There is abook on the market of which I would like to tell you.

If you want to improve your lighting skills and to be able to light everything you want then this is the book for you. It doesn’t teach you how to set your light every time the same but teaches you to think about what light does and what you want to get out of the image you want to create. I got the book two days ago and read it in one setting and it changed the way I think about light and my images in the studio.

Most of the images in the book are taken with film and not digital BUT as this is a book about light and lighing techniques that is not a problem at all.

This is one of the best books I have ever read about this subject and believe me I have read many.

You can buy it from amazon, just click on the image and it will bring you to the page.

Happy shooting and till the next time

The first shoot is done and we have some photos to show for. I have used Paramount lighting which I show here.

Paramount 1

Paramount 2

It was difficult to begin with and we shot around 40 images. I ended up with 17 that were good and the two above I liked myself the most. The model will have a look to see what he likes and we will add that to the portfolio. As lighting equipment I used the ProLine 300 Kit which was very easy to work with and I feel gives a good result. I made 1 mistake and that was that I had the white-balance on auto and I should had this on 5600 Kelvin. This resulted in a lot of work to get the colour balance right but is a lesson for the next time. Look at your camera settings before the shoot!

I have the ProLine 300 Flash kit now for a few weeks and become more and more impressed by the quality it delivers for its price.

This week we had a little gathering to try out the possibilities in some table top and DOF with this kit to see if it was possible to trim down the light far enough to work with very low apertures. In principal we wanted to trim the light down so we could use F2.8 on a 100 ISO setting and this was done without any problems whatsoever.

We used 1 light with a softbox attached and had a lot of fun with this. The picture shows that working with a small aperture is possible due to the ease of use in trimming the power down.

There is only 1 thing I miss in the kit and that is proportional modeling lights

Happy shooting

One of the hardest things to do as a beginning photographer is to create a appropriate portfolio of the kind of work you do or want to do. This is especially true if you are looking to go into an area you haven’t worked in before as potential customers would like to see what you can do for them and that means what have you done in the past!

Depending on the kind of work you want I can honestly say that to create a wedding portfolio is the most difficult one there is. A wedding day is probably one of the most important days in a brides (and grooms) life and they want to make sure that everything is perfect this means that entering this market is difficult. When I tried to entering this market place I needed a portfolio of at least 1 wedding and do get that I think your have 3 options:

• If you are lucky then one of your relatives are getting married and you can create your portfolio on that day. You must be aware however that if they have an official photographer don’t get in his way as he need to deliver top quality. You can talk to him and see if you can operate as a second or third shooter for him.
• Try to in contact with an established wedding photographer and offer your time, maybe even against a small fee (he pays you), as a second shooter and get your portfolio work.
• Offer your time to a couple that is going to get married and charge them only the printing costs for the album. BUT tell them that you are new in this area so that you give them the choice on risk they are taking!

As a portrait photographer it is a bit easier to get some good portfolio photos, you have family and friends who you can ask to sit for you, ask strangers in return for a printed, of digital (DVD), photo portfolio for them. The costs are low and you can build this up.

Make sure you have ONLY your best photos in your portfolio. Make several portfolios one for every area you work in.

To give you an example: I want to get into environmental portrait photography and need to create a portfolio for that. I am lucky as I have another job and do the photography as a part-time freelancer. To get a good few photos for my portfolio on this I proposed my employer that I will create a set of photos for a calendar based on the product release cycle on the company. It will cost them nothing, and it even will cost me nothing as I am doing the portraits in working time. They have agreed to this and I am doing this project for the next 3 – 4 months. This will give me a seasonal amount of portraits to choose from and a reference of a "customer" which I can give to potential clients in the future. What is more this calendar will be printed I have tear sheets to show.

I will keep you update about this project in the months to come.

I hope this gives you a idea how to start and as usual any comments are welcome.

Theo