a makeshift reflector holder

An important disclaimer: what I have described below is how to use your equipment for purposes it wasn’t designed to fulfill. Doing what is described below is entirely at your own risk and you’re responsible for any damage it may cause to your equipment, people it might hurt, etc., etc. You don’t have to do what I’ve done unless you decide so.

If you also happen to often work with reflectors and don’t always have a handy assistant around this is probably going to be useful for you. Below I’ll describe a quite decent DIY solution/substitute for a reflector holder on the field – it’s cheap, it’s stable and you most likely have (almost) all the ingredients.

What you’ll need

• A good tripod (mine is Manfrotto’s 055XPROB)
• Ball-head to go with it (Manfrotto 486RC2 here)
• A short spigot adapter (Manfrotto 119)
• A clamp which can attach to the above adapter (mine’s some no-name cheap thing, but it’s solid)

So, the basic idea is that you use your tripod as a “do it yourself” reflector holder. Thanks to its wide spread the tripod offers a lot of stability so you probably won’t need to use sand bags or other weights to keep things where you placed them. Because you’ll be “holding” your reflector vertically and not horizontally there are some limitations as to what and where you can reflect. Yet, don’t despair – if you have a tall tripod you can still get pretty decent results at eye height and retain most of the stability.

Below are some photos with brief explanations to help you understand better how the whole thing works. It’s really simple.

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exposure: blasted

In the past couple of years I’m noticing an interesting trend to blow any decent exposure. It seems to be very popular (and not quite well executed) among new photographers. It’s become sort of fashionable – a cool shot is a severely overexposed one. No, I’m not talking about a well done high-key image. I’m talking about wedding portraits, commercial shots, etc., etc.

The proper exposure of a photograph is closely tied to its content and message. Action shots are more likely to look good with a bit of extra light but a static shot is likely to make the viewer confused. Simply overexposing to fix a mistake on the photographer’s part isn’t the right approach… Just as making an image monochrome/sepia toned isn’t.

When a technique or a certain look is introduced into a photograph for no apparent (or supportive) reason it quickly gets old and boring. A bit like HDR – it was a showoff thing the first 5minutes…. and only for the first 45 layers.

Keep those tones visible. Keep the white – white but with texture. I delight in being able to actually see the texture of the model’s skin. It may seem old-school and dated at first, but good lighting lasts much longer in the viewer’s memory than a blast of white throughout nearly the entire frame.

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the engagement shoot – a prep for the wedding

Often an engagement shoot is offered as a separate package by photographers. It is a separate event (well, kind of) and sometimes it’s also far in time from the wedding day itself. Yet, for the times when the engagement isn’t happening too far in advance of the wedding or the couple simply didn’t manage to capture the moment in a special way, offering an engagement shoot as part of one’s wedding package can be a great win-win situation.

As a photographer one will benefit from the engagement shoot as part of the wedding package because it bumps up the value of the package itself while at the same time offers a less stressful environment to engage with the couple in a photographic relationship – to see how they behave before the camera, to get more comfortable communicating with them, to get a better understanding of their taste for pictures… even to see how self-conscious they are.

For the customer – the couple, it’s a good practice run before the wedding and a good number of professional portraits (which many couples lack) at a small increase of the total price.

Lastly, such an “engagement” shoot doesn’t necessarily need to be called that to be a part of a wedding package. An extra short 1-2hrs photo shoot before the wedding will be warmly welcomed by most couples. Give it a shot and see how it will benefit you!

Below are some samples from a recent engagement/pre-wedding shoot I did with a great young couple.

Click the link below to see the rest of the images.

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check the batteries!

Yes, I’m sure you’ve also thought to yourself “It’ll never happen to me.” So did I. And I generally made sure it won’t, except today when I didn’t make sure it won’t and it did happen to me.

Mental note: always check the batteries. All of them.

Luckily, I was shooting for myself and will be able to have another go at the photos I didn’t take, but it was extremely annoying nevertheless. If you’ve had it happen to you – you already know what I mean.

Mental note #2: batteries lose charge over time, even if left unused. That’s what got me today, and my Elinchrom Skyport receivers in particular… Which I hadn’t used in a long while and figured they’ll still have enough juice. The tricky bit with them is also that they usually last so long – I always forget when I charged them last.

Anyway, lesson learned – don’t presume a battery is full unless it really is.

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thinkpad w701 – basic review

I’ve been using the ThinkPad W701 laptop desktop replacement and figured I’ve gathered enough information and experience with it to write a basic review for any photographers out there looking for a powerful mobile workstation.

My W701 (the one pictured) is the model with a single LED screen and no digitizer (the built-in Wacom tablet). I have an external Wacom Intuos4 M and a second flat screen, so these options were not of interest for me. My configuration came with 4GB of memory, Intel’s i7 Q720 @ 1.6GHz processor, NVIDIA’s 1GB FX2800M video controller, and two hard drives. Immediately after purchase, I upgraded the RAM to 16GB – this was the cheapest way to go.

As I alluded to in the beginning – this is not a laptop. I wouldn’t even quite call it a “mobile” computer… Unless you go by the weight standards of some years ago. It’s also massive in size. Coming from a 15″ ThinkPad R60 the size did surprise me at first, but I never bought this to be a “carry around” machine. It’s the ideal desktop replacement, especially for people like me who travel seasonally and need to bring the work along.

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A little housekeeping

At last, the time had come for some housekeeping. As a result, both my photo portfolio section, as well as the blog have received some new bits and pieces and old things were reviewed and updated.

If some sections of the site look funky or the images don’t seem to be the correct ones – hit the good old F5 button or force-refresh your browser another way to get the latest version properly.

The general idea of the update was to outline my portfolio better into four sections: wedding, commercial, portrait and still-life. I’ve also added a “recent” section which will be updated most often to represent the latest of my work – ought to be an interesting place to check out every now and then.

In addition, I’ve finally managed to put together a simple pricing scheme and put that online. In the near future release documents and sample contracts will follow. This is to provide anyone interested with some basic information about my photography services. While it’s mainly a guideline I trust it will be useful.

Finally, some social networking buttons. I’ve limited myself to the bookmarking by Digg, and the three main social networks – twitter, Google’s (new) +1 and of course, facebook. The buttons on the side bookmark the blog’s homepage. For working with a particular post – use the buttons available at the bottom of that post (these have been there for a while).

Last but not least, the photo portfolio content has been updated a bit. For the near future I’ll try to keep the main galleries as they are now. The long term plan is to update the entire portfolio every two years so that it’s more relevant to potential customers or fellow photographers.

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