Met veel plezier deel ik jullie mee dat mijn nieuwste Nederlandstalige boek bij Pearson Education, ‘Digitale Fotografie: Flitsen’ vanaf nu vooraf besteld kan worden via deze website. Het boek wordt momenteel gedrukt en zal vermoedelijk in de derde week van maart beschikbaar zijn voor verzending. Door vooraf te bestellen zorg je dat je zeker bij de eerste leveringen zit eens die de deur uitgaan. Bovendien krijgen de eerste 100 bestellingen een gratis oranje CTO filter van Rogue Filters cadeau. Zo kan je meteen de cases op blz. 74 en 76 in de praktijk omzetten! Het boek kost 19,95€ + 3€ voor verzending in België.

Bij het boek hoort ook nog een code waarmee je gratis een bonushoofdstuk (van maar liefst 36 blz) kan downloaden met daarin interviews met 4 Belgische off-camera flash fotografen: Tom Museeuw, Bert Stephani, Jürgen Doom en Andy Van den Eynde.

Hierboven zie je een aantal voorbeeldpagina’s uit het boek. Interesse? Surf dan in een – opgelet: flauwe woordspeling op komst – flits naar de bestelpagina. Als je dat wil kan je daar trouwens in één moeite door nog een paar van mijn favoriete flits-extra’s bij bestellen. Alvast veel leesplezier toegewenst!

Samen met Jürgen Doom organiseer ik twee nieuwe workshops rond flitsfotografie op locatie: werken met reportageflitsers los van de camera.

De eerste workshop is gericht op beginners en gaat door op zaterdag 6 augustus. We leren je stap voor stap de voordelen van off-camera flash en hoe je dat zelf op je Nikon of Canon kan instellen. We leren je manueel werken en tonen hoe je met eenvoudige en goedkope accessoires sterke resultaten kan bekomen.

De tweede workshop gaat door op 8 augustus en is bedoeld voor mensen die al een basiskennis van ‘off camera flash’ hebben. Deze workshop gaat dieper in op zaken zoals high-speed sync, werken met de nieuwe generatie PocketWizards, werken met meerdere flitsen, werken bij felle zon en gaat ook dieper in op de keuze van light modifiers.

Beide cursussen omvatten een theoretisch gedeelte en een praktisch gedeelte, waarin je onder onze begeleiding (fotografisch) aan de slag gaat met een model.

Als bonus eindigen we de sessies telkens met het importeren van de beelden in Lightroom, waarbij we nog een korte demo geven van de nabewerkingsmogelijkheden. In tegenstelling tot de vorige workshop ‘Speedlight to Lightroom’ ligt de klemtoon bij deze twee workshops veel meer op het (flits-)fotografische gedeelte!

De prijs voor beide ééndaagse workshops is telkens 225 €. De workshops zullen doorgaan te Leuven of Gent (exacte plaats wordt pas later bepaald). Inschrijven kan vanaf nu. Het aantal deelnemers is beperkt tot 8 per sessie.

Meer info en inlichtingen op flitsworkshop-at-morethanwords-dot-be of flitsworkshop-at-jurgendoom-dot-be.

• 09.30 – 11.00: PortraitsOfAsia: travel photography
• 14.30 – 16.00: Before & After using Lightroom, Photoshop & Plugins.

There are other workshops, demo’s and photographers as well: with speakers such as Jimmy Kets, Henk Van Cauwenbergh & the Lime Trio (Tom Museeuw, Pieter Van Impe & Bert Stephani), the program is as diverse as it is interesting. The full program can be found here. Entrance to the event is 10 € , 35 if you stay for the evening buffet – I don’t know about you, but I know I am . The demo’s are free to attend and the workshops (such as the two I’ll be hosting) are a mere 5€ per piece. You can make reservations through the site of Het Computerwinkeltje. If you’re coming to any of my two workshops and you have some stuff you’d like me to talk about, feel free to drop a line in the comments!

English readers: this is a Dutch service announcement. Next post will be in English again. Promise

Op zaterdag 20 en zondag 21 maart 2010 staan Mrs. MoreThanWords en ondergetekende op de fietsreisbeurs in Retie. We bemannen er een stand met info over (fiets-)reisfotografie en vertellen er over onze wedervaren tijdens het PortraitsOfAsia projec

Er is ook een selectie van op aluminium gekleefde foto’s te bekijken die vakkundig door het Nederlandse vaklab Wiegers & Smit afgewerkt werden. Onze mooiste foto’s werden ook gebundeld in een boek van Asukabook.  Meer daarover in een van de volgende blogposts.

We trainen alvast onze zelfdiscipline om er niet vandoor te gaan met één van de vele uitnodigend bepakte fietsen en een landkaart of drie, vier. Alle info op: www.vakantiefietser.be

In het december-nummer van het Nederlandse fotografievakblad ‘De Fotograaf’ is ondertussen de vijfde aflevering over PortraitsOfAsia verschenen. Bij het schrijven ervan hadden we net de cultuurshock tussen Singapore en India meegemaakt, en dat merk je ook aan de tekst.

Meer info over abonnementen op ‘De Fotograaf’ vind je hier. Leden van de Vereniging voor Belgische Beroepsfotografen kunnen een abonnement nemen aan groepsvoorwaarden. Meer info daarvoor op www.beroepsfotografen.be.

Aflevering 5 (alsook de vorige vier afleveringen) over PortraitsOfAsia kan je – met dank aan De Fotograaf  - hier in PDF downloaden.

