Trains Cars and Automobiles...

In preperation for a cover shoot i have to do for a magazine i had a quick play with the lights in our backyard. On hand was my brother in law's new Subaru WRX. It took me few moments to remember what i did last time and how to get the lights right but i got it in the end with only 4 lights. Your are not going the get the qaulity of shot you will be able to get in a studio with an adjustable ceiling but for location shoots this is just fine. I am throwing a few diagrams in for those of you that are technically minded.

I had four lights, two 500W strobes and two 300 W strobes. The 300's i put alongside the car, seperating the car from them witha big scrim (white, almost translucent material stretched over a frame). The two 500W's I fitted with Softboxes. The one I put on high level to the back bumper of the car while i had the bigger of the two softboxes flat in front of the car. I shot then from this angle. When i wanted to do a shot from a higher angle I also had to raise the lights to make sure i get more light on the roof of the car.

There are a lot of different ways to get this right but I have always found that simple is sometimes the best.
Here is the photos to have a look. i did have to get the obligatory photo of the proud car-owner of course....

Afternoon Rant

From behance

After a request from some of my students on how to get their photos with that nice old aged effect so used by current photographers i have decided to put a few photos up that I have done like this to give you few pointers.

Photography pointers: Forget all the rules you are supposed to use when taking photos. This type of photography is not about structure but about spontaneity. Use a flash and it doesn't matter if you have shadows on your images, it is part of the appeal. If you do have access to one use a ring-flash if you can. Don't worry about slight movement of the camera or the person. The blur ads to the effect... (you wont get published in Vogue this way).

Photoshop Pointers: Once you have your images that has been perfectly exposed you need to lighten all your images just a tad to make sure the software that we are going to use wont make them too dark. Now go to the website Action Central and download some of the actions there. the ones I used for these photos were the Muted Fashion action and the Editorial action.

Download the action. Open photoshop and your image. Double click on the action that you have downloaded. it will now be in your photoshop Actions panel.

Go to Window in the Photoshop Command bar and choose Actions (alt f9). You will now see that these actions have been added to the standard actions that photoshop has. All you need to do now is run the action by pressing the play button on the bottom line of the Action-window. The computer will now do the work for you.

Easy-peasy. Now you just need to take some more arbitrary photos and send them off to some hip indy magazines and publishing is in your future!

behance

New Times

I have decided to go ahead and redo my whole website. Being in education now for some time Ihave decided that i will from now show you all the work i have done, as far as is contractually possible of course and show everybody how it is done. some of it is difficult, some of the work is easy. Here I will blow open the veil of secrecy and show you how to make shortcuts.
hope you enjoy it
theunis