I had already mentioned my super secret i’d-have-to-kill-you-if-i-told-you project quite a while ago. The project has kept me from posting here as regularly as I would like to.

Well finally that project has reached its zenith and I can now speak about it openly! Which is very exciting!

I had greatly increased my production last year and realized that I needed to produce in an efficient way, focusing on my strengths, and on the themes which make money. That’s when I started thinking about the tools I would need to achieve that.

Luckily for me, my good friend Oliver has excellent business skills and together we decided to team up and produce the tool to achieve that. It has been over a year in the making and tomorrow we will launch it to the public coinciding with the Microstock Expo in Berlin.

The tool is called Stock Performer and it is a powerful analytics tool for microstockers. We’ve been testing it for 6 months with a small but excellent team of photographers and tomorrow we will start accepting invitation requests to slowly take in customers in our controlled launch.

Come over and join us, I’d love to see you there!

Join us on Twitter
Join us on Facebook
Request your Stock Performer Invitation!

After a big effort to increase my portfolio by 70% in the last 12 months, I can now finally collect the fruits of that effort. My 2011 average is improving and my files are selling more.

I am aware that not everybody is experiencing growth. In my case, my portfolio is not that big yet, so it is easy to increase it.

Here is the overall picture:

Blue vars are revenues, red line are downloads and grey background is portfolio size.

How are things looking for you?

For all you living new Berlin, I wanted to point you out to an intensive Photoshop workshop with Natalia Taffarel. It’s in Berlin, so many of my readers could find the pointer useful.

Find out more about it here: http://www.studio-67.com/workshop/

Disclaimer: I have no affiliates with this workshop, nor am I part of the organization

After many months of hesitation I finally took the plunge and put two thirds of my portfolio into iStockphoto’s Partner Program.

For those of you who do not know what it is, basically it allows iStockphoto contributors to sell their photos with little hassle on partner agencies ThinkStock and Photos.com. You do not have to worry about uploading, keywording and the such. iStockphoto simply mirrors your content on those two sites and once a month pays you your royalty on any sales.

This topic has been heatly debated on the internet. There are many arguments against and many for. Read here or here for an overview.

When I was at the London iStockalypse it became clear to me that Getty and iStockphoto’s strategy is to move the right content to the right markets at different price points. Getty buyers are not the same as iStockphoto buyers, which in turn are not the same as ThinkStock and Photo buyers. Each agency has their speciality. It is unrealistic to expect one agency (in this case iStockphoto) to satisfy all these markets equally.

And since I have been dearly enjoying my revenue on Vetta images, which are mirrored on the high-priced Getty website, I thought, why not do the same for my poorer images? Why not move them to the markets where people expect to pay less? iStockphoto has become quite expensive, so there is no point keeping those images there.

And therefore, I decided to move 1000 images to iStockphoto’s partner program. My 500 glamour pictures, which produce most of my sales, will stay on iStock and Getty/Vetta. They should remain high priced. I believe 1000 new images on the partner program is a big enough load to soon notice if this was a good decision or not.

And I guessed, if I don’t try, i’ll never know!

I’ll keep you updated!!

Are you on the partner program? Do you enjoy it? Or are you against it and believe it will only damage your business? Share your thoughts!

I had the pleasure to be interviewed by two media outlets: the first one is the spanish speaking website myMicrostock.net and the second the german magazine Digital Photo.

Let’s keep them coming!

I am currently working on a large portrait series. For this portrait series I use the same lighting setup for every person. It’s amazing to see so many people photographed the same way. It allows one to better see the similarities and differences between all of them. At the moment I already have about 15 people photographed like this. Here are three of the pictures:

The lighting consists of quite a lot of light. But the light formers really give me the power to manage that light correctly and get such a cool effect. Here is the lighting setup:

Have you used this lighting before? If so, please show me some samples!

Last Friday I had a great photoshooting! I worked on quite a few themes but the most interesting one is the one I want to share with you today. It all started off when I decided I wanted to do a shoot with a cool russian hat I found at a costumes shop.

The lighting on this picture is based on a three light setup. The main light comes from a Profoto Beauty Dish with Grid above the model. It produces a high contrast well lit picture. The grid on the beauty dish focuses most of the light on the model’s face and upper body. Thanks to the grid, the arms and legs are not lit as strongly as the face, which is important if you want to make the model’s face stand out.

In order to accentuate the model’s body, I used a Profoto Strip Light from the side. That creates the nice body highlight on the right side of the picture. You can see it best on the legs and the pants. Finally, I used a snoot to create a spot on the background, giving the picture more depth.

Camera settings were f10 1/200s with a Canon 5D Mark II and 100mm 2.8L II lens

Here is the setup:




And here a candid picture illustrating the lighting:

Do you have any samples with a similar lighting?

*Disclaimer: All links to equipment just for information purposes only. I have no affiliates with any of the equipment producers.

It’s been a while since I posted here! Thanks to all of you who wrote to me asking me to restart! I have been focusing all my time on producing many new photos and working on some interesting side projects. But I want to revive this blog and what a better way to start than with a new lighting setup!

I took this picture two days ago in my studio. A big thanks to the model for the great poses and to the make up artist for making the model look splendid. Through a friend of mine I received some nice swimwear from 1-9-7-9 which we used on this picture and others of the series.

The lighting on this picture is simple. The main lighting is provided by a beauty dish. You can never get it wrong with a beauty dish! The strip light in the back ensures the hair get a nice highlighting and that the model’s body is better defined standing out from the dark background. My background was a nice red wine color. The settings on my Canon 5D Mark II were 1/160s and f8.0.

Here is a diagram of the lighting setup:

And here is a picture of the lighting setup (the model is wearing another swimsuit on this picture). Please note that the strip softbox on the left was switched off:

Do you have any pictures with a similar lighting? If so, please share in the comments section!

Shallow depth of field always brings a lot charm to an image. We use it constantly when photographing with natural light. In the studio it gets a little bit more tricky due to the power of your strobes.

Some time ago russian photographer Alexey Ivanov posted a great article on producing shallow depth of field in his studio. His result was impressive.

I took up his technique to produce portraits and wanted to share the results with you.

The Images

The Lighting Setup

The main light is a Profoto Beauty Dish with a grid. In the first photo that is all the light I used. Hard to believe but the paper background is color white!

In the second photo I added a powerful spotlight to brighten up the background. The background spotlight is powerful enough that the light spills onto the model creating the very nice reflections on her cheekbones.

To achieve a shallow depth of field I pushed the camera’s ISO down to 50 and opened up the aperture to f3,5. It’s tricky getting your focus right with such a low aperture, but if you concentrate, everything is possible!

The main light was a Profoto 600W head reduced to its minimum power. Due to the large aperture I needed as little light as possible. So I kept the power low and played with the distance of the strobe to the model, thus allowing me to keep my large aperture without overexposing the image. Here is a picture of the setup (please note that the background light was only used in the second picture):

The Lighting Diagram

For those of you interested in the technical details:

• f3,5
• 1/160
• ISO50
• Canon 5D Mark II with Canon 100mm 2,8L USM II

I am very happy with the results and I will certainly produce more picture with a shallow depth of field. The bigger your sensor the easier it is and nicer your depth of field. With a 5Dm2 the results are good but imagine using a middle format digital camera!

What do you think about shallow depth of field? Have you tried it in the studio? Show me results!

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Nice behind the scene pictures from today’s photoshooting. Enjoy.