Just a picture from my recent trip to Rome - it’s easy to take nice pictures in this city as (nearly) everything you see there is beautiful and worth being photographed. The light is also on your side; the ochres of the old buildings get more vivid in the setting sun and thousand years old stones reveal the finest details when lit the right way. The city is an astonishing show in itself. As usually, come to see more on my website, www.jancphoto.com.

Today I’m publishing an example of my landscape work. This picture was taken in January in the sunny Southern California near San Diego. The surfers were climbing back up from the beach while the light setting sun was creating interesting effects by making its way through the humid air above the ocean.

I have been contacted by a fashion stylist from New York, Olu; he was visiting Paris and wanted to have a few shots done with the Eiffel tower in the background or any other typical Parisian setup, showing his new clothing line. This was January so the weather is usually very cold but we were lucky and although it was dull and grey at least it wasn’t that much freezing. I used a simple hand-held speedlight with a lightbox to bring up more details and to pop the colors on the beautiful outfits of Nigerian inspiration.

The previous post showed Don under Parisian soft gray weather. In this picture that I shot in Atlanta, GA, we had great sunshine - great? Well I love sunny weather but it is not usually the best light you can get for portrait shooting as the main source (the sun) is very harsh and casts hard shadows that rarely make a model look good. But if the light is reflected in a proper way the reflector becomes the source and its large apparent size creates a softer lighting for your model. This is a good example: Jerome is lit by a reflector that is held in the direct sun light by my assistant Habeeb. Note the soft shadow cast by Jerome as opposed to the hard shadows around that come from the direct sun. I also used the curves in Photoshop to rebalance zones with different contrast.