As time goes

Today remembered one of the funnier moments captured back in 2011.

While looking at this photo, I realized that today it would look a bit different. I got less 'contrasty' over the years, I guess... Here is same photo today (coming from Lightroom).

Happy birthday, Maya ;)

Julia - how it was made

I proudly present the latest member of our family- Julia. She just turned one month! I don't have to say we are more than happy to have her. A note of sanity- this post is not about how Julia was made, it is more about the photo... ;)

GED Dancers

One of not-so-usual jobs from last year- photo shoot for GED, a dance studio in Göteborg. Talent was their top-rated couple Dawid and Frida- Swedish champions on multiple occasions etc etc. These two can seriously dance! I had a chance to observe them training and it was hard to keep up with all the moves, not to mention that inner feeling of being a tree stump or a rock or whatever heavy bulky and lifeless thing when it comes to dancing.

Definitely worth going to see some dance competition when one comes to your town! And if it is Göteborg, you might even see photos made by me on GED's posters. That was the main intended use for the photos, thus all was shot on white seamless  background.

Read more for the tech details and findings...

Last wedding this year...

And so, with my last congratulations to the newlyweds, I declare my wedding season over for this year. Nothing else planned, at least. However, you are more than welcome to come up with an unexpected winter wedding!

Meanwhile, a couple of moments from last session at a wedding in Germany.

Summertime fun!

A lovely day spent with family Veitch! The kids were having a blast and were really hard to keep up with! Or is it just me getting old now... :)

So, here is a whole bunch of sunny summertime portraits of kids having fun.

Right before I left Mum suggested that Maya should go and take a nap... That idea was actively refused by crawling under the table and playing with a network cable... If that is not cute, I don't know what is :)

A bit of summer romance

What is a summer without a wedding?! Here are a couple of candid shots from a recent wedding in Sweden. Congrats to the newly weds one more time!

A few more weddings left this year. Hope I will be able to post those here!

Emmet

Meet Emmet- the drooling, chewing happy five-month-old. A great kid and such an ease to work with! Was smiling for the whole hour while I was there.

As usual in the full post you will find some more details on the techie side of the pictures.

New members of the family- Emilia and A Nikon 50mm 1.4

So it finally happened and maternity that I took pictures of materialized into a lovely daughter Emilia :) Now you know why I was gone for a month... So without further delays- here she is.

As this is a photo blog I will not go into details how cool this is- too hard to explain anyway. Let me just summarize briefly:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Maternity shoot

A bit different maternity photo session - for the first time it is of my girlfriend Dalia! We are expecting a very unusual Christmas present this year!

After all the talks about photography at home (nagging out new gear) I could not afford not taking pictures of her, so here are some shots from the latest session we had.

The idea was to have 'white and light' maternity pictures and I think it worked out pretty well!

We could not miss the 'belly holding' shot too, with yours trully in there as well :)

Realy excited about our first addition to the family! I don't think I fully understand what's coming my way, but I am definitely getting a lot of practice with baby photography quite soon!

If you are interested in details on lighting setup and diagram, click the Read More link.

Simple lighting setup with Elinchrom Bx 500 Ri

Some weeks ago a good friend came visiting and one of the evenings we spent making a couple of portraits of her. She is a happy camper as you might notice :)

Half way into the photo session Terra felt she needed to investigate things

Terra is one curious dog. Nothing goes unnoticed at home...

For those curious how the pictures were taken- a chart of lighting setup and some more details on how the pictures happened inside the post.

Changing My Skin

It is yet another post-vacation period - the time when all the stuff accumulated in my head through out vacation is being compiled and released out in the open. Relax, there is no need for you to take cover, but this time my actions are a bit more visible than what they normaly are.

