Vi har börjat flytta in i nya studiolokalen så nu hoppas jag på kurser och fotosessioner igen som skall bli så roligt!

Alla fotointresserade kommer bjudas in på öppet hus vid tillfälle när vi kommit i ordning. Då kan man få sitt porträtt taget och se lite hur en fotostudio kan fungera.

A spontaneous photo shoot in the studio this weekend resulted in some photos that I’d like to share.

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I had some friends over at the studio some time ago for some portrait works and also child shots. This one became my favourite and I am sure you can see why this was…

Hi, I am Pooh.

Hade några vänner över för att ta lite porträtt och familjebilder och det här blev den bild som jag personligen tyckte mest om efter den sessionen. Det är väl inte så svårt att förstå varför?

Here is finally some results from a wonderful photo shoot in the studio together with Karin who is the model in all these pictures. We were aiming for getting that feeling of old French postcards á la 1920ies or so – and here is the first set on display, there will be at least one more set later on since we got so many nice pictures from this session.

Till sist här är en del av resultatet från en mycket trevlig session i studion tillsammans med Karin som är modellen i alla bilderna. Vi försökte få till känslan i gamla franska vykort från säg 1920-tal ungefär. Det kommer minst ett set till efter detta eftersom vi fick ihop en hel del trevliga bilder.

Stockings

Behind the Screen

The Corset

Finishing Touches

Drama

The Prima Donna

Endgame

En av bilderna som jag har tagit när vi körde “franska kort” i studion sist har hamnat etta på tio-i-topp listan över “fine art” på Modellbilder.se. Stort tack till en kanonmodell att jobba med också!

(Jag är ganska stolt)

Bilden på Karin är tagen under vår session för "franska kort" i studion sist. Jag är ganska stolt över en förstaplacering måste jag säga! Efterbehandling i Adobe Lightroom och Photoshop CS3.

One of my pictures from the last studion session with Karin when we did “french postcards” has been ranked #1 on the top-ten list of fine art pictures at the model site “modellbilder.se” here in Sweden.  Thanks to the great model as well!

(I’m pretty proud of that)

A little while ago I found this excellent blog on Nikonians by Martin Turner. He writes about how the classic potratit painters worked and how we can improved our portrait photography by learning from these masters. He has written several very interesting blog posts on this subjects and I felt like commenting on them myself.

In his first post also titled “Learning about portraits from the masters” he discusses the context of the portrait more than the actual technique to pain or photograph. A portrait is supposed to say something about the person being portrayed and therefore it is important to not lose context and pay some attention to the surroundings of the person, the positioning of the subject, any other props or objects in the picture should have meaning and add to the portrait and not detract from the person being potrayed. I think this is an important lesson and something that is easily forgotten.

In his second post he speaks about differential focus something that has been used by painters for a long time and photographers using a telephoto lens, wide open aperture and focusing as close as possible to re-create. Of course post processing can also be used to achive this and there are more than one way of doing nice differential focussing on a subject.

For a portrait we want the eyes to be sharp, then the mouth and the hair are also important — putting too much fuzziness on the hair makes things look strange and the eyes and mouth are what we as humans focus mostly on when we are viewing a portrait of someone else. An excellent example about this is the painting of a Genoese nobleman painted by Bernardo Strozzi in oil on canvas.

Another thing that he notices are also that backgrounds in paintins are almost always very dark. Almost to the point of being black but never completely black there is always some texture to them but in a very subtle way and the idea of isolating the person from the background is very evident.

Today in photography we often use light backgrounds, even white overexposed so called high key shots which usually means you put 4 times as much light on the background as you do on the subject. Makes it easy to cut out in photoshop and re-arrange in a different background but I get a feeling there is a reason that portrait painters never used such backgrounds.

He also talkes a lot about skin details and softening of the skin in portrait. This was done by painters also using selective focussing techniques when painting but this is also likely down to that our minds generally don’t remember much skin details, we focus on the areas around the eyes and mouth and we tent not to remember too much on other details.

The rest of the posts are also interesting but his number 2 post was the best one so far in my opinion.

You can find Martin Turners Nikonian blog here if you want to read more, and I hope you will because it is very interesting to read his articles!

