For the sake of light mongering.

Hello internet. 

Where do we start? I think geographically would make good sense. I'M HOME!!! Back in my zone in the Mother City AKA Cape Town. What a stoke to be where I belong again… Been way too long since I walked on the beach barefoot in the warm, white sand and smiled to myself marvelling at the trivial yet beautiful details life has to offer. I have been doing this fairly often as I have been surfing and bodyboarding almost everyday since I have been home nearly 3 weeks now, and in order to get from the car park down to the waters edge, you have to walk along the warm, white sand. Some times life just hands you these nuggets and it feels like smiling is the most gracious way to say thanks.

So much to get out here, and I have been fairly slack with the whole blogging thing lately, that is not to say that I have been slack with the whole shooting thing, this is definitely not the case. In fact it is the polar opposite, I have shooting more than I can actually handle. I have shot plenty, and now I also sit with copious amounts of unedited pictures and only more and more ideas pouring out of my inspirationally saturated mind. Its literally like a downward spiral that is terminally growing at a frightening rate. However, the minutely sensible side of me has decided to take a stand against this process and start dealing with this apparent "problem" by getting my ducks in a row and churning out some pictures. Hopefully this will even out the scales in the right direction again. I take comfort in the fact knowing that I am getting somewhere now, but yet the problem will always remain the same, the one things that is absolutely essential in this line of work and has become a personal philosophy of mine over the last few months as well, consistency. Just got to keep on keeping' on.

Some times I have the intricate, elaborate and exquisite ideas that lead to beautiful images. I love exploring, developing and entertaining ideas and concepts that will challenge norms and standards that I have learned to accept and that I have become used to. Other times I can be just as happy shooting something simple and classic that will give me just as beautiful pictures. I have been playing a lot and experimenting with some things that have been yielding cool and different results. Instead of getting mad creative and throwing colours, textures and tones around, its just trying something different like maybe cutting a light modifier apart and putting it back together differently to try out something new, shooting with a different number of lights to what I am used to, shooting a different style of lighting, the list goes on and on, but basically I have gone back to basics and tried to make the changes all on my side of the camera before I get into post production. I love this as it reminds me that photography is a craft like being a carpenter or someone that one has to know their tools well in order to be a master at their craft. 

For a while I got out of the style I was shooting, started shooting different things, looking at different photographers' works, following different people, looking for inspiration in different places and generally trying to do things differently. I thought I had progressed and broken through to a new tier of being a super shit good photographer or a good super shit photographer. However this was not to be the case, I ended up going through a very brief and and rapid change of styles in a very short period of time. This all sort of happened subconsciously as I did not even realise it until I had seen the three last sets of pictures I had shot and seen the clear resemblance between all of them. Whatever, I just happy to be shooting and seemingly learning more and more and getting "better". I guess better is a bad word here, but I feel like I am progressing, I don't think one photographers work can be better or more right than another's, I think this comes down to personal taste and I don't really think that ones taste can ever be up for discussion. I love editorial photography, but not so much wedding photography, even though I give wedding photographers mad props for doing what they do. And you can fuck right off for trying to tell me that editorial photography is not as good as another style of photography. I guess this leads back to one of  my favourite editorial photographers, and if you read this blog often, you will have seen his name here before, Mr Zack Arias. What a dude. What a fucking dude. Zack, if you ever happen to stumble across my humble offerings by some sliver of chance, here it is man, your work is the shit. You are the business and a large part of the reason I keep shooting pictures. I aspire to shoot the jobs you are turning down. For real.

For those of you that are familiar with Zack's work, I guess you can see that I am influenced by him and have often drawn inspiration for my own shoots from his work. 

I went through a stage where I wanted to shoot just like him, not exactly, but as closely as possible without looking like a cheese. After a while and with much resented influence from the fashion industry, I sorta went rogue and just started shooting things the way I saw them and wanted them to be. I was really happy at one point that I thought I had managed to break out of this mould I had placed myself in, but then these Ariasesque flashbacks starting showing up throughout my sets and I could tell I was not really moving forward in the direction I wanted to. This is probably when I also went through my "fuckit I don't want to shoot" phase, which incidentally tied in with the "weather is complete balls and I am depressed and not amped to shoot" phase. This kinda threw me a bit as I just kept on going and shooting little jobs here and there and then spending a lot of time working on my personal projects, some of which were torn to pieces by some fucking ridiculously dim witted people that I foolishly allowed myself to work with. Moving along swiftly though, I have been refining my personal work like a finely tuned and caringly crafted Islay whiskey. The results are quite pleasing and I am looking very forward to shooting the Cape Town leg of these projects which will be slightly more "exciting". Exciting fits quite well here as generally where there is a chance you may be, shot to death, stabbed to death, raped to death or killed to death in shape, form or mean a fair amount of excitement is usually involved. I won't give too much away at this stage, but Im going to be exploring the grittier, untamed side of South Africa in order to showcase the shit that isn't so glamorous and/or fabulous. 

