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.

Strobes are great but I enjoy working in a fully equipped pro studio as well; for some shootings and for commercial work I rent one that is here in Paris - Studio Blad in the 9th arrondissement. They have great Profoto lights and all things that make your life easier when you bring in models, such as a kitchen, a shower and a make up desk. All you need to do is bring your camera and voilà. Here I shot the singer Don L Castor from LA who now lives in Paris; I used 4 lights (again): the main one was a big octogon camera right, two strip boxes and a snoot that lights Don’s hair and spills on the background as well, creating this nice little aura around him.

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.

I was set to assist a friend and photographer for his “Spring Fashion” shooting in the beautiful Parisian park of Saint-Cloud and wanted to take advantage of being there to ask one of my models to come and join me after the shoot I was assisting. Just about when we were ready to start taking pictures after nearly 2 hours of preparation, make-up, hair dressing and styling, a police car stopped by and the cops told us we needed a written authorization to use the park for photography. We started arguing the pictures wouldn’t be used commercially but the cops called more cops and at some point we were facing about 5 or 6 cops who didn’t look like they wanted to pick-nick with us. Funny - they told us we were in breach with the rules while we didn’t even actually start taking pictures. Our intentions were criminal, they told us. And our model was certainly under age (it turns out she is 22), maybe even an illegal immigrant (not even…) and we looked suspicious anyway. So… there wasn’t much more to discuss, and as we didn’t much care spending the rest of the weekend in a police station we packed up and left the park. On the other side of the fence, just between the river and the highway, we realized we didn’t have a Plan B to find a shooting location. After about 30 hectic minutes when the stylist, the MUA and the models were on their way to get nervous we finally found a spot under a bridge over the river Seine. And… the location turned out to be fantastic. There were large boats anchored there, a wall that hid us from any further policemen patrolling on the road and the light was just perfect for what we wanted to shoot. So after sending a text to my model to cancel the shoot I finally called him to come to the new location and here is an example of what we did there. More on www.jancphoto.com.