Light & Composition are two of the fundamental instruments that allow us to translate the threedimensional world into twodimensional photographs. So, I’m happy to see that after a couple of eBooks on (artificial) light, the fine folks over at www.craftandvision.com have released a new eBook ‘Beyond Thirds’ which is all about composition.

While the book starts out with the ubiquitous rule of thirds, as the name implies, it quickly moves beyond that, and tackles concepts such as balance and the power of triangles (one of my own favorite ways of making stronger composition). I especially liked the paragraph on cropping, which is closely related to composition and I was happy to see the square crop – again one of my personal favorites – mentioned as something to explore. The book also offers some creative exercises and – true to form for the C&V series – challenges you to try something different than you might be doing already. Having just bought a Fuji X10 as a walkaround camera, I feel like I’ve already taken that advice to heart: the Fuji has a 4:3 aspect ratio, much different from my beloved 2:3 or 1:1 aspect ratios and it will surely be challenging to come up with great composition

Photography, like any art, is always about learning as much as it is about experimenting with what you’ve learned, and this eBook helps you with both. As with all other Craft & Vision eBooks in general and Andrew S. Gibson’s ones in particular (check out his excellent eBooks on B&W conversion, by the way) this is worth more than the $5 it’s priced. Yet, as always, there’s the usual 20% launch discount that shaves another 20% off: use discount code BT4 and you can have the PDF version of Beyond Thirds for only $4 OR use the code BT20 to get 20% off when you buy 5 or more PDF ebooks from the Craft & Vision collection.These codes expire at 11:59pm PST November 19th, 2011. Happy reading

What hectic times: I feel like we’ve released Making Light, An Introduction to Off Camera Flash just yesterday, and today I’m already thrilled to present you with the sequel, Making Light 2. Advanced Use of Off Camera Flash. This second part picks up where Volume 1 stopped: it’s all about working with multiple flashes and more advanced techniques such as High Speed Sync, that allows you to sync a flash up to 1/8.000 of a second.

To feed even the biggest gearhead’s gear lust, there’s a chapter on… gear! I discuss some of the modifiers I use, my choice of triggers and other useful stuff. Hey, I even mention a printer. What do printers and off camera flash have in common? Well, you’ll read it in Volume 2 .

Just like we had in Volume 1, there’s again 10 case studies, illustrated with setup shots but quite frankly, there are a lot more case studies, tips and suggestions throughout the gear section of the book, as well. So even if you’re on a budget, you might still skim through it!

But probably the most interesting part of this eBook are the four interviews I did with colleagues Jürgen Doom, Andy Van den Eynde, Bert Stephani and Tom Museeuw: these interviews give you an insight into the minds and camera bags of four working professionals who are head-over-heels into off camera flash.

If you’re interested, you can pick up a copy of Making Light 2 in its entire 77 page PDF goodness for only $5 here. And if you do so before October 24th, midnight, you even get 20% off with discount code MAKINGLIGHT4. If you’re really hungry for knowledge, why not get some other books from the Craft & Vision store and save 20% off any purchase of five or more books with code MAKINGLIGHT20.

Finally, if you did not yet get the first Making Light, there’s also a limited-time bundle where you can get both Making Light books for $8. The bundle can be accessed from the bottom of the Making Light 2 product page (see the screenshot below).

Below that, you’ll find a couple of screenshots from the book.

Hieronder vind je nog een paar screenshots uit het boek!

I’ve been playing around a lot with FourSquare, recently. And no, I don’t mean that silly Facebook App that tells people where you are all of the time and that allows you to become the mayor of Whateverville. No, I’m talking about THE Foursquare.

The FourSquare is a combination of a custom designed flash bracket and an equally custom designed 30 inch softbox, both of which fold down to a small package. The bracket can hold up to four speedlights, which is what it did on this very sunny day. The nice thing about the FourSquare is that the back of the softbox can be opened, allowing you to trigger the flashes optically if you want to. As this shot of dancer Olympe (you know you’re destined to do great things when your parents name you like that!) was shot in blazing sunlight and optical triggering can be unreliable, I preferred to use the following setup: one SB-900 was attached to the foursquare as a Commander, and connected to my camera with the SC-28 cord. The other three Speedlights were set up as Remotes. The flash signal goes from the camera to the Commander via cable, so no problem there. And the Commander is so close to the Remotes, that the infrared signal triggers those without a problem.