So things are coming along at a fair pace at the moment, starting to make progress on various things, networking with various agencies, getting a team together, planning out some shoots, making deals and doing favours and service trade's with various people. Possibly my favourite part about all this is the location scouting. My word are we blessed in terms of diversity and rad places to make beautiful pictures here in Cape Town. Another thing that makes life all the more pleasant in the whole scheme of things down here is the amount of light we have, and not just shit, flat, grey light, but amazing, warm, flattering light. Really spoilt for amount of usable hours to get out of the day.

Ok, enough nonsense for the mean time, here are some pictures I shot for the sake of being active and doing something cool for the sake of doing it. The model in question is from on of my local agency's in Trondheim, Trend Models. This set ties in with the last set of headshot's I posted, I eventually managed to get my shit together and find the colours, tones and feel I wanted, which also happened to not be any of the other ones I had played with before either, typical. Enjoy and check in soon again. Cheers, N. 

Choices and Choices....

I love the the possibilites of working with RAW files. Importing a fresh batch of pictures is like opening all your Christmas presents at once. Of course, if you have done your job as a photographer correctly, you should have a pretty good idea of what you should be getting. There are so many directions that a picture can go, sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming, especially when you have a vast amount of engaging pictures. I struggle sometimes to focus and figure out what it is that I want out of the picture. The matter is only made more complicated by the fact that I shoot mostly people. The challenge as an editorial/ portraiture photographer is to carry the feel or atmosphere of one or an entire series of pictures through from the time of looking through the lens to the final delivery after post-production. Often what I see and imagine to be there or not be there, is very different to what the final viewer encounters. This is the real challenge, making sure that this consistency is present throughout.

Im just going to include everyone here instead of just us photo-nerds. For those that don't know what a RAW file is, here is the breakdown. The file format you get out of a normal point and shoot camera, iPhone and most other consumer camera's is a .JPEG. JPEG's are a compressed file that holds a less informative digital signature. Looking at a print of the a JPEG side by side with a RAW file straight out of camera you cant tell the difference. The beauty of RAW is that it contains all the information that you could want for post production, this is where JPEG falls short as it does contain some digital info, but very little. I guess a fitting analogy would be to say that shooting JPEG is like going to a shop and buying a sandwich off the menu, shooting RAW is like owning a sandwich factory. Get the point? Good.

I recently shot a model from the local agency, I have been "babysitting" the pictures for about two weeks now, this is a long time considering that they were extremely minimal headshots and 3/4 shots. I have been throwing some thoughts around regarding what I want to do in my post production phase, and tried some of them, failed, lost hope, tried again, got bored, failed, tried again, got side tracked, lost motivation, failed. It went on and on until now, whilst offshore with a solid few hours to kill I sat down with a full box of snus, an endless supply of chocochino's and some cookies I managed to produce. Half a snus box later I had something to show for. The only problem is that I think I produced too much. Yeah, I might have got a little bit carried away with experimenting with different colour palettes, tones, textures, split tones, effects, exposures, presences and hues. There is an endless combination of things and techniques you can apply to a set of pictures. To make things slightly easier to start out with, I narrowed down my selection to one photo. Something that would be easy to work with in terms of pure post-production. Something that had a near perfect exposure to start out with. I enjoy working with skin and eyes in particular, so this narrowed things down a bit more too. Eventually after making my final selection I took one that I met all of the above criteria. Here's what came out: 

This is the original image, straight out of camera, no post-production, no retouching. As I said, this met all the criteria, near perfect exposure, good skin tones to work with, interesting, sharp eyes, a clean headshot all in all. There is one thing that bugs me though, the model's right eye is not holding the catch light as well as the left one. Something which is completely my fault. #inconsistency. However, no train smash. Another thing that helps is that the background is just shy of pure white. This way I have some room to play around with the shadows and fall-off light. Whats next?  The work that goes into making a picture like simple, but thought out in details you dont see. I will not go through all of the points here, but here is a brief outline.

*Compositon- Notice how she isn't placed smack dead centre in the middle of the frame? Rule of thirds, a valuable tool, and worth remembering to add balance by creating an off-balance.

*Exposure- I shot this with two lights, one through a pure white umbrella, that was roughly 45degrees off to my right, angled down and +-80cm away from model, and the other behind the model facing the wall with no modifier, 2/3 of power over the key light.