We had a photo course this weekend and the last day we had a visit from Sally, a great model for the students to practice shooting using model lights and bouncers and everything else that goes with it.

Denna helg eller weekend som det heter på svenska har vi haft en fotokurs i studion. Här har vi Sally som kom över idag och hjälpte till som modell så att kursdeltagarna skulle ha något att fotografera.

Last Sunday we had a lovely photo shoot in the studio with Theres as a model and Annie doing the makeup and then three photographers. Here are some of the pictures from this session. Annie is a makeup artist from the Stockholm Makeup Artist school and Theres had modeled only once before and that was on the Saturday but everything got great and we had a lovely time!

The full set is here >>>

The slide show of the full set is here >>>

Old Circuit

Using Nikon D70s, Tamron SP Di 90/2.8 1:1 Macro, Soligor extension tubes, SB-600. Developed in Adobe Lightroom.

This Thread is Screwed

Nikon D70s, SB-600, Soligor extenders, Tamron SP Di 90/2.8 1:1 Macro, Adobe Lightroom

Well I got inspired by the picture in this post and had to roll my own. I love high key shots!

No ginger roots were harmed in this photo session.

Recently Jeanette bought some nice potted flowers and that prompted me to whip out the camera again to try to make a study of a rose petal. This flower that has been the theme of many songs, paintings, music, love letter, photographs and even statues still fascinates people and the florists comes up with new hybrids every now and then.

I have used the Tamron 90mm f/2.8 to take these pictures since it gives me the best control over the focus depth and also allows very close range focusing.

SB-600 flash used to even up the lighting a bit in TTL-BL (balanced) mode.

One of the more difficult things to light are glassware and bottles containing liquids. I experimented quite some time before I got something that was reasonable here. I am using a cheap light tent to get an even spread of the lights here and it still took some doing.

I am using two tungsten lights of 50 W each and my SB-600 flash aimed at the background. Camera WB is set for tungsten so the flash becomes very blu-ish in color which was the idea, this masks the creases and wrinkles in the white backdrop for some reason. (more…)

Three Gringos, A Study in Friendship

I just got an email and with it I got the result back from my friends, they have now made a poste of the shoot we did earlier that I wrote about here and the result was great.

Additional artistic work by Patrik Freij <farbrorfreij@tele2.se>, photograph by me!

I think the first poster is the best one really, I was never a hundred percent on the lower part of the table and so by putting the logos on top of a brown background like that is perfect. I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out, and it was great fun!

You can see the original photograph and the painting we set this scene up after here.

Here is a variation of the same poster:

"Vänner" means "Friends"

I believe I will go there soon to shoot the repetion of their play!

I was using a 50mm f/1.8 lens when shooting this, it was the perfect focal length (even on my DX camera) and the sharpness and definition of the 50mm is almost scary sometimes. Post-Processing was done on the original photograph with Adobe Lightroom, The GIMP and Photoshop CS3. The main actions was to mask the actors and darken the background a bit further than what we managed to do in the photo.

Paul Cezanne: The Card Players

This was some photographs I did for some good friends who has a theatre. They had this play and when they played it people from the audience came to them and asked if the play was based around the famous painting by Paul Cezanne called “The Card Players” or “Les joueuers de carted” as it is called in French.

They asked me to shoot a similar shot, based on the paiting, for a promotional poster for the theatre group and the play that they were setting up. Which I thought was a wonderful idea so we went ahead trying to find the right costumes and other props.

We set it up where the theatre use to make their repetitions. We had to be a little inventive trying to recreate the moods. We used stage lighting to light the picture and I shot it with Nikon D70s using Nikkor AF 50mm f/1,8 lens, one of the sharpest tools in the tool box.

D70s with 50mm Nikkor f/1.8, studio lighting (tungsten) and gelled highlights.

The bottle is a port wine bottle I brought last time we visited.

In the final edit the background is darkened more to look more like the painting and the window frame visible is blurred. I may post the final edit when they have their posters printed!

It was great fun making a poster like this when there was a very set theme. We had a printout of the original painting to study and the actors here where quite used at getting in the mood so they sat down and nailed everything immediately.

I had to take a few angles before I found what I was looking for in the camera viewfinder.