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photo session (available light) – Ekaterina

August 10, 2011 Neil vN 26 Comments

photo session (available light) - Ekaterina

Ekaterina, (or Kate, if your tongue trips over her name), was the model at the top of my recent review of the Canon 8-15mm f/4L fisheye zoom lens. Since the fisheye makes everything bendy, and it must be the least flattering of lenses for portraits, I wanted to show a handful of images from the rest of the photo session with her. These should portray her graceful beauty much better.  Read more inside...

Directional light with off-camera bounce flash

July 25, 2011 Neil vN 13 Comments

Directional light with off-camera bounce flash

During the same afternoon that I had the opportunity to photograph Ulorin Vex, I took several other sequences of images of her in other costume. Here we worked in the foyer area of the Hotel Monaco in San Francisco. (If only all other hotels had such a diversity of immediately photogenic areas!)  With this image, I wanted a near-symmetrical image, with just Ulorin Vex's posture slightly breaking the symmetry up. Just enough to make a stunning subject even more eye-catching. A little more about the train-of-thought to getting to this  Read more inside...

off-camera flash – adding dimension with back-lighting (model: Lea)

June 30, 2011 Neil vN 16 Comments

multiple off-camera flash - adding some pop with back-lighting

Lea is a model I've worked with on previous occasions. With her striking looks and easy demeanor, she is just a pleasure to photograph. We spent some time this afternoon in down-town Manhattan, looking for interesting spots as backdrops. Jessica spotted this dramatic gate and interesting glass front. It seemed like the perfect place to start the photo session, but it needed something extra to give the photos some drama. The final image is shown here at the top, but let's look at how we got there ...  Read more inside...

review: Fuji X100 camera – photo shoot with a model

June 22, 2011 Neil vN 17 Comments

review: Fuji X100 camera - photo shoot with a model

First of all, for those who haven't heard of the Fuji X100 (affiliate) yet, it is a beautiful retro-looking rangefinder-mimicking 12 megapixel digital point & shoot camera (with a fixed 35mm equivalent f2.0 lens), that gives remarkable image quality. That about sums it up. For all those reasons, quite a buzz developed around this camera. Quite unlike anything since ... oh, the Leica X1. Or the Olympus Pen EP-2. Or the Sony NEX-5. There was greater excitement building up around the Fuji X100 though than other cameras,  Read more inside...

photographic composition – eliminate & simplify

June 6, 2011 Neil vN 19 Comments

eliminate & simplify - the first steps in photography composition

These two images were taken from more or less the same spot. All that changed was my vantage point, and my choice of lens. This vibrant park in Manhattan seemed like an interesting place to photograph, but when photographing a couple, I really want the accent to be on them. The best way to do this is to frame them so that the background is as simple as possible, but still complements the final photograph. I had the couple sit on top of this grassy mound, and I lay down on the grass, and framed them tightly  Read more inside...

Photographing couples – Going beyond just posing

May 31, 2011 Neil vN 10 Comments

Photographing couples - Going beyond just posing

With the recent post on a few guidelines on posing people, I wanted to add the reminder that when photographing people, our final destination isn't just the posed photograph, but that we should try and capture something about our subject. Something about their personality, or showing some facet of who they are and their lives. When photographing couples in particular, my accent is on photographing their relationship as well. In addition to the portraits of the couple, I want to show how they interact with each other - playfulness  Read more inside...

Using a macro lens for a photo session of a newborn

May 21, 2011 Neil vN 13 Comments

Using a macro lens for a photo session of a newborn

I had the pleasure of photographing Jen and David's newborn baby. Aside from photographing the proud parents with their little one, it is also essential to get detail photos of the baby. With close-up images, you see even more clearly just how small this newborn baby is, when you show the scale. A tiny hand clasping a finger. Tiny toes gently flexing against her mother's hand. For this, a macro lens is an essential part of my camera bag.  Read more inside...

Mimicking window light with off-camera bounce flash

April 27, 2011 Neil vN 23 Comments

Mimicking window light with off-camera bounce flash

Continuing the photo session with Ulorin, we worked inside the hotel room for the next part. The photo above is a candid shot of Ulorin fixing her hair between changes in clothing. Ulorin's next outfit shown in this article, was more revealing than the previous outfits during the photo session. (Just a heads-up for the Tangents readers who are surfing from their workplace.) Photographing inside the room, I initially tried to work with just the window-light, but hit a small snag. The indirect light through the window kept changing  Read more inside...

Off-camera flash – Change your position, change the direction of light

April 26, 2011 Neil vN 37 Comments

Off-camera flash - Change the light by changing your own position

Ulorin Vex was one of the two models that we used in the recent workshops in San Francisco. Having seen Ulorin Vex's personal site and portfolio on Model Mayhem, I jumped at the chance of working with her again with a photo session the day after the workshops. Working with a model as professional and striking-looking as Ulorin, was an experience. The photographs shown in this article was from a sequence we did in the passage outside my hotel room. The lighting was surprisingly simple, but I had to improvise with the  Read more inside...

photo session: a lazy afternoon

April 8, 2011 Neil vN 17 Comments

 Read more inside...

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