Picture of the Day
category: Color Portraits
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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.

category: Color Portraits
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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.

category: Color Portraits
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Sometimes I shoot outdoors. In this case Don and I walked around Les Halles in Paris and took a few pictures with no additional light - just natural light. Check the pictures on my Facebook page; here is one that I liked because of the grey fall soft light; the overcast sky is one giant light box above the model’s head. I also liked the purple stickers on the glass doors and tried to play with them in this composition.

category: Color Portraits
tags:

I keep using the Nikon SB-900 strobes for my shoots and I must say I am pretty satisfied with them; of course the power is not the one of an Elinchrom monolight (that I used before and still have it for e.g. photos of groups) but they can give you decent lighting (especially if you use several of them at the same time); interesting modifiers are not that difficult to find on eBay (and you can even DIY some more) and… they are portable and not dependent on external power. In the case of this picture I had the model, Ruben, over in my home studio so I could have used AC powered monolights but I really enjoy the strobes. Here I used four: one on each side of the model with a lightbox (square lightbox while ideally I would have liked to use strip lights), one behind to light the backdrop and one (main) with a beauty dish, on model’s left and above him. The rest is compositing with an old airline ad… More pictures on www.jancphoto.com or on my Facebook page.