An alternative would have been to equip the four SB-900′s with PocketWizards Flex TT5′s, but this setup is expensive enough as it is

Anyway: why would you want to use this setup instead of real studio lights? One word, or actually: three words: High Speed Sync. As you notice from the exif-info, this was shot at a blazing 1/4.000 of a second at f 2.8. Try that with studio flashes! High Speed Sync allows you to work with fast shutter speeds and wide open apertures (to minimize distracting backgrounds such as this one). The only drawback is that it eats a lot of power, especially when you diffuse your light through a softbox. That’s why 4 SB-900′s were used (at full power).

More info on the FourSquare can be found here.

English readers: I’ll soon start an English newsletter. If you want to sign-up for that, follow this link and choose English as your language.

Vorige week ging de eerste ‘échte’ MoreThanWords nieuwsbrief de virtuele deur uit. Je vindt er nieuws over workshops, interessante kortingen en links en telkens ook een Lightroom of andere fotografie-gerelateerde-tip. Wil je weten wat er in de eerste editie stond, klik dan op deze link.

Wil je je inschrijven, klik dan hier. Vul het formulier in en kies de gewenste taal. Je ontvangt dan een bevestigingsmail waarop je nog eens moet klikken om definitief ingeschreven te zijn! Uitschrijven kan bij elke mail door op de unsubscribe-knop onderaan te klikken.

Workshops worden ook altijd op Twitter aangekondigd: @mtwpiet.

Tot de volgende?

I’m very proud to announce the release of my second eBook through Craft & Vision. After ‘The Power of Black & White in Adobe Lightroom & Beyond’, which was all about postprocessing images, this one is about photography itself.

‘Making Light. An introduction to off camera flash’ is the first in a two-part series about the wonderful world of opportunities that using a hotshoe flash off camera will open up for you.

The book offers an introduction into the key concepts, techniques and gear that’s needed to get you started right away. Below is the Table of Contents.

The last chapter shows nine case studies in which off camera flash was used to take the picture to the next level.

As all other Craft & Vision titles, this eBook comes at the ridiculously low price of 5$, and coupon code LIGHT4 will shave off even another 20%. Feeling hungry for knowledge? Then use coupon code LIGHT20 to get 20% off of any 5 or more titles from the store.

These codes expire on August 21st.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing and photographing it.

Ilona, one of the students of the Swedish workshop goes into ‘grand écart’ mode. Not your typical ballerina shoes, but then again, Sweden’s highest mountain isn’t your typical ballet environment. Using a small aperture (high f-number) turned the sun into this starburst.

One of the other students acted as a Voice Activated Lightstand, holding a bare flash this time. Triggering was again done with cheap Cactus V4 triggers. After all, like I said in the previous blog post, the best triggers are the one you have with you!

But what to do if you forgot even those cheap triggers? Or you have a Nikon Flash or triggers and everybody on the workshop for some mysterious reason is using Canon cameras? That’ll be up next.

Had a great time teaching at a one-week photograpy workshop in Scandinavia (Swedish Lapland, to be more precise). It was a fun mix of landscape photography, environmental portraiture and teaching postprocessing techniques.

Our guide navigates us and the adopted 10 week old Lisa through the waters near Överkalix. Water, forests, a reindeer and a guy named Carl. It doesn’t get much more Swedish than this.

I couldn’t resist the urge to whip out the old flash and make this environmental portrait. I used a Lumiquest SBIII softbox to slightly soften the harsh cast shadows an undiffused flash would make. I find the Lumiquest to be a great, highly portable little light modifier. It’s handholdable and ideal for those guerilla-style ‘the-photographer-is-also-the-lighstand’ kind of shots that I always wind up doing. Best of all, it folds flat and fits just perfectly in my ThinkTank Speedracer bag.

I had left my PocketWizards FlexTT5 & MiniTT1 at home so I used simple Cactus Triggers to trigger my flash. I could have used Nikon’s own CLS, but in bright ambient sunlight conditions such as during this trip, the triggering isn’t always reliable. When working with these triggers, you loose the ability to go beyond the sync speed of 1/200th. You also lose the ability to work in TTL and remotely control the power of your flash. When working outside, I find this to be not so much of a problem as most of the time, you need full power anyway to tame the ambient sunlight, especially when you make that sun a part of your composition, as I’ll explain in the next blog post.

