Planning has started for one of my mid-june shootings. I’ll be doing two shootings in June both aimed at producing sellable images for Getty.

The shoot on the 14th of June will be a business shoot at a very nice office building in Berlin. My production assistant is working on getting the shooting rights and I hope it works out.

On-location business shoots benefit from a clean and elegant office environment. You want to ensure that the images appeal to the widest possible market. For this session we’re aiming at booking 3 models : two male and one female model.

I’ll keep you updated on progress!

With time your portofolio ends up appealing to more and more models. If your local model agencies know you,  you are registered at model sites like Model Mayhem or Model Kartei, or if you have user accounts on photography sites or community websites, chances are you will be contacted regularly by models looking to work with you.

You can expect anybody to ask you: professional models, amateur models, friends of friends or somebody just looking for cheap photos. It’s easy to discard these requests and even develop the habit of deleting them straight away. But I would strongly recommend you to manage these requests with care.

I have developed a form on Google Docs which allows models to register themselves on my own private database. Each time a model requests to work with me I kindly ask them to fill it out and inform them that I will contact them when they match a project’s requirements.

Have a look at it here.

In the business of photography, you aim to produce images at the lowest cost possible but with the highest potential for benefit. Finding the right model is not always easy and when you do your project really benefits from it.

The picture above is of Wibke, a young model who had just started when we worked together. You never know who will want to work with you and you have to keep all options open always!

My trip to the States is going well… until now. Due to some crazy overbooking at Chicago Airport I have been stuck here since yesterday. I wasn’t able to fly onwards to Denver and all American Airlines could offer me was a night at a run down hotel outside the airport and miles away from the town center.

I got up early today, 6 o’clock, my earliest wake up in over 12 months, and came to the airport to hear again that the first flight to Denver was overbooked too.

So I’m sitting in a huge fastfood cantine in the middle of the airport waiting for time to pass and hoping I get on the next plane… Thank god for the internet

I am having a short break starting tomorrow. I am leaving on a 2 week trip which will take me to Louisville  Kentucky, Denver Colorado and Montreal Canada. I’ll have my camera with me so I’ll try to blog from the trail, but I wont be doing any serious photo shootings until mid-June.

So until then I’ll keep you updated with random stuff I come across in North America. Probably very off-topic to this blog. Once I am back in June and the real photo shooting starts, things will be interesting here again

James Weber recently posted a long item on his blog going through his experiences shooting with water in his studio. Very good description of the different ideas he had and how he set it all up to get very impressive pics!

Click on the image or here to reach his article

Reading this blog will give you some insight in the way I work. Until now you’ve gotten a glimpse of organisation, behind the scenes and some of the lighting settings. Eventually I will also start posting some video footage shot during my photosessions.

But as a photographer I also get to talk to other cool photographers in my city. And I am happy that there is so much talent around here! In the next weeks and months I am going to start a series of video portraits where I will report on a photoshooting organised and carried out by each of these photographers.

You will get a few minutes to submerge into their world, meet them and their teams, see how they work on-set and learn a thing or two. Ill keep you posted on how things go, but my aim is to post one such portrait each month.

During my hotel shooting with Giada few weeks ago I had brought with me two of my Profoto heads. At the same time we had wonderful sunlight shining through the large windows. On more than one occasion I wondered whether I should go with my Profoto strobes or stick to the natural light.

On some pics I tried both and compared the differences before deciding how to proceed. Here you have one of those moments. Please note that the pictures are all unprocessed and straight from the camera.

On this first picture I only used sunlight. Camera settings are F3.2 and 1/80 at ISO400.

On this next picture I experimented with a strobe. I used a strip light placed right above the model’s head outside the view of the camera viewer. The image changes considerably. Both images might differ in crop and pose but you clearly see the effect of the different lighting.

Its obviously a question of taste but the second image convinced me pretty fast to continue working with the strobes!

The small picture on the right describes the light settings.When mixing artificial light with natural light in a hotel room, I pay special attention that the artificial light balances well with the natural light.

Thats why you can still see the sunlight shining in through the window, even though the strobe is on, ensuring the model appears in a natural setting.

Yesterday was a long day. We started the photoshoot early at 7am and worked until 5pm. Afterwards I met with the publisher and went through the images of the day. And as is often the case in such projects, dinner, drinks and party were included in the program

I will not be able to post any images here until they are published, but I do have quite a few behind the scene images. The team was pretty big. We had two models, a hair and make up artist, the producer, the publisher, the stylist, two assistants and a big car. Considering I shot most of the series with no strobes, I was pretty much well served!

We managed to produce the 7 images in only about 9 hours. In this project, the editors were looking for very specific imagery. They had a story board I had to stick to. So my aim was to provide the photographic skills to achieve that goal.

Enjoy the making of pics!

I’m writing from one of our breaks. Models are gettting ready so I got some spare time. Shooting is going great! Models Samira and Petar are doing a good job and the atmosphere is really relaxed.

The magazine production team have organized every detail so things are going fast. I am positively surprised!

Lighting has been very simple: sun light in most shootings. The main focus being the beauty of Samira and her great styling! I think the hommage to Audrey Hepburn is working out well.

I leave you with some shots I took from my phone

There are lots of cool behind the scenes videos out there but I found this one from James Weber really well done!