xmagination Blog - photography » Portrait

White Wedding

Andreas — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 20:51:35 +0000

I was asked to take the wedding photos of a young talented musician, who played on one of my many birthdays, and his wife. They told me that professional photographers could only be hired for the whole day, covering the complete wedding. And these so called professionals would then open their big wallets and ask the young couple to do so too. I have already seen a variety of wedding photos, for which , I’m sure, people have spent a lot of money. And believe me some of these printed memories were really disappointing. It’s sometimes a shame. Benny and Wei, that’s the couples names only wanted some decent pictures in great quality and brought three hours in return. Make a long story short this is how they came to me.

To be honest I’m always a little bit nervous when doing wedding pictures. The couple relies on you. And you (actually me) are standing there with a lens as big as the frozen grin in your face, knowing that you have to be somehow creative without any influence on weather. Well alright the location was perfect. The couple decided to have their photos taken in the Eremitage in Bayreuth, which is a large area with old fashioned buildings and gardens. The weather was very cloudy and thundery, but stable.

For the first picture I positioned the couple right in the light, which fell through an open spot in the allée. Rolf, my right hand, reflected the light with a Lastolite Trigrip from left. This gave enough natural light and contrast in front of the long green allée.

The next spot was the so called sun temple. Both desperately wanted a picture in front of the building. My first attempt was to take these pictures with a wide lens. It was almost raining and the result looked like crappy pictures from a disposable camera. So I tempted the couple away from the building and attached my 80-200 f2.8. And here we go.

Sometimes people reproach me for using photoshop (PS) without knowing if I even do so. The fact is, for all these pictures I have not touched PS. But it’s true I’ll never be able to use the raw pictures my camera gives me. Sorry cam but you are dumb. My camera has no human eye and I’m not speaking about retouching, hell no! It will always have problems with levels and sometimes with white balance. I think adjusting pictures is not a sakrilege. It is sometimes just a necessity.

The grass was wet but I simply like the depth of the picture and the faces in the picture.

Actually sometimes you have to be lucky. Who were these people and where were they coming from? Don’t ask, just shoot! I only used some fill light light from my flash, mounted on the camera.

For the last two spots a reflector made no sense as there was nothing to reflect any more. The sun was gone and a few rain drops fell. So hiding under the big trees and at the sun temple was a good option. The sun temple with its white pillars wouldn’t necessarily give enough contrast to the bridal dress, but due to the different color tones it worked out perfect. Rolf softened the light with a white “softener” (or whatever this is called).

Thank you, Rolf!

Under the Softbox

Andreas — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 20:44:38 +0000

You must be strong now as the following pictures will show nothing else but me!
I usually do not like photos being taken of me but sometimes I feel I could need a shower under the softbox, so I can remember what I once looked like when sitting in my rocking chair.
Main light comes from a softbox almost above my head and in a straight line with the lens. Some of this light reflects in a reflector close to the floor.

Studiolike portraits with the X100

Andreas — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:45:01 +0000

Today my sister was visiting me and she brought fake lashes, make-up and a hat. I brought my X100 and we both exercised patience as I do not have a modelling light and the X100 performs bad in low light. But the pictures turned out to be sharrrrp! Eazybox with SB-800 camera left, trigrip gold/silver.

100% crop from Fuji X100

And then her husband came, Dimtrij Dimitrijanovitch:

Self-portrait (continued)

Andreas — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 21:50:40 +0000

Here are some additional pictures of yesterday’s session.

Self-portrait

Andreas — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 10:46:41 +0000

Once again I had the desire to take some self-portraits of me and what could be better than to start the year with a camera, a flash and an idea. Inspired by a portrait shown in a german newspaper-supplement I saw the challenge to reproduce the light setup in my apartment. It (happily) still has a lot of white walls, which is always criticized by guests. In this case the white wall was just good enough to serve as a background. So basically everything I did was to position the softbox with one SB-800 approx. 6ft from the floor, pointing down, so that the wall would not catch too much light. What followed was: camera on, flash on, release shutter, Mac on, sync with Ipad. And then I had to take like 80 pictures, every time interrupted by a position check on the display, until the right hand and the tablet matched the face and the hand in the picture; aarghh… it was almost driving me crazy!

Backlit shot

Andreas — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 11:28:09 +0000

I haven’t done a lot of photos this year. I can’t really tell why but sometimes it’s the familiar surroundings which isn’t very inspiring. It’s sometimes hard to see the world with different eyes, to create something brand new out of something very familiar. I think this is what people call abstraction.
However I appreciated my sister asking me to take pictures in the park I live close by. As she is very familiar to me and so is the park I decided to give the pictures a punch of color and light, in order to make them something special. The only tree in the park that was still carrying yellow leafs had already been occupied by color searchers like us. But when it was our turn I dialed manual (over) exposure, pointed the camera towards the sun and tried to produce as much flare as possible. And this with a lens I preferred to buy for its flare-resistance (Nikkor 17-35mm f2.8). After some minor color adjustments in lightroom I finally got the pictures that match the colors, the mood and the time of the year.