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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...

Kate – a New York photo session

January 7, 2011 Neil vN 13 Comments

Kate - a photo shoot in New York

Kate is from Ukraine and has a deep fascination for New York. As a present, Kate's sister flew both of them out for a vacation here ... and had me photograph Kate around New York yesterday. The idea was to get a mixture of portraits of Kate and some photos of Kate in obvious New York locales. We started off in the Meat-Packing district because I wanted a photogenic spot that wasn't too crowded during a weekday (in winter), so we could have an easy start to the photo session. Since Kate might not have been experienced with photo shoots, I thought  Read more inside...

using narrow depth-of-field & great bokeh

October 27, 2010 Neil vN 34 Comments

creating a background with narrow depth-of-field & great bokeh

Shooting images for the review of the Nikon 85mm f1.4G AF-S lens, it struck me how truly superb this lens is. It improves on the legendary Nikon 85mm f1.4 AF-D lens in some key areas. (For me the updated lens was an immediate upgrade.) But ultimately, you could get similarly beautiful images with any short portrait lens that gives you a very narrow depth-of-field AND has great bokeh. (Just to reinforce that again .. narrow DoF and bokeh are not the same thing. But I digress.) So, whether you're shooting with a  Read more inside...

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