down to 3 things: luck, equipment, composition.

Equipment:
- Get a body with great ISO performance 1600 or more
- Get at least 2.8 lenses from 10mm up to 500mm
- No, no flash :)
- Spend a lot of money and go

Composition (can be challenging)
- you are most of the time litteraly at the feet of your idol or ... some other musician.
- A lot of rubbish is in your way, mikes, other musicians, construction poles, ...
- Musician have a bad habbit of not standing still, the ones that do stand still are boring.

Luck:
- yes, you will need it.

So why do I still bother? I can't help it, I just love the feeling, being frontstage, while thousands of people are standing behind you, feeling just a little bit jealous :). And sometimes, when you are really lucky, you do get that one lucky shot which could just make your day. (I'm still waiting)

What follows are some shots of the last concert I did, Afro Latino 2012, lovely atmosphere, great music, and great organisation. Did I already mention that those are also reasons why concert photography is worthwhile practicing? 

Brenizer and cows

This weekend I stumbled upon fstoppers.com. It's more or less the photographers heaven, so much information all combined in one site. Thanks guys for the wonderful site, I'll be checking it out on a regular basis.

One of the articles I was most interested about, was the one about the Brenizer effect. This article explains how you can create a wide angle picture and still preserve a shallow depth of field, something which is not possible to achieve with any wide angle lens. What Brenizer  basically does is: Create multiple pictures with a portrait lens (50mm - 85 mm) and stitch those pictures together to get a wide angle picture.

Wanting to try out this technique as soon as possible, but being short of models, I decided to go into the wild :). A couple of weeks ago a number of cows have been set loose in our backyard. So I figured why not shoot the cow.

It turned out to be a little bit more challenging than I anticipated. The cows did not listen, what ever I did, they came in to close. But in the end I did get something which was more or less acceptable. Not quite the result I was hoping for, I guess a little bit more practice will be needed. Next time I will try this out with a more intelligible model :)

Getting to know the cow, Tip (for the city people out there): I figured this one out by accident, walk into some cow manure, go sit somewhere comfortable and wait until the cows approach you. They will come to you and lick the manure of your shoe. Well done, you just bonded with a cow.

Making your first shots, letting them get used to the camera.

Go for the final result, the next picture are actually three pictures stitched together. As I said before, not the best result. I should have created a bit more distance between me and the cow, but she was so fond of me that she kept following me.

Just one more thing, be careful. Cows may look stupid, they also weigh 700kg, you do not want to mess with their feelings. Be gentle, tell them nice things, like how wonderful they look, how great they are as a model, the best you have ever worked with and stuff like that you know what I am talking about.

I'll definitely will be trying out this technique again in the future, hopefully with some better results.

Backup your shit

As an IT specialist I know the importance of regular back-ups. Now, knowing about it and doing something about it are two different things. I have just spend the last three days trying to recover my pictures. Amongst which a wedding album which I had just finished.

On Saterday I decided to go for a marathon session, finishing a wedding album which was long over due. Well that is, they got maried 4 weeks ago and I always promisse a 3 week delivery. So saterday and sunday I spend most of my time working on this beautifull album. Some 20 hours passed by, and you know what I finished the album.

Before taking a backup of the album I decided to take a well deserved walk with the dog. After my walk however, fate kicked in. My PC had shutdown, rebooting took forever (45 minutes) and after the reboot everything was unbelievably slow, I am used to some slow processing, but this was rediculous. After another 15 minutes I was confronted with the absence of my e drive.

The e drive being the one which holds my wedding album. Being an IT specialist I was not really worried. I was going to fix it :) Having fixed numerous other crashed pc's of my buddies and relatives, this was not going to be a problem.

I got my live ubuntu cd. Booted from cd, and what do you know my e drive was still not accessible. Damn't that worked in 100% of my previous crashes :(

Ok back to windows utilities, got to windows repair, after going through a couple of sessions, amongst which some nifty command prompt scripting, my C and D drive were missing as well. I love those windows utilities. :)

By now I started to get a little bit worried. I did make a backup of the pictures so that was not worrisome, but knowing that I had to go through the complete process of designing the wedding album really was bugging me, spending 40 hours on an album is normal, doubling it is not something you like to do.

Let me tell you how it went down, after three days and some restless nights I was able to recover my files. The wedding album was saved. Yeah for me, being an entrepeneur I immediatly saw great opportunities, with all the knowledge I just gathered over the last few days I could help a lot of people and of course make some great money on the side. My website promoting myself as a recovery specialist was already on the way. But then I remembered, I don't need any extra work, I promissed myself to start enjoying my live and to work less.