Those of you that have been here before noticed already that it is all bright and shiny now. Jep- coming out of the shadows :)

Besides having a lighter skin here I've also removed all kinds of searches and links to various photo directories. They are meaningless (i.e. give none or close to none measurable effect and I don't care what you web marketing people say) as I've noticed so far so no need to clutter things up. Also no more adds from now on as there is no real financial gain from them too. Plus they are annoying :)

As for content there are a couple of new things coming up. I am planning to go crazy beyond webspace. Just tried out the trial version of Bibble 5 which made my day because it is a realy good tool that is workable. Got it's own ups and downs, but haven't they all? So, soon enough I will be moving everything over to some flavor of Linux and have my whole digital darkroom windows/mac free (reasons for this coming together with the flavor choice details). There will be tons of writing about the whole Linux/Bibble/Gimp stuff.

And it is not only on the blog that is changing - homepage got turned inside out completely too.

It is all concentrated on people photography now. Making portraits is something I was getting ready for. And now I am. You are allowed to call me barn/porträt fotograf i Göteborg as my utterly poor Swedish suggests :)

Anyhow, looking forward to see where this brings me. All new adventures will be covered here together with the tech stuff.

That's about it for now!
Keep on dreeming ;-)
//M.

Photoshoot of Désirée Hermann

Last weekend took pictures of an aspiring singer/songwriter Désirée Hermann. Check out her music on myspace. In the mean time here are my two favorites from the shoot:

Both shot with Elinchrom BX 500 Ri kit. The first picture was lit with one softbox in front of her and lighting the background (a white bed sheet...) with the second Rotalux. Two takeaways: make sure the background is realy smooth; has no wrinkles and is not wavy... Otherwise you'll waste too much time cleaning it up in full lenght shots. Second- one light for background is ok, but just a little not enough to make it eavenly lit. Tried to fill in with SB-800 from the other side, but that flash is so weak compared to Elinchroms! You get used to a lot of power too quick :)

Second picture is just one softbox directly above her. To get more controll over light would be just great. A normal softbox spills light too much and I did have to do some make up work on the background to get it completely black. No big deal though, but obviously a gridded softbox goes on the ever growing wishlist.

Ah yes, shot with Nikon D70s and 70-300 VR (first pic) and 18-70 (second pic).

Have fun ;)
M.

Old 50mm f/1.8 manual Nikkor on my D70s

During the years of marriage to D70s I've completely forgotten my old 50mm 1.8 Nikkor lens that is gathering dust together with Nikon FM2.

Figured I might as well try it on the digital camera. Here is the result:



So, yes, it is possible to use an old Nikkor lens on a new(er) digital camera. There are a few buts though.

First- manual focus is a killer. Very hard to get it right wiht small and dark D70s viewfinder. I even started thinking I might need glasses... Well, anyway, manual focus while taking pictures of moving subjects is nothing I miss.

Second- no metering. You have to bother and play setting up the exposure manualy.

Have to be fair- once you do get the borring manual stuff right the picture is great!

BTW, the light is just dinner table lamp. It created quite deep shadows so I put a Lastolite TriFlip silver reflector to bounce some light back into eye sockets.

Feel like putting the new Nikon AF-S 50/1,4 G on my xmas wish list :)

Cheers,
M.

Heavy artillery - Elinchrom BX 500 Ri

It's almost a week since my first ever propper studio lights have arived and now when the initial excitement is over, it's about time to write about the Elinchrom EL 20751KIT Style 500/500 BXRi To Go Kit.

It is amazing how much difference working with these lights makes! Knowing that I'm coming from one Nikon SB-800 background, you should not be surprized these Elinchroms made a whole world of difference for me.

Jump inside the post for first samples.

Obviously, first to suffer were my closest ones- girlfriend and dog... :)


The dog got borred in just about no time:

This picture is cross-lit by both Portalite 60x60 softboxes that came with the kit- one camera right at about 45 degree angle, the other one facing the first, so they are firing into each other.

The dog is gone. Time to bother girlfriend!

Tried to light her in a high-key fashion... Lights are at 45 degrees both sides of the camera. White bed cover, white wall in the background. The background did not get completely white so I used the SB-800 with Skyport trigger to do the dirty work. That wasn't realy enough; in the far left top corner there still was a bit of shadow, but total time of post processing was less than two minutes- completely acceptable if you ask me.

