Tangents

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available light portrait (model – Anelisa)

July 22, 2010 Neil vN 34 Comments

photographing people - available light portrait

While unloading lighting gear from the van to shoot a last few images for a certain section for my next book, I turned around and noticed the way the light fell on Anelisa.  Beautiful portrait light.  The (cropped) pull-back shot will show why ..  Read more inside...

Boudoir photography – an intimate photo session

March 27, 2010 Neil vN 23 Comments

Style in boudoir photography - intimate photo sessions

I did a recent photo shoot with a model, Carly Erin, to expand my boudoir portfolio. Sometimes you get to work in large spacious rooms or studios.  Sometimes you work in smaller more intimate locations. When you work in a tighter, more intimate setting, the choice to include the surroundings or not will greatly affect how you shoot. I made the decision that I didn't want the location to be identifiable and this affected how I shot, so I used a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens for most of the photo session to compress the perspective, and  Read more inside...

photo session: Jeannie Dee

February 20, 2010 Neil vN 6 Comments

photo session: Jeannie Dee

Last weekend I had the great pleasure of photographing Jeannie D, a well-known South African TV personality.  Actually, "well-known" is an understatement - she's a bit of a star. The shoot was for the cover of Top Billing magazine.  The cover image had specific requirements for the setup of the scene - a Manhattan apartment, with a view of the city in the background. I'll post more of the actual cover shoot later on, but in the meantime wanted to show some of the portraits of Jeannie D that I got in between the TV crew setting up, and the setting being  Read more inside...

combining flash and ambient light

January 4, 2010 Neil vN 46 Comments

combining flash and ambient light

Going by the emails that I receive, one of the areas that many photographers struggle with is that of combining ambient exposure and flash exposure.  This question  is also expressed in other ways.  It can be a frustrated, "where do we even start?"  I also often see it expressed as an involved step-by-step deconstruction of technique, making the entire process more complex than it is. In reply to that, and many other emails I've received in the past few months, I'd like to offer an analysis of a few images from a recent shoot. One of my  Read more inside...

Shooting candid portrait at events, with bounce flash

November 14, 2009 Neil vN 19 Comments

Shooting candid portrait at events, with bounce flash

My favorite image from a Bar Mitzvah party that I photographed.  It is one from a series of candid (or semi-candid) portraits of various guests and their kids at the party.  Aside from the obvious photographs that need to be taken during these kinds of events, I also try and grab more candid images, and for these a telephoto zoom (70-200mm f2.8) works really well. By going wide open on this lens, you can really isolate your subject .. and also draw in more of the available light.  In this case the background is a mixture of  Read more inside...

how much depth-of-field? just enough!

April 8, 2009 Neil vN 31 Comments

choosing the necessary aperture for depth of field (DoF)

Depth of Field (DoF) is one of those elementary factors in photography which seem to mystify most (new) photographers.  A question that I'm often asked is, "How do you know how much depth of field you need?"  Now anyone who has delved into the topic and has done some research knows that you soon stagger back .. your head spinning trying to tie together all the concepts:   circle of confusion, focal length, subject distance, size of enlargement, format size, hyper focal distance, and so on. But a working approach might just  Read more inside...

Bounce flash – balancing foreground and background exposure

March 8, 2009 Neil vN 35 Comments

Bounce flash - balancing foreground and background exposure

Lighting for the impromptu portrait of this little cutie was simple - just an on-camera speedlight, bounced up and over my left shoulder.  This gives soft directional light.  A simple technique that works every time when using on-camera flash indoors where there are light ceiling and walls around. Settings: 1/250th @ f4 @ 1000 iso; TTL flash My exposure settings was determined by the out-of-focus garden area outside, seen through a large window. It was over-cast, and therefore not super-bright. This meant that the bounce  Read more inside...

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