Troubleseeker

I use this to put up tears from magazines and other interesting tidbits that i find inspiring. I also use it (like shown in the photo above) to put up my own prints – I can review them, analyze them and compare them side by side with other photographs. By having them up and so immediate I can sometimes spot something that I don’t like about it, then go back to editing and fix it.

Putting up inspirational images and your own work helps your development as an artist i find. It’s a difference if you look at it briefly while flipping through a magazine or if you have it hanging there and can spot more and more details over the course of time. It also makes a neat decoration for your blank wall in the room. :)

Another way of using it would be to display example photos of poses, light, make-up and so on. It makes it easier for everyone being on the same page.

If you want to try this yourself, all you need is a small steel wire (can be found at any hardware supply store), some tiny clamps and two nails or screws.

It is sunday morning, 10am. The car is filled with the smell of Tim Horton’s while we leave the outskirts of Ottawa to head to a place we have only heard about: some abandoned mines in rural Quebec. I wrote down GPS coordinates because there is no street address. Outside of the car is nothing much but rain in varying form, alternating between drizzling and pouring.

“We can always look it up on the map on one of our iphones”, I hear myself saying to the others in the car. Sommer, Anne & Penelope the model chuckle as someone starts to make jokes about the possibility that the mines could be haunted. Some more references to more or less popular horror movies follow.

10:30 – The car stereo stops working. We’re getting close to the location. We drive up a hill an what could be flattered to be called a dirt road. We keep going and pass some odd looking houses. “Who lives out here? But hey they have a nice colourful swing in their garden”. No children though.

We pass a building that looks like it could have been a church. On the opposite side a grotesque formation of a saint figurine with kneeling children statues in front of it. Sandwich break. I get out of the car to check the light. 5 minutes later we’re on the road again.

We can’t seem to find it. The road is almost indistinguishable from the scrubs now and we don’t have a 4WD car. I get my phone out to have a look at the map. No reception. I ask the others in the car. Seems no one has reception here. At this point it seemed a good idea to turn around and ask one of the locals for directions. And so we did.

The car stereo comes back on in random intervals now. We finally find a living human being. Older French woman. My French is rusty so I ask Anne to commence the communications. A few minutes later after what sounded like a very long explanation on how to get there I ask Anne “So?”. But the French woman did not know anything about a mine. Apparently there used to be a mine behind her house but that’s not there anymore. She advised us to turn around and drive back.

We drive back to the next gas station. Anne and I head inside to ask the guy working there about directions. He is in his 50ies. He is looking up and down on us and then hums with a French accent “I’ve been living here for 25 years and never have I been up the mountain in the mines”. A second guy appears, seemingly out of nowhere. He is much older. When he talk I can see that he is missing most of his front teeth. “Do you want to go the Mines?” he asks. He starts to give us the directions. He is waving with his arms and I can see that his hand is mutilated, missing some fingers. He keeps saying “Be very careful!” which makes me nervous, followed by a “When you come to this intersection, under no circumstances take the right way – ever! Go left, never take the right way there! And be very careful!”. We thank them briefly and hurry up to get back to the car…

Once we finally found the place there were indeed many strange things happening: abandonded cars in the middle of the forest, people with painted faces stopping next to us and firing guns, 2-3 feet long things dropping from the cave wall into the water with a thunderous noise, Hillbilly Texas Chainsaw Massacre shacks. But we all survived :)

The shoot was published in NYC’s Chaos Magazine.

From a recent shoot with Anjela (Giovanni/Montage/CoverModels):

Thanks to Catherine Dupuis for the fabulous make-up and to the awesome Paul and Shalan from CPROPhoto for dancing with me in their studio :)

For those of you who are interested: Pretty simple and straightforward light setup, which was one Profoto head with Magnum dish and a couple of flags, 85mm f/1.4 at around f/9 if i remember right.

In case you don’t know the web comic What The Duck, go check it out :)

Raw instant film: Penelope (Sutherland, MIM)
make-up: Sommer Mbonu, hair: Anne-Marie Rooney, 120mm Hasselblad on Fuji 100c

My friend Pete Forde had brought a polaroid camera with him on his last visit to Ottawa. I really liked the raw quality and the fact that you can “touch” the picture immediately (something that you don’t get from a picture on a LCD screen).

And just a few months after Polaroid has stopped producing instant film, their legacy has become more important to me than ever. Thankfully, Fuji still continues to produce Polaroid 100 film for medium and large format cameras. Using proof polaroids (like the ones seen above) are extremely useful to make sure the light, settings and everything else is alright before wasting a roll of film.

Often, when reviewing my portfolio and looking at my pictures I ask myself what is going on in people’s heads when they see the picture. Will they enjoy the picture and be captivated by it or will they be too preoccupied with the thought of how it was made?

The final picture
(Ioana for Next – MA:CoverModels)

I am just gonna take a random picture here that I finished editing from a recent shoot. There are a couple of things that could be criticized about this photograph if you want to be petty. Regardless, I like the result and it should be good enough to serve as an example.

Editing a picture like this is really straightforward: removing blemishes, burning, dodging, adjusting levels for key areas and toning it.

Details (50% zoom)

To me, the key is that the picture will look good in a large print – thus paying attention to details (e.g. skin texture) is crucial. At the same time I like to leave several imperfections in for the picture to not look all too lifeless and eery.

You might have noticed that the eyes are still fairly dark. Yes, it’s pretty easy to light up the eyes, bring out the colour of the iris, yada yada. But here is the point: don’t just automate every picture through a set of processing steps.

just because you can, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to do it always

..and that applies to every step of the editing process.

The Original
ISO200, 60mm, f/8.0, 1/200 sec

This is the original picture as it came straight out of the camera. I just set up two lights (a daylight calibrated light from the top and a slightly cooler calibrated light from the bottom). And it may come to some as a surprise but the original photograph is often pretty close to what the final result looks like.

Once upon a time there was a wizard. Bearing an unpronounceable name, his devout fans affectionately gave him the name Knut. The grumpy old wizard he was, Knut did not like to leave his luxurious tower. Yet he was admired for his special talent to summon the finest apples. Once a year he would step out on his balcony, bathing in cheers by his loyal fans, the sheep people.

“This day,” Knut thought by himself “is going to be a good apple day”. He felt surprisingly vivid today on his two-hundred-and-fify-third apple summoning. “I have summoned two-hundred-and-fifty-two apples. Nothing can go wrong today because I know exactly how to summon the finest apple”. Knut stopped for a second. He suddenly remembered a nightmare he recently had in which one of his fans demanded that he summons an orange. In his dream he did not know the secrets of the orange thus wanting to strike the foolish peon with a fireball – but then he realized he did not know how to cast a fireball either. “All these years I’ve been summoning apples and that is all I do. Can I call myself a wizard after all?”

When he did not show up that day, the sheep people decided that it is time to move on and shortly after found the next great wizard that they could praise.

your experience cannot be expressed in time

“I am taking pictures for X years or I am designing web pages for X years” does not mean anything. You could be doing the same wrong boring unreflected thing over and over again – for years. You could be shooting five hundred graduate pictures every semester and still not learn anything in ten years.