To me, there are three fundamental things that help you make better pictures. The first is knowing and understanding light. The second is trying to convey a sense of time and motion into this fraction of reality a photograph is. And the third is getting more depth in your pictures. And that last point is what Craft & Vision, the educational eBook project of photographer & author David duChemin has just released a new title about.

It’s aptly called ‘A Deeper Frame’ and it’s David’s first eBook in about half a year and also the first since his fall of a wall in Italy. Luckily, the fall only hurt his body, because after reading the eBook it seems his mind is still as lucid as ever. In ‘A Deeper Frame’, David lists a number of ways to add depth into your pictures. He discusses use of optics, focus perspective and lots more and includes exercises for you to try out.

It’s a highly recommended read for anyone that wants to make more compelling pictures, that better translate the threedimensional reality into a two dimensional photograph.

To accompany the launch of this book, there are the usual discounts plus an unusual one:

For the next three days only you can have A DEEPER FRAME for $4 (discount code DEEP4). Or you can buy 5 eBooks for the price of 4 (discount codeDEEP20). That’s the usual Craft & Vision deal. But this being David’s 12th eBook he wrote himself, on a total of over 20 C&V titles, C&V are offering their deepest discount yet. 12 eBooks (either David’s or other C&V authors’) for $40.That’s about 34% off the already ridiculous price. That’s $3.33/eBook! Use discount code DEEPER12 when you Visit Craft&Vision, fill your shopping cart and check out. These codes expires at 11:59pm PST July 2, 2011.

As usual, this deal only works for the PDF versions of the eBooks. If you have an iPad, you can also get the iPad versions but they don’t have the discounts. Personally, I just read the PDF’s on my iPad through GoodReader. This is a great PDF reader for iPad and it even lets you make annotations to your PDF’s!

English readers: this announces two new workshops on off camera flash

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.

One of the things I like most about Craft & Vision, the publishers of my ebook on Digital Black & White, is the sheer diversity of the books they offer. For those of you who are new to C&V: C&V is the brainchild of Canadian photographer and author David duChemin. After having written his print book ‘Within the Frame’ (a highly recommended read, by the way), David started writing a couple of ebooks. Each e-book only cost (and still only costs) $5. That’s less than what you pay for a photography magazine, and the ebooks come without adverts. Well, I’d be lying. At the end of each ebook is an advert… for Craft  & Vision

After a while, other photographers joined in and started writing ebooks on their areas of expertise. And that’s what makes C&V so interesting and unique…

With a new C&V ebook released almost on a monthly basis, the total is now over 20 titles. And diversity rules: just looking at the last 3 releases, we’ve had (warning: shameless self-plug ahead!) The Power of Black & White in Adobe Lightroom & Beyond, a 100 page ebook on Digital Black & White conversion in Lightroom by a very obscure Belgian photographer.

That was followed last month, by Extreme Perspectives, dedicated to the difficult craft of photographing extreme sportsmen like mountaineers in action, and now we have (micro)STOCK. From Passion to Paycheck by Nicole S. Young, a book that’s all about Stock Photography. And again, it’s a highly recommended read. The book mixes a couple of case studies, that will shred any prejudice you might have against the typical images you might associate with Stock Photography with really useful tips for anyone wanting to get into this industry. I for one thought stock photography was very much about those pictures you find in the average, middle-of-the-road annual report, but Nicole shows lots of examples to the contrary. The case studies show how diverse the stock photography business is and the tips are a nice balance between general advice and more ‘nuts & bolts’ kind of tips and things you should look out for. I specifically like the fact that this book doesn’t promise the world. In fact, it explains that Stock Photography can be profitable, but it’s also hard work. You shouldn’t get into it for the love of money, but for the love of photography.

A highly recommended read for anyone that’s considering putting up images for stock or even just wants to know how the (micro)stock business works. The book is available as a PDF and an iPad version will follow (although personally, I prefer to read the PDF on my iPad through GoodReader, which allows for annotations.

And, as if 5$ for an ebook isn’t already ridiculously low, there’s the usual C&V book launch discount: for the first five days only, if you use the promotional code MICRO4 when you checkout, you can have the PDF version of (micro)STOCK for only $4 OR use the code MICRO20 to get 20% off when you buy 5 or more PDF ebooks from the Craft & Vision collection. On the very off chance that you’d want to submit moody black & white converted winter mountaineering images to iStockPhoto, you can just blindly add the last five C&V titles to your basket . By the way, these codes expire at 11:59pm PST June 11, 2011.