Focus on iPad

Another photo from the fair exhibition that I like. The person is nicely separated from the background and the symmetric green bars on the sides of the frame provide a good framing. I also like motion blur at his right hand pointing at the iPad, but best thing is the light. It was a pure ambient light but at the background there were placed two bluish spots pointing exactly at the right direction and providing cool accent lights on both sides of the figure. Camera spec: Canon 5D mark ii with Canon 70-200 2.8 IS II at 70mm, F2.8 @ 1/100, ISO 2500.

I Want this Job

During this week I was ask by DES Job Fair organizers here in Aalborg to do some short photo reportage documenting the event where students from the university meet with companies in order to establish connections. Here is one of my favourite photos I took. I was working completely with ambient light only as I didn't want to disturb the atmosphere with my on-camera flash which was moreover impossible to bounce (ceiling more than 20m high) and off-camera flash would attract too much attention. I found my scene from a distance, set the camera to manual in order to have consistent exposures and then took several frames to get the right expression. On the photo above I like that it has a clear foreground and background and the main two objects in the middle are nicely separated by a shallow depth of field. This creates a feel of dimension. Shooting at ISO 2500 is absolutely no problem, after a slight noise reduction in Lightroom 3 the photos look like shot at ISO 400 on my Canon 40D. Camera spec: Canon 5D mark ii with Canon 70-200 2.8 IS II at 70mm, F3.2 @ 1/100, ISO 2500.

On the Air

I took this photo last year at a job fair. The squares at the backdrop were full of color and very bright, which allowed me to make the background behind the man with the phone very dark. The main subject was lit with my off-camera flash Canon 580EX II with Lumiquest Softbox III positioned to the left and slightly behind the subject, creating a more dramatic Rembrandt light pattern. An on-camera flash was used for a little bit of fill on the axis of the camera. The lighting diagram is outlined to the right (click on it for a larger view). And yes, this was not a candid shot, I simply asked him to stay at the place and pretend a phone call. I liked already the original photo but then decided to use the gradient tool in Lightroom to make the right third of the picture black and white and it turned into an even more interesting photo. For completeness let me say that I used the brush tool with exposure set to -4EV to clean up a few distracting objects behind my subject. Camera spec: Canon 5D mark ii with Canon 24-105 4L at 47mm, F5,6 @ 1/100, ISO 200.