kids « Jurgen Doom

Nikon D3x – a closer look

29 March 2010 om 11:38 door Jürgen geplaatst in de categorie Camera,Flashlight,kids,Portrait

In my previous post I published 2 photographs of my kids, to celebrate the arrival of my Nikon D3x.  But it is indeed impossible to assess the quality of a camera and/or lens on a tiny image in a blog post.  Therefore, I’m herewith posting a 100% zoom of a detail of Myrte’s head.

The image is photographed with a 85mm Tilt/Shift lens, so it’s manual focus.  Although I probably would have wanted the eyes to be a little sharper, I think it’s still pretty acceptable considering we’re looking at an image at 100% magnification (which comes down to roughly the size of an A2 for the intire image).

Nonetheless, look at the sharpness and crispness of the image, especially Myrte’s hair and eyebrows.  I also don’t notice any color fringing at the edges (also thanks to the great lens used).

100% crop of Myrte's headshot, by Nikon D3x

100% crop of Myrte's headshot, by Nikon D3x

Needless to say I’m happy with the results and I’m looking forward to the journey with my D3x.

Portrait photography – on location shoot with Myrte – part 3: flashlight

18 May 2009 om 11:25 door Jürgen geplaatst in de categorie Flashlight,kids,Portrait

This is the last post of the shoot with Myrte on location (a field at midday in bright sunlight).

After having used flaslight to brighten up the shadow side of Myrte and to balance it against the harsh sunlight coming from the back, I wanted a few shots of her where the flashlight became the predominant light, hence underexposing the sunlight.  This would give a totally different feel to the image than what we saw in the previous posts.

In order to do so I had to set the flashlight to almost full power so that the flash could overpower the sun.  Using f/14 at 250 I dialed in an exposure setting into my camera that effectively would create an underexposed image, but the use of the flashlight added enough light on Myrte to get a correctly exposed image on her.

The result was about 1 usable photograph because Myrte got bored of being a model and wanted to enter her airy fairy princess world …..

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Portrait Photography – on location shoot with Myrte – part 2: natural light with flash light

14 May 2009 om 12:26 door Jürgen geplaatst in de categorie Flashlight,kids,Portrait

In the previous post I explained how I photographed Myrte, a 6 year old girl, in a field on a bright sunny day.

After the initial shots without flash, I decided to use a flash (Nikon SB 900, triggerd with pocket wizards) to brighten up the shadow side of Myrte.  Since the sun was coming in from behind her (at left), I had to lighten up the right side of her face and body.  In order to do so, I choose to balance the light from my strobe (speedlight) against the sun so that the amount of flash added to Myrte would compensate for the loss of light on her shadow side.

This was done by adjusting the level of the speedlight.  It was aimed directly at Myrte (no use of any translucent material such as umbrella, ….).

The images were downloaded into Adobe Lightroom 2, where I adjusted the image to my liking (by boosting the blacks, exposure and by bringing back the saturation).

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This next image was converted into black and white (with boosted highlights and blacks, in order to keep a balance in the image).

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After about 10 minutes into the shoot, Myrte wanted to wear her “princess” dress.  So after a change of clothing we continued the shoot.  Notice the very light sky which, in effect, had a rather deep blue appearance.  But by overexposing a bit I rendered the sky lighter than it was in reality.

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Finally we had some action going.  I asked Myrte to turn around a few times in order to get movement in her dress.  Due to the fact that I used a flashlight I was able to “stop” the action without getting blur in her face.

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