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Category: Photography

  • American Football

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    A friend invited me to come to one of the American Football games, at which he played for the Kent Falcons, the University of Kent’s team. At this game they played against the University of Christchurch team. He told me it was their first season as a team, which might explain why they lost quite badly against Kent.
    It was also the first time ever I’ve seen American Football. It took me all of the first half to figure out more or less how the game works. Once I was able to get a feeling for where the ball was going to go I started to get some decent pictures.

  • Wedding: Lynn & Tim


    Such a cute couple. I had a great time at Lynn and Tim’s wedding last summer. Tim used to work with my aunt and that’s how we got in touch. As usual I went to see them and we discussed the details of their wedding well ahead of time, so that everything could go as smoothly as possible on their big day.
    Once again, Olivier Kerschen assisted me throughout the day. It’s great to have an assistant with you who knows the way you work. We started the day at Lynn and Tim’s home with detail photos and some shots of Lynn getting ready. The church in Obercorn in which the ceremony was held wasn’t far from their home, so we could spend a good deal of time with Lynn and still meet Tim at the church, early enough to confirm with the priest the decisions Olivier and I had made when we had scouted the church on an earlier occasion.
    The ceremony was great, with some brilliant solo performances by the choire and lots of emotions.
    The reception and dinner were at the Claimarais in Belgium, a lovely hotel-restaurant with a beautiful parc surrounding it. We stayed with the couple and their guests well into the night: the dinner was followed by catchy music by an Italian trio, and the family and friends had come up with some priceless games for the couple in between the dances.
    We took the couple photos of Lynn and Tim on a separate day, which allowed us to visit a couple of locations. We started in the Grund in Luxembourg city, which looks great in summer; then we moved on to the Schueberfouer, the yearly Luxembourgian funfair for some photos in a more unusual and exciting setting. Finally we drove to an abandoned warehouse to finish the shooting with a modern, gritty edge.

  • Zazu

    Meet Zazu, Alison’s African Grey parrot. She’s a crazy one. (Zazu, not Alison.) When I took this photo, Zazu was about three months old. You may already have seen this photo in my PAD collection, but I wanted to show you a bit of behind the scenes information from when I took this. The setup shot below should give you a pretty good idea of how I managed to light Zazu in her ‘natural habitat’.

    So, first of all, for Zazu to be sitting somewhere outside her cage with not too much clutter around her, I first set up a lightstand with a superclamp, which in turn held one of her perches in place. To keep her occupied we let her play with a pen top, one of her favourite toys.
    The lights are all triggered using Canon’s ETTL system. An on-camera ST-E2 sent out the signal to the slaves, which were all set to manual mode. The lights on the left and right in the back are 430EX Speedlights with my DIY snoots on them. (The snoots are cookie boxes lined with gaffer tape.) The snoots shape the light into a tight beam, to reduce flare to a minimum and to avoid the light bouncing around the room.
    The softbox on the left is the Westcott Apollo set with a 580EX inside it. It’s rotated towards the camera so as to avoid it spilling light onto the wall in the backround. On the table on the right side is another 580EX. This one is flagged by a tissue box (whatever comes handy, really!) and I put a CTB gel on it in order to end up with a strong blue background. I also didn’t want the background to be homogenous, so I placed a basil plant in front of the light. The shadows from the plant add a bit of interest to the background.
    Oh and the white thing floating at the top of the image which Zazu is staring at in the setup shot is an origami crane. She has since taken care of it.