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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...

dynamic composition – changing your viewpoint (model – Carrie)

June 26, 2010 Neil vN 8 Comments

dynamic composition - changing your viewpoint (model - Carrie)

Near the end of the recent photo session with Carrie, I walked across the street to find another angle. Walking back, I noticed the sun just dipping behind the roof of this old train station. I thought it might flare interestingly if I caught the sun just on the edge there. The problem was that I had to step into the street a few times when there was a lull in the traffic. The angle was a tough one since I had to, or rather, wanted to keep my camera at ground level to shoot up. I wanted the flare, and I wanted this  Read more inside...

photography using the available light

June 21, 2010 Neil vN 25 Comments

photography using only the existing light

Instead of a photo session where I had to rely on off-camera lighting to give some color and snap to the photos, I want to show a photo session where I used no additional lighting or reflectors.  Just the available light.  This photo session was shot in same area as the previous one, but a week later  with different light and a different couple, Kristy and Tom.  They were just as great to photograph with tons of personality, making my work easier.  But I still had to look for opportunity and great backgrounds. Using off-camera  Read more inside...

composition – framing the shot

June 4, 2010 Neil vN 6 Comments

composition in photography - framing the shot

In composing a photograph, what you exclude from the frame, is as important as what you include.  With this portrait of Anelisa, I noticed that at this angle, the light reflecting off the black-painted wall created a warm glow of light behind her.  With the receding lines of the bricks, I immediately composed the photo to exclude everything but our model and the specific background.  A very specific background. Looking at the edges of the camera's viewfinder, I eliminated everything that could distract or didn't add to  Read more inside...

background exposure and flash

April 28, 2010 Neil vN 7 Comments

flash photography - background exposure and flash

When I saw this dramatic sky with the approaching storm during our recent shoot at Coney Island, I knew I wanted to photograph our model against it.  By the time I actually started taking photos, the raindrops were already spattering around us. So there was little time to work. I knew I wanted a brooding sky.  Now, depending on how I chose my exposure, I could've had a much the sky appear much brighter, or just a little bit brighter than shown here.  There's a whole range of possibilities in how I could've exposed for my  Read more inside...

it was one of those days ..

April 22, 2010 Neil vN 19 Comments

You know how some days you have the feeling that the day is just filled with all kinds of possibilities? Today was one of those days. I got to meet and hang out with someone's whose work I admire - Frank Doorhof. Frank is a fashion photographer from The Netherlands who is highly regarded for his lighting skills. He is currently visiting New York to present workshops on photography lighting. (In fact, there are still a few spots open for the Monday workshop.) A mutual friend, Richard Verlaque, arranged for us to meet, with the intention of us also doing a photo shoot, and possibly exploring  Read more inside...

Canon E-TTL flash settings – Average vs Evaluative flash metering

April 18, 2010 Neil vN 23 Comments

Canon E-TTL flash settings - Average vs Evaluative flash metering

With TTL flash, (or E-TTL, as Canon call their specific flavor), the camera and speedlight working together according to various algorithms to control the flash exposure. The E-TTL flash exposure will therefore depend on various factors - the tonality of the subject and scene; the brightness of the scene; and how the camera interprets the sections of the metering pattern.  Other factors quite possibly also includes data from the lens.   How these factors inter-relate, we can only make educated guesses; and many  Read more inside...

what you see …

March 17, 2010 Neil vN 8 Comments

... is not necessarily quite what was there in the original scene.  Read more inside...

Bounce flash & direction of light

March 12, 2010 Neil vN 41 Comments

Bounce flash & direction of light

An aspect to flash photography that I frequently underline in the articles on this site, is that we need to carefully consider the direction of light from our flash when we bounce our flash.  Sometimes we just need to bounce the flash behind us into the room to get soft light.  But when we have multiple walls / surfaces we can bounce the flash off, then our choices become more interesting ... especially when we do portraits. This is Carly Erin, a delightful model that I photographed for my own portfolio: an intimate photo session. What I  Read more inside...

off-camera flash portrait of a show dog, Chanel

March 1, 2010 Neil vN 14 Comments

off-camera wireless TTL flash setup for a portrait of a show dog

A friend of mine, Carol Beuchat, is a photographer who specializes in dog portraits and dog shows.  She was at the recent Westminster Dog Show, and needed to photograph this beautiful whippet, Chanel, for a magazine cover.  Since it was in Manhattan and it was ice cold freezing outside, we had to photograph the dog indoors.  The hotel lobby where the attendees to the dog show stayed would have to be the setting.  And would have to make a great setting. The one foyer of the hotel had these gleaming metal elevator  Read more inside...

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