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 project.

Er is ook een selectie van op aluminium gekleefde foto’s te bekijken die vakkundig door het Nederlandse vaklab Wiegers & Smitafgewerkt 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

A quick note for the Dutch-speaking (or at least Dutch-reading) readers of this blog:

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.

Ever since I lost a whole holiday’s worth of travel pictures, because I accidentally dropped my fashionable and fancy portable harddrive, I have started to appreciate qualities such as shock-resistancy over design.

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.

Good news for those of you who have an iPhone (or those photographers who are still looking for a reason to buy one). OnOne Software, who make Photoshop Plugins, have developed an iPhone application that lets you wirelessly control your Canon or Nikon DSLR.

In the email they sent, OnOne says the Software allows you to control camera shutter and settings remotely, review images, and see live viewfinder previews before you shoot. It also works with an iPod Touch.

The software is priced at 19,99 $ (they even have a ‘lite’ version at one tenth of that price), which is actually a lot cheaper than buying a real wireless remote, as I unfortunately had to find out after losing my Nikon ML-3. As I don’t have an iPhone with me right now, I cannot really tell you more about it but those interested should check out OnOne’s website. If anyone has already tried or bought the software: please leave a note in the comments!

I’m pretty positive that using the iPhone as a remote for a DSLR will result in better pictures than using it thing as a camera . After all, I don’t make phonecalls with my D90, do I?

Hello folks, I’ve added a new category to the blog. It’s called ‘Gear’ and the aim is to provide you with some quick-and-dirty blogposts about (photography-related) stuff I use and that I deem interesting enough for others to know.

The first blogpost in this category will be of specific interest to all you MacBook users: I have recently switched to a 13 inch MacBook Pro (could somebody please explain why they call it a ‘Pro’ and then put in an SD-card slot instead of a CompactFlash one?) and I have taken it with me on my PortraitsOfAsia.be project.

As you might know, the preferred means of transportation on PortraitsOfAsia.be is a bicycle, which means, in conjunction with South East Asia’s bumpy roads and the design of my otherwise fantastic Ortlieb bicycle bags (the have slightly protruding bolts inside that don’t go together well with flat, fragile objects like laptop screens), I needed something really strong to protect the laptop.

I had searched a while for protective sleeves, but a lot of them looked like they had been primarily designed with fashion in mind (instead of rigidity). A simple nyoprene laptop sleeve might protect from scratches, put not from damage from acute pressure on one specific point of the laptop.

Somebody told me to have a look at Crumpler (I knew they made photo bags because I have a pretty good messenger bag from them) but did not know they also made laptop sleeves. Like this 13 inch Hard Suit, which says it all: it’s very rigid on the outside yet has softer foam on the inside, and after months of cycling my laptop still looks like new. It’s also quite fashionable. In spite of some downsides (it’s a little bulkier than a normal sleeve, but of course, that’s the price you pay for the extra protection and the price itself is a little high but still only a fraction of the price of the laptop itself) I would highly recommend it.

You can get it through any of the Crumpler Stores or the Crumpler website itself. Crumpler originally being a German brand, you can also order through the Crumpler.de website. I haven’t checked if there are differences, but non-UK Europeans might be better of ordering there).

There’s also a ‘Special Edition’ that features a carrying handle, so you can carry your laptop like a briefcase. The standard version is more meant to be held under your arm, or inside another bag, like an Ortlieb Pannier…

So, highly recommended for any MacBook user and almost a must for those that want to their MacBooks on a cycling trip.