A few dozens of shots later I started feeling boredom coming through the lens... The shoot was over :)

The only one left to bother- yours truly! Made a dark and groosome self portrait. One of the Elinchroms with softbox above my head, pointing downwords. Here I'm sitting on a chair in the middle of living room. There was some light spill on to the wall behind me, but it was very minor and, again, a couple of clicks in PP fixed it in no time (just levels, no cloning).

Hope these samples illustrate correctly why I am so happy with this purchase :)

Update with more samples:
- A portrait of a friend I made with this kit;
- Maternity photo session lit with BX 500 Ri kit;
- Added a Rotalux 90x110cm softbox to the kit;

Cheers
M.

Leidi Misterie shoot

I feel that it is about time to write down how the portrait of Leidi misterie was created. I am really happy about the final outcome of this session. It was a quite a journey before we got to this:

 

On this photoshoot we worked together with a Gothenburg based make up artist Josefin - Nordic Beauty.

Tech details of combining two pictures and changing background with the GIMP - inside the post.


The whole thing as you can see is two pictures. A flower which I shot while on vacation in Lithuania (mothers garden... :) ) and Leidi misterie.

The original pictures look like this:

 

 The flower is all natural light. It was shot with the same D40 and macro filters as the bugs in this previous post.

Leidi misterie is lit by two SB-800 flashes. One of them inside a shoot-through umbrella, right outside the picture above her head, the other fired directly into the sealing on the right side. To kill the rest of shadows I used a reflector on the left side (not a reflector, but the thing to put over the car dashboard on a sunny day :) it does bounce the light!). Lights triggered with Elinchromes.

I was standing on two soft seats above her, trying not to fall... It was hard to keep from laughing in that awkward position... we pulled off one good shot :)

One mistake here- the background. It was very hard to clean up while postprocessing. It would have saved me some hours if I used the green one like the pros do... Now we shot on whatever was available. Afterwards I used layer mask in the GIMP to remove the unwanted areas. To get a starting point of the mask, I made a copy of the image, then used Colors->Thershold... tool.

 

It turns the picture into black and white. Afterwards all you need to do is copy it into the layer mask of the original photo and clean up till it looks something like this:

 

The above mask is not only completed by painting, but also Gausian Blur was applied to it to smoothen the edges.

To cast a shadow I created a new completely black layer and applied the same mask to it, then moved the mask slightly to the left and reduced layer opacity to arround 30%.

Eventually the flower was too brigh/saturated so I added another white layer and masked it where needed.

All layers together look like this:

In between there was some fiddling with colors/curves, a little bit of cloning... The usual stuff.
All in all, this picture was definitely worth the effort!
Have fun!
//M.

Lighting J in Berlin

Jörgen is a good fella. We work together as geeks. While doing some work in Berlin this summer we could not miss our chance to create his portrait, showing his huge interest in history. Where else if not Berlin?..

So, we picked the biggest site of them all. At the time we arrived the sun was all the way up. Seemed quite boring. Managed to talk the guys to grab a beer while we wait for some better backlight. Could not wait long enough, but you can already see the sun shining through the back of the gate.


Trusty old VAL David was holding a bare SB-800 to the left of the camera, a bit above J's eye level. The flash was triggered by on-camera flash of D70s. I sinned and did not note the settings, but those don't really matter too much. The background was underexposed by a few stops and J got blasted with correct amount of light, making him stand out in the picture, having the bright light of the future in front of him, with knowledge of history behind :)

Good luck with the timing again. The place was crowded and we managed to squeeze a shot when there were no people in the frame, except for one lady with baby right under his left arm. Was easy to remove her with The Gimp. Otherwise there was no hard PP done on the image, slight adjustments for the clouds that got a tad burned even with under exposure and that's it.

Triggering off camera flash with the small built-in of D70s might be unreliable sometimes, especially when it's really bright outside. But more on this issue in the future!

//M.