But it would be a shame to let all this knowledge faint away. therefore I decided to share my experience in this blogpost. I know I don't have a lot of readers but for those who do read my blog, I hope one day you will be able to use what I am about to tell you.

Caine is the solution. Caine is a linux distribution, and stands for Computer Aided INvestigation Environment. It's a distribution containing all sort of recovery utilities. I did not take the time to investigate the complete distribution, but I will tell you how I used it.

First download Caine, burn it on a cd. Make sure your computer is set to boot from cd. Boot! After booting you will get a linux desktop. The distribution is created in such a way that you only have read rights, so there is no possibility to screw things up even more than they have been screwed up by windows :)

Once on the desktop, open up the menu, go to Forensic Tools and launch TestDisk. TestDisk is the utility which will save your day. Now go through the following steps.
- Choose No Log (arrow keys) hit enter.
- Choose a disk (arrow keys), look at the size to determine which one you want. hit enter
- Choose table type (windows -> intel, use arrow keys), hit enter
- Choose Advanced (arrow keys) hit enter
- Choose partition (arrow keys) in a lot of cases the one your are looking for will be called DATA, DO NOT HIT ENTER
- Choose [List] (left right arrow keys) now hit enter
- You now have got access to your lost disk, navigate to the folder you are trying to recover, use arrow keys (up, down, left right)
- Once you have located the files you are trying to recover, select them (yes with the arrow keys) hit c (to copy)
- After hitting c, the tool will ask you for the destination location, just accept the default, hit C again.
- repeat the last two steps for every file you are trying to recover.

so far so good. Now that you have copied the files you are trying to recover, it is time to get them on some external device. Insert an usb stick are something similar. Your usb stick will not be recognized by the system, trying to mount it will not work. An other utility has been provided to mount external devices.

Go to menu, open up Forensic Tools again, and choose the utility Safe Mount. In the dropdown box select the last entry, well I am not sure that it is always going to be the last, but it is a save guess, I guess. Do not forget to check the check box to make it a writable mount, remeber by default Caine will mount everything as read only.

Now that you have mounted your external device it is time to copy the stuff you just copied onto your desktop (that is onto Caine) Here is the catch, you can't just open the Home folder location, doing so would leave you with no permissions to copy files.

So there is one last utility you should know about. Which is called Nautilus, at the bottom of your screen there is an icon looking like a seashell, clicking on it will open Nautilus as administrator. Afer opening it you will see on the left hand side a tree menu, select caine in the menu. On the right hand side you will see an icon representing the dektop and an other Icon representing the folder you want to copy.

Right click the folder, choose send to, in the first dropdown box choose Removable disks and shares, in the second dropdown box choose your external device (it is not the cd rom ;) ). click on send. YEAH !!!!! your lost info is copied on the external device.

Before pulling out your usb stick, remember to unmount it first, and yes you will have to go through one of the utilities again. Open up the safe mount again. Choose the last entry in the list hit ok again. On the next popup choose unmount. You can now unplug your usb stick and take it to your next windows disaster machine.

I hope you will never have to use this procedure, but when running on windows you never know. I always make backups, of everything I do. When I get home after an assignment the first thing I do is, make a copy of my pictures on three different locations. When starting to work on my pictures, I sometimes get sloppy and make the copy after all the work has finished, I know I should do it on a more regular basis, but hey I am only human.

Remember this procedure is for copying a small number of files. Caine is also able to make an image of a complete drive, but I did not dig into this procedure. I had a backup of most of my work anyway.

Och yeah, why did it take me three days?? Because it was only on the third day that I discovered Caine. If only I would have known .... Now you guys ain't have no excuse for sucking up valuable spouse time.

This post was not much about photography, but any photograper should know about this distri.

beautiful location poor lighting

I planned a nice outdoor shoot with the beautiful Cato, But as happens so often we had to change plans the very last minute. The weather was bad but luckily for us Cato's mother could get us into 'De Vooruit' in Gent.

We were allowed to shoot in the old theater. It's probably the most beautiful theater of Belgium. But unfortunatly it is realy poorly lit. ISO 3200 1/30s f2.0. Now I don't have a zillion strobes in my backpack ... should I have?

Perhaps, if I would have known in advance, I could have taken some more strobes, umbrellas and triggers with me. But frankly ... I'm not into strobisme. So I went for the safety shots and ended up with these shots, not quite what Cato was expecting, but hey I'm still learning and one of these days all will fall in place.