*Catch lights- I always try to light the eyes in my headshots evenly, I blew it here, but it is an easy fix in post. The first thing you see when looking at a picture of a person is their eyes, this why I always try draw the attention there with a catch light. I always focus on the eye closest to me aswell. 

*Make up and hair- I went for the minimalist look here, when you see the rest of the pictures in the series you will see why, the models natural features stand out more for headshots this way too. I also purposefully placed her hair behind her ear closest to me. This it to play on the shallow DOF I was shooting, notice how that ear is not in focus but they eyes are? Thats what I look for in my headshots.

*Posing- I play around with different poses when I shoot headshots, as a general rule though when I shoot guys or girls, I like to have the shoulders clean an neck clean, no bra straps, no jewellery, nothing that will distract from the models natural features. Posing also has a lot to say when shaping mood, feeling and atmosphere, here it isn't so apparent as this is just a headshot, so It comes down more to facial expression. I was fairly happy with the pose here, I liked the fall off of light on her neck and under her chin.

Right, so assuming I have covered these points whilst I'm shooting, I should be consistent and getting good results when I start looking through the images in post. So assuming I have got all the above to an acceptable standard, and that I am happy with what I am seeing on the camera, I shoot. I go through an entire shoot keeping all of these things in check. Finished shooting? Double check I have all the shots I set out to get, I like to think of this part as the Pokemon part, "gotta get 'em all!". Now the bittersweet process of post production can begin. For the sake of making things easier, I will exclude all the pictures I played with in Photoshop CS6. Photoshop is whole other can of worms when it comes to experimental portraiture. All of pictures that follow were retouched in Lightroom 3.5. Now you can see what I mean with the whole endless options of shooting RAW thing. These are a few of the images that I retouched from the original posted above. Will put up the full series in the next few days, until then, stay classy. N.

PS! - Click on the first picture and then you can browse through using the arrow keys to compare.

This was the first one I got cracking with, love the subtle tones and the crystal clear, sharp detail.

Bit of an old Polaroid feel to it, digging the grain and "roughness" of it.

Converting from colour to black and white is something that either works 100% or not, was a little unsure about whether these were better suited to B+W or colour. 

Black and white with a soft hue to warm it up a little. Tried to avoid going to too much sepia. Hate sepia.

High contrast B+W,  think this is my favourite out of the B+W ones.

Little bit of a softer look, less contrast and some warmer tones. Peachy-ish.

Offset split tones, lost a bit of detail in the skin, kinda 50/50 on this look.

Also one of my favourite colour retouches, neutral and true. Maybe a little bit too polished.

Low contrast, softer and less presence, almost looks like it was shot with natural light.

All I want for my birthday...

Im a bit lost for words here. Im stuck between the verge of compiling another small essay for you to read and just saying fuckit. Its late, I'm tired, its been a weekend of epic proportions, and tomorrow the insanity of it all will continue. Given, I have a fair amount of what society would call "work" to do, I have a lot planned in terms of photography. Looks something like this:

* Shoot a rap star. Potential booty shaking, bling and boobs.
* Shoot headshot's of said rap star.
* Shoot a model out on location in the freezing cold.
* Shoot the second part of a series im compiling.
* Start shooting a new series that I am really, really, really excited about. Something very different.
* Shoot a dude with a massive afro.
* Shoot something else I am not allowed to talk about right now.
* Edit all of this shit.

All of this has to be done due to time constraints with regard to my departure back home. Another pretty good reason is that my mother may come for a visit. She recently learnt the phrase YOLO. Which apart from being absolutely magic to hear my mom say YOLO, is great because a spontaneous flight from London to Trondheim will mean I will get to kick it with the most amazing mom in the world for a weekend! ( Come on Neety! You Only Live Once!) I refuse to be caught up with the trivialities of the photo business on a weekend that my mother comes to visit me all the way from South Africa. I really would like to get done with all the shooting before I kick it home as well though. Time to get cracking and make things happen.

In the mean time though. I attended one of the best parties this weekend. My dearest friend Linn-Sara celebrated her birthday in typical style. What a rad Saturday. What a group of people. I kinda felt obliged to whip out the 7D and fisheye for this one. Love that camera and that lens. I have been debating selling the two for long time now. I have also been leaning towards keeping it, but now have come to the conclusion that after the SA trip, it has to go. I hardly shoot it anymore, and its an expensive piece of gear that I can't really justify keeping just because of one lens. Going to be sad. But strategically the right move. *cough* 5D mk3 coming. *cough*.

Here are some pictures of some of the love that was shared, the drinks that were spilled, the cake that was baked, the face's that come to life at night, and most importantly, the friendships I value so much today. Check in soon again. N.

PS. Creds to my buddy Stian for some of the shots. Cant dance, look like Tony Montana and shoot photo's all at the same time ya know!