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  • Speedlinks January 2010

    I hang around on the internet so much and browse so many photography forums, websites and blogs that I stumble across a lot of interesting photo-related stuff. Here are some cool pages that I discovered recently that you may enjoy:

    • DIY Gary Fong Lightsphere. The Lightsphere is a popular (in my opinion overrated) but expensive light modifier. Make your own by following Artur Gajewski’s guide on instructables.
    • RGB Music Lab. Ever wanted to know what your photos would sound like? Feed them to this freeware Mac/Win software to find out.
    • What camera should I buy? This question pops up in forums all the time. The ones who ask them usually don’t give any information on what kind of camera they’re looking for. Read through Scott Bourne’s article and you can probably find the right camera yourself or help others help you.
    • Studio Lighting Techniques. Addicted to Life shows some cool studio setups to build upon and experiment with.
    • Possible World Record. A Canon EOS Rebel XT falls 3000ft from the sky and survives.
    • Classic Portraiture. Joe Zeltsman has written an in depth guide on posing people for portraits.

  • Pimpampelen

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    Alison and I made a trip to the butterfly garden in Grevenmacher. This time the temperature was a bit more comfortable than the 40°C in the World of Butterflies. We only had one macro lens between the two of us so we took turns in photographing and holding a flash for one another. We started out with the ringlight adapter but moved on to a DIY diffuser to light the butterflies. It’s quite useful to be able to sculpt the light the way you need it to be rather than being at the mercy of the sun shining through a glass roof and foliage. I used the Pocketwizard Mini TT1 and Flex TT5 to allow the camera and flash to communicate with one another. Setting the flash power manually would have been tricky, since we worked without tripods. At those small distances, a few centimeters change in the distance between flash and subject can make a big difference. (Inverse square law: if the flash is giving me a correct exposure at 1/8 power and 10cm distance, if the flash moves 5cm closer the power needs to change to 1/32. ETTL takes care of this on the fly.)
    So my technique here is to get the aperture I need for a decent depth of field, then dialing in a shutter speed and ISO that get me enough ambient light for a photo that’s slightly underexposed, then bring in the flash to get the exposure to where it needs to be.
    (For those wondering what the title means: it’s one of the Luxembourgian words for butterfly.)

  • Wedding: Carole & Jules


    I first met Carole and Jules at the wedding of their friends Martine and Mike the year before. They got in touch with me last winter and I ended up shooting their wedding day in July together with Olivier Kerschen as assistant. We took photos of Carole getting ready at her parents’ house and, once we determined that the weather was going to play along, drove to the Parc Municipal in Mondorf. It’s a really great place, quite big with lots of different possibilities to take the couple shots. The size meant that we had to walk around a bit to get to the places I had scouted beforehand but it worked out nicely. I used the 5DMkII again, mostly with the EF 70-200. Olivier was in charge of getting the lights where I needed them – which sometimes includes dangling halfway off a bridge to get the light in the perfect spot.
    The wedding ceremony was in their hometown Ellange, in a lovely small church just opposite the venue in which the reception was held. And you should have been there to see their faces when the white limousine arrived to pick them up! We moved on to the the Restaurant Delicious in Sandweiler, outside of which I took portraits of all the couples before everyone went inside for the dinner. It’s a nice place, they had hired some cool DJs and the fun just didn’t seem to stop. I especially liked the balloon-popping-sumo game their friends had come up with. When we left around 3am the party still wasn’t showing any signs of slowing down!