Pipaluk on a Ride

I took this image couple of weeks ago as a part of a series I photographed for the parents of this pretty young girl from Greenland. As usual, the setup was easy. I found a green background without a direct sunlight and placed the girl further away from it so that the long focal length and F3.2 made the background completely blurred. Unfortunately, the position of the girl let some direct sun beams hit her face and T-shirt, so I asked someone to hold a larger silver-black reflector between the sun and the girl, with the black side facing her. This created a very nice and soft light on her face with some catch-lights created by reflections from the nearby buildings. Camera spec: Canon 5D mark ii with Canon 70-200 F2.8 IS II at 200mm, F3.2 @ 1/400, ISO 400.

Happy Family

Many weeks have passed without me blogging any new photo. I took many photos I would like to share in the meantime, there was just not enough time during this busy period for me. Anyway, it seems that things calmed down again and I hope to continue my regular blogging frequency. Today I post one of the very recent family portraits I took. I like to use off-camera flash but this photo is just a natural light. The main reason being that when photographing children, I like to keep my setup as simple as possible. I simply positioned the family under a tree with the sun behind them and made sure that there was a nice pleasing background behind them, preferably without any areas directly lit by the sun. Then it was just the question to entrain the family and press the shutter at the right moment. Camera spec: Canon 5D mark ii with Canon 70-200 F2.8 IS II at 70mm, F5.6 @ 1/200, ISO 400.

A Happy Baby

I love photographing babies and children. The shoot is always different, you never know what to expect and they always look good on the photos. This is a recent photo I took in my home studio, the set up for baby shoots is always simple, one softbox, one reflector and this time I chose a gray background. I like the baby smile and the right leg raised up. I have one more photo that I will post soon, the same set up but very different atmosphere, just check the block in a couple of days. Camera spec: Canon 5D mark ii with Canon 70-200 F2.8 IS II at 95mm, F9 @ 1/160, ISO 200.

Jumping for Joy

A few days ago I had the change to photograph an 8 years old model Veronika. I found out that in order to relax the atmosphere when photographing children, asking them to jump often brings lots of fun and more natural expression in their faces. I set my camera to manual at 1/1000s in order to eliminate the motion blur, added little bit of on-camera fill-in flash, decided on my composition (note the leading lines pointing towards her and the larger tree on the left balancing out the image), asked her to jump and pressed the shutter release. I enjoy the result a lot. Camera spec: Canon 5D mark ii with Canon 70-200 2.8 IS II at 85mm, F4.5 @ 1/1000, ISO 200.