De volgende – en laatste – aflevering zal ietwat anders zijn. Hoe juist, verklappen we nog niet…

There’s plenty of reasons to photograph during the so called ‘golden hour’ (which sadly not always lasts an hour). The colour is warm, the shadows are beautiful and, because the sun is already low, it brings out texture.

For small flash users, there’s an even better reason: a hotshoe flash is not very powerful compared to the sun. But that ratio gets better once the intensity of the sun diminishes.

In this picture, this allowed me to set the exposure for the sky, making sure I did not loose detail there. I positioned the three main subjects so that their faces were still being a little ‘rim-lit’ by the slowly setting sun, which also threw a nice, very three-dimensional shadow to the front. You can see that effect in the picture below. I’d like to tell you that I made it especially for instructional purposes, but the truth is that I forgot to turn on my flash

I then brought their exposure up by using an SB-900 from the front. The flash was triggered by the on-camera flash of the D90. A lot of Nikon cameras have this nifty feature.

The picture below is the out-of camera picture. Because Mrs. MoreThanWords directed the flash towards the faces, the picture is still a little dark around the engine part of the motorcycle. I tweaked it to the final result by cropping in Lightroom and then throwing in a couple of Nik Viveza Control Points.

When I shot this picture, I knew I was going to post-process it to Black & White. Still, I did not use my camera’s built-in B&W setting – I would not even know where to look for it, quite honestly. As always, I shot in Raw, because that gives me most flexibility afterwards, enabling me to seperately and precisely control the grayscale conversion of every individual color. Shooting with a Black & White preset on your camera is as definetely not the way to go, as the car in the picture definetely is not a Mercedes… although those rims sure tried hard to persuade me otherwise!

I also used a polarizer for this shot. A polarizer has become an essential piece of equipment for me. It weighs nothing, costs next to nothing (at least compared to your camera and lens) and it can totally change the look of your pictures, in a way post-processing can’t. It can make skies look darker, make reflections disappear, or, as in this case, maximize them. You loose a lot of light, though (4 stops), which is why I cranked the ISO up to 640. But even that loss of light can be handy for those times when you want a slower shutter speed during the day: you can actually use your polarizer as a makeshift 4-stop neutral density filter… If you don’t already have a polarizer, I’d advise you to get one. If you already have one, you know what I mean . Just pay attention when you use it on wide angle lenses, as you might get vignetting at the extreme wide focal lenghts.

I converted to Black & White using Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro plugin (I blogged about this in further detail here), which I activated from within Lightroom: I chose the ‘underexpose by 1 EV’ preset and added a couple of control points, to add some more ‘Structure ‘ (Nik’s version of what Lightroom calls ‘Clarity’) to certain areas. The whole process took only a couple of minutes. I then cropped the picture to a 2:1 crop  ratio in Lightroom, which I have added as one of my crop presets, as it is perfect for creating a double spread in a square photo album, which happens to be my favorite album type.

For the PortraitsOfAsia.be project, I took along a Freecom ToughDrive Custom, which, as the name suggests, a shock-resistant portable drive of 320 GB. A nice added bonus is that the Freecom drives are not only tough, but they’re well-designed as well. The USB Cable nicely fits into the drive, and the Custom version even allows you to put your favorite picture under it’s transparent shield . There’s also a ‘normal’ version, a ‘Pro’ version, which boasts USB as well as FireWire, and even a version with a leather cover.

When I was in Singapore (click here for my completely unbiased impressions about the city – in Dutch, sorry guys) I saw Freecoms latest addition to their range of shock-resistant harddrives: the ToughDrive Sport. I was happy to notice that the Sport version (which is also available in 500 GB) deals with the only complaint I had about the original ToughDrive: the cable is very short (there isn’t really any, actually), which means that if you take the laptop on your lap, or are lying in bed with it, the drive is ‘dangling’ at the side of your computer.

The ToughDrive Sport has a ‘real’ cable of about 30 cm, that you can nicely wrap around the drive when you’re not using it. The design also features a big O-ring, so you can even clip the disk with the supplied karabiner (mousqueton) to your belt (although I’m not sure why you’d want to do that…)

The ToughDrive has a nicely finished, non-scratching, rubber-like exterior. Since Singapore is all about spending money, I thought I’d honour the city by buying one

By the way, don’t be put off by the prices you see on Freecom’s own e-commerce site. As usual, you can get a much better deal by shopping around on the internet: you might find outlets that are up to 50% cheaper, depending on where you live.

P.S. ToughDrives are designed to take a fall from up to one meter on a flat surface. This means that in real life, you’ll have a better chance of your disk surviving a drop than a non-shockresistant drive, but you should still backup your pictures to at least one other medium!

Funny how a day of shooting pictures can turn out: I shot this picture on a plantation tour in Java. While the other members of the group were being instructed on the life of the cacao bean and the origin of vanilla sticks, I had wandered off (again) and found myself making this picture of a young Muslim girl.

Because the girl’s own umbrella put her face in a shadow, I chose to fight her umbrella with mine

While her mother held my white flash umbrella, through which I shot an SB-900, I just had to press the shutter and focus on composing. I like to ask bystanders to figure as Voice Activated Lightstands. It involves them in the process and it always attracts a crowd, which can be an interesting supply of new faces to photograph.

I ducked down deep to make sure the umbrella filled the entire background and to make sure that the lens (and hence the viewer) would not look down on the girl, as is often the case with pictures of kids made by people who are taller than them. I have a couple of pictures of the girl looking straight in the lens, but I prefer this one. You can see the catchlight of the flash umbrella in her eyes.