Having a break from taking pictures can be a form of re-gaining inspiration and I do it often myself: I put away my camera for a week or two just to be able to grab it again soon with new ideas and inspiration. However, I think it might be dangerous for some of us – we might forget to take the camera again and this can result in months of no photo activity at all. It applies especially for those who don’t have photography as their main source of income. But how come we can give up on photography and art? We can’t! But we tend to forget about it and only later we realize how many great opportunities for great shots we missed and how much joy it brings us to take and make pictures!

Well, as I mentioned before, May 2010 (last month) was a horrible month for me when it come to photography – I had no inspiration, no motivation, almost nothing. I was looking at my camera and thinking, thinking and doing more thinking: how? what? when? and even ‘why?’. Yep, it was definitely too much of ‘thinking’ and not enough of ‘doing’! The lesson I learned is that taking a short break from photography is as important as grabbing your camera again and just go shooting, even when you’re still not inspired and you’re not motivated (or even lazy). In some cases, motivation and inspiration won’t come to you, but you have to reach out for it!

Apple introduced many new features (like brushes with special effects, brush in/out adjustments, and many more) in Aperture 3 and I have to say that many plugins which I use with Aperture 2 are unnecessary and even useless. One of the most important feature for portraits for me is skin smoothing, a new feature in Aperture 3. There are many more feature in Aperture 3 and going over would take too much time. The bottom line is: it seems that I don’t need now to have any additional plugins in Aperture 3 except for BorderFX Aperture Plugin , which I mainly use to apply a watermark when exporting post-processed pictures. Unfortunately, BorderFX is still only available in 32-bit mode (at least when this post was written) and the 64-bit beta version of BorderFX has too many bugs to use it.

I will write why I won’t make Aperture 3 my main post-processing software in next blog post, so stay tuned.

Low-key lighting is a style of lighting in photography and can be seen as an opposite to high-key lighting. Low-key lighting provides higher contrast to a picture and the controlling color of a picture is black. Low-key lighting provides an opportunity to highlight only the contours of a subject or an object and to use fill light or a reflector to illuminate shadow areas in order to control the contrast.

I met with some of my university friends for a small reunion in November 2009. I hadn’t seen one of them, Anna, for a long time because she spent considerable amount of time in Alaska in the past few years. During one of the conversations, I heard that Anna plays a guitar and without much hesitation, I grabbed a guitar from a corner and I handed it over to her.

The result are those low-key lighting portrait pictures, which create mystery and at the same time focus light on particular subject within a picture – in this case a musician and her instrument. I didn’t use a reflector for these pictures, just SB-900 SpeedLight.

Portraits of Children

I met with my high-school friend in Poland during summer 2009. It was a great pleasure to meet her husband for the second time and even a greater pleasure to take few pictures of their kid Tim. While the kid is awesome, it was not easy at all to keep him stay in one place for longer than 2 seconds. So what did I do? I made a mistake – I was snapping pictures like crazy. Honestly, I didn’t have much of a choice, especially shooting with high aperture of f/1.8 and f/2.2 (shallow depth of field). I decided to use my AF-S NIKKOR 35mm F/1.8 lens for shallow depth of field as a special effect.

Portraits of Children

Well, I ended up with around 450 pictures out of which I have chosen only 45. Imagine that you have to go over 450 pictures and not only choose the best ones but also to edit them and do post-processing. You can imagine how much time it took. In fact, it took me 8 days (more or less). But I think it was worth it at the end. I believe that some pictures came out better than I actually expected. I’m presenting you only some of them here.

Anyway, Anis (my housemate) asked me few days ago to take a picture of him for his CV. So I set up all the equipment in our living room and I shot few pics – traditional, sitting, upper-body part pictures against white background – typical ID-type pictures. Then, I took that picture you see in this article. When I uploaded it to Aperture, I realized that this guy could serve me as a model; so we made a deal Now the only challenge is to set up something when both of us have time.

The first type includes those who like to look at pictures. It’s a passive type but doesn’t mean it’s bad. In the second category fall those who take pictures. Here things start to be a little more complicated because some of you who claim to be photographers, will fall in this group together with non-photographers. Let me explain you in a second after mentioning the final, third group of those who make pictures (yes, make pictures – it’s not a linguistic mistake). For me personally, it is the latter group that includes real photographers.

