Farewell

Tomorrow is my last day here in Frankfurt/Germany. I will be going to live in Japan for one year and my journey will begin in Russia via Trans-Siberian Railway. I will be on my way to Kobe for the next 30 days, staying in Mongolia and China for a week respectively. I hope to take a lot of interesting photos which I hope to be able to share with you when I will finally be in Tôkyô.

I took this photo of Keiko in June, hanging out at Main river in Frankfurt. If people let me just do my stuff with camera and flash and everything is relaxed, I think a lot of nice shots can come to existence, like this one. It’s nothing spectacular (besides her attractiveness, beauty and absolutey amazing eyes) but a simple honest portrait, snapshot like, edited in a nostalgic style.
Reminds me of the good times here…

Lighting Info: Flash handheld left.

Postprocessing: Retouching, color correction, conversion to GIF and back to JPEG..

View Large On Black

Relax’n Hair Styles

I was busy the last weeks with a huge assignment from my local hair stylist called “Relax’N”, for which I already did their advertising photo.

This time we had 11 models, including both hair stylists in various (lighting) settings for three day shootings. Sometimes you have to go save with the light, don’t have a lot of time, other times you can create something more interesting.

There are a lot of pictures to be posted on my Flickr-stream the next few days.

With these shots of three men and three women I was pleased because they look nice and professional, and I love that the models don’t smile but sometimes look a little bored or without perspective.

Lighting info: Flash through umbrella high left, goboed flash back right, goboed flash for the background

Postprocessing: Retouching, sharpening, tonecurve…

Ladie’s version:

Light experiment

Since I am in London for a week now there will surely be some updates, finally. So I finally get to post this picture from around two weeks ago, that I did together with Manuel Hossfeld, fellow photographer and strobist.

The idea was to use these small light sticks that people take to concerts or so. The difficutly here is obvious: Trying to get the weakly glowing sticks to become vibrant while not getting distracted by a background that is too bright, and then lighting the subject accordingly.
What I really enjoy here are textures of the cloth on the head of the subject (that’s me by the way) and the jacket. The wide angle gives an aggressive feeling. Lot’s of things learned on this shooting.

Strobist: SB right high on head, left low on shoes, in the back.

Postprocessing: Different layers of exposure and contrast.

With Manuel Hossfeld