We finally, finally got some sunshine and went for a long walk in the snowy woods.
So good for body and soul. More photos from this series over on my photo blog.
It’s carnival weekend over here, which means no office today. Instead I’ll stay in (roads are closed all day due to carnival anyway), work a little on my neverending photo business to-do list and just enjoy the last of the long weekend.
I’ve hinted at this so many times and now I am finally ready to tell: I just founded my own photography business.
I offer portrait, family and animal sessions for now and you can find me on Facebook. In the coming months I will be launching a blog to share photoshoots, a website and a small online shop selling my most requested images as prints.
I am very excited! Juggling a full time office job, a photography business and my personal life will be challenging (in fact, it already is), so I am taking things slowly. In the past months I have done a lot of research, talked to my accountant and learned about taxes and the whole business side of it. I am doing everything in this myself (including the website), so the new pages will be up one at a time.
The idea is to build this business slowly but steadily over the next few years.
I’m happy to be finally doing this and excited to see what 2012 will bring!
I’ve been meaning to share these photos since november. I was asked to take some photos of the guys at our barn who like to run around in full-flegded cowboy outfit at the weekends.
The aim of course was to make these look like real, vintage cowboy photos so while I liked the simple black and white processing, the vintage look is of course more dramatic.
There were ten or eleven guys to photograph within less than an hour! I’m only showing the best shots here, but every cowboy got his picture into the calender they eventually made from the photos.
So, just this quick sharing and now I’ll have to get ready for another week at work. Have a good week!
I posted the photoshoot with my friend Dana, but the same day I also took photos with another friend at the barn. Jessica has the most gorgeous red hair and I had to photograph her (I don’t normally go around asking people if I can take their picture).
I almost like the black and white shots best though. This is again all available light, shot at the barn in one of the stalls.
We had bad luck with the weather (stuffy, dark and humid but not rainy enough to actually take some cool rain shots), but we found one green spot with nice light eventually.
I had so much fun, we’ll be doing this again soon and hope for sunshine next time!
Taken on a sunny friday afternoon with his Canon 5D (still waiting for my tax return so I can buy my own!).
W’ve been through some pretty tough times in the last 1.5 years and I still can’t really put it into words. So I’ll just say I’m happy things turned out the way they did.
We had a weekend training course at the barn last weekend. Trick training is something I have always wanted to learn and though I’ve done some clicker training with my cats, working with a big heavy horse is something else!
The horses were all very curious and most learned really quickly.
We’re planning to practice regularly over the winter and maybe put together a little show next year.
Where there are horses there will almost always be dogs too and I had fun shooting some dog portraits in between.
Wrinkly gorgeousness:
Off to plan a show program for my cats!
I am very lucky to have friends spontaneous enough to jump into a cold creek so I can take photos:
Sundays seem to be the days for impromptu photo shoots around here. I am loving the look of these, almost 1940ish to me. Isn’t she stunning?
My favourite, maybe my favourite image ever taken.
The light down at the creek was very tricky and I found myself wishing I had taken my Olympus OM2…film would probably have been better in dealing with it than digital.
This is almost an outtake, but one that I really love:
Thanks Dana, I really hope you didn’t catch cold and are fit for our next adventure, old school western camp next weekend 😉
Everyone I show the Holga to looks at it curiously, picks it up (it weighs nothing) and then either laughs out loud or gives me the “Really? WTF?” look.
And they’re right, of course. But oh, aren’t they so wrong too! Because what could possibly be laughable or wrong about a camera that produces this:
and this:
and this:
?
The Holga is small and lightweight and quirky and it will be the one camera that will always fit in my bag, no matter where I go (I have been known to squeeze up to 3 cameras in a handbag, so that will definitely be an improvement). It makes me look and think and see differently than any other camera I have had. Laugh at that if you will. I’ll be too busy taking pictures and remembering to take the lens cap off and adjusting the vague focus points and advancing the film click by click per hand to notice 😉
By the way, I have now got a scanner for the negatives and I can highly recommend going that route of self-developing and self-scanning. It is more time consuming but definitely a lot less expensive and yields a much better result than letting a lab process and scan/print the images. Just saying this because I was hesitant of buying a scanner, but I am very happy now that I did!
A little impromptu shoot at the barn yesterday, mainly for me to practise some camera settings I wanted to try out without pressure.
Shooting in the bright sun at 2pm in backlighting… tough lighting situation but not always avoidable, so something I really needed to learn.
Spot metering…another function I had real trouble with and therefore never used during ‘important’ shoots. I finally got the hang of it yesterday.
And the last thing I needed to work on, especially in that light: shooting full manual. I used to shoot manual a lot with my Fuji S5600 before I got my DSLR. Then I happily settled for Aperture Priority and never gave full manual a second thought.
What inspired me to try all of this out were the presentations from Jessica Claire and Jerry Ghionis at Escalate Live , which I was lucky enough to be able to view online. Jerry’s examples made it clear that you really have to know your camera inside out to be able to get creative with it and Jessica stressed how important it is to try new things out all the time, even though they mightn’t always work (I’m sure she wasn’t talking about camera settings, but this is my starting point for now, before moving on to ‘higher’ things).
Bottom line: if you want to know how your camera really works, grab a willing friend and try, try, try. I learned valuable things about shooting in tough lighting, while using spot metering, while shooting in full manual mode yesterday.
If you need to start somewhere before that (for example moving away from auto mode to maybe aperture priority), try it!
This one is going to be an all time favourite, I am so in love with that picture!
Next on my things-to-do-to-become-a-better-photographer list: Learn to see more, become less hectic, learn to give instructions.
Oh, and I have already shot enough 120 film in my Holga to outdo the camera price…cool, eh? Look forward to lots of Holga pics 🙂
Sorry Melli, I never leave the house without my camera, not even for sunday morning breakfast at my mom’s 😉 Taking pictures is compulsory for me and you’ve got such pretty blue eyes…I couldn’t help myself!
Impromptu portrait sessions are the best! And in case anyone wants to know the data: indoor in front of window, ISO 1600, 50mm, f2.3.
little home by hand 