Now few sentences of explanations. A person can fall into more than one group. Naturally, those who are in the first group, have little to do with the active part of photography. They just enjoy looking at pictures (passive part of photography) and I would say that 99,99% of everyone is in this group. The second group of those who take pictures, usually includes those who own point-and-shoot cameras and take casual pictures at birthdays, parties, etc. However, those who own DSLRs and in some cases those who claim to be photographers as well. In general, it will be those who just point-and-shoot no matter how expensive and how professional their equipment is. They don’t spend too much time (or not at all) to see and try a different composition of a picture, they don’t walk around their subject to investigate lighting, different angles, possibilities, etc. They just point-and-shoot.

The third group includes real photographers. This is the group where people, or rather photographers, make pictures – they spend time before pressing the shutter button on thinking about the composition of a picture, they play with light and its sources, they put their camera into Manual mode or semi-manual and play with different settings for each picture. The most interesting thing about this group is that you really don’t need expensive or professional equipment. You can do everything I just mentioned with today produced point-and-shoot cameras and many professional photographers still use point-and-shoot cameras!

As you can imagine from the title, I’ve decided to take my photography a step further and to concentrate on portraits, portraiture, fashion, people documentary or any other type of photography that involves people. Why? There are many reasons, way too many to mention all of them here but to name just few: I realized that I had spent not enough (photography) time on taking portrait pictures or just pictures of people. It is one of the photography domains which I need to master. Another reason is that people are very interesting subjects for photography. Their faces or expressions give not only a general tone to a picture but they also subconsciously send out messages in pictures.

I have scheduled a couple of portrait sessions for this week and I’ll be moving to Brussels this weekend where I’m going to start my new job. So, if you’re in Brussels or in the neighborhood and you’re not afraid of a camera and you would like to spend fun time with a photographer, give me a call or send me an email!

About today’s pictures: I was having a walk in Maastricht (the Netherlands) with my friend Graciela and I took a couple of pictures. I think she is a very interesting model, especially because of her latin background. I will try to convince her for a more extensive photo session

Some of you might know that I’ve been looking for a new job for some time now. The reason is very simple: my job contract at my current company will expire in September. Unfortunately, the contract ‘decided’ to expire at a very bad moment for me (or for anyone who is in the same situation): we have the so-called ‘economic crisis’! I have my own opinion about this crisis but I will abstain from expressing it here for many reasons, which I’m also not willing to put forward here (unfortunately the Internet is not like Las Vegas – once info appears online, it spreads to your private life as well).

As you can imagine, I’ve been having hard time finding a new job, amazingly weird considering my education (two Master degrees), work experience and languages. Oh well… the worst thing would be to give me and blame the economic crisis but I will NOT do that. So what am I going to do next. Well, keep looking for sure. Some friends suggested me to consider photography as a more full-time task or even as a business opportunity. As much as I love photography, there is much more I would need to make a business out of it. I would need more equipment , a studio and much more experience (much more!).

Unfortunately, sometimes unexpected situations or photo sessions mean that you might not have all the necessary equipment with you. But at the same time it doesn’t make much sense to take all the equipment with you all the time – the most important are the camera, your eyes and creativity..ohh.. and a subject for pictures. Some of you might notice that the use of a light reflector for some pictures could be handy, especially in such light. Here comes the second important rule of portrait photography: never, I mean NEVER, take portrait pictures in strong sun (unless you want to create a special mystery in pictures by tweaking them in post-production). Strong light/sun creates lots of contrast in pictures and some features typical for portraits will be either gone, exaggerated or just a customer will be very dissatisfied from the final result because he or she won’t look natural in the pictures.

What is particularly interesting about Josine as a model and in this set of pictures are two things: eyes and curly hair. I tried to concentrate on these features since it was NOT a real portrait photo session. Why? I believe that for a portrait session or portrait pictures, you need to have a person in his/her natural environment (work, home, etc). Therefore, portraits are not only about a person, but also about the environment in which a person operates, lives, works, etc. In portraits, a person is complemented with the surrounding, which provides additional information about the person. Only such portraits establish well the image of a person.

For the time being, the extract with few selected pictures of Josine are below. You can find all the pictures on my Flickr account here