Honestly, 2012 started  rather boring from a photography standpoint. Yet, there was one big highlight already: I found a 40 years old analog medium format Mamiya in my parents basement. I have posted my very first steps with this camera and a 10 years expired Kodak Ektachrome E100VS slide film (Rest in Peace Kodak). It sounds like a big cliché – I searched within my father’s stock of old cameras and lenses. I already knew he had a big arsenal of Canon 35mm A-series cameras from the 70ies & 80ies. I was searching for my Canon AE-1 Program to go [...]

We at grabo-photo love Canon as a brand. They have an great range of products, and we use some of them by ourselves: scanners, printers, point-and-shoots, photocopiers in the office and of course our DSLR cameras. In recent times, they have announced some new products in their camera segment: The compact camera Canon PowerShot G1 X The professional DSLR EOS 1Dx The cinema EOS C300   Let us quickly run through the products… Canon PowerShot G1 X This is the newest addition to the portfolio and the spiritual successor to the PowerShot G12, but will apparently NOT replace it. The biggest change seems [...]

Once again, we have a rather easy tutorial for you: How to take really beautiful low key images of women, men, in the nude or in beautiful lingerie. Altough the results are stunning, the procedure is rather simple: You light the model from the back to outline the body. This is the general idea, but there are myriads of possibilities (you’ll find some examples in my older post HERE). The obvious variations are: the type and angle of the lightsource, its distance from the model (and associated hardness/softness of light) and of course the number of lightsources. Here is the image [...]

Today, I’ll present you one way to achieve a classic head-shoulders studio portrait. Instead of providing precise flash-distance, -size and -power information, I will concentrate on the workflow. Three flashes are necessary for that kind of portrait. I encourage you to set up your flashes individually instead of all of them together. That way you will see, control (and learn) what each light does. If that works out well, you may combine the setting of more lights simultaneously ;) This Setup is, as said, very classic, some may consider it boring. But master that lighting and you’ll be able to adapt it to [...]

This is an easy one… In fact, it’s more like a quick-tip: How to easily lessen local contrast in the face, and increase the face’s global contrast with the background. In other words: Make it nice, and “pop”. To shoot the image I present you today on the right (click on it for a bigger view), I went with Vania to a nearby park in Strasbourg. Something like an hour before sunset, the sun was fairly low and the light was nicely colored. Rather good conditions to take a sweet picture of Vania lying onf the grass and looking up to the [...]

The blur effect of a tilt / shift lens is fancy thing and very popular at the moment. You’ll find plenty of smartphone apps that let you use the effect (although only a fake post processed version). I have tried to emulate the look with a quite experimental method called ‘freelensing’, you find my post about it here. Now though, I had the opportunity to test a real tilt / shift lens Canon TS-E 24mm 3.5 L and to play around with it. One of the actual reasons to buy a tilt / shift lens was to correct for perspective [...]

This is a tutorial where I explain how I did this picture, so you can learn and do the same!

Have you ever noticed when shooting on a sunny day at noon, that your camera doesn’t quite grasp the scene how you want it? The sky is too bright, the contrasts are extreme and the colors are not as saturated as you want them. Well, you guessed it, a polarizer filter can fix this. Sunlight reflected by non-metallic surfaces is polarized. Especially grass, leaves or sand but also roads etc reflect light which lets them seem desaturated and contrasty on pictures shot on sunny days. A polarizer filter absorbs the polarized light, reducing reflections, flares and thus letting the image [...]

Time for another TechTalk post: Add punchyness (how I love this word) to your images with our new Lightroom preset “GRABOgram”. Simply download it and install it to your Lightroom preset directory (see attached txt for info) and you’ll find our preset in Lightroom. If you are new to Adobe Lightroom, you can download a free 30-day trial version over at adobe.com. It is definitely worth checking out! Presets are a good basis for quick photo editing. They let you achieve certain looks quickly and efficiently without spending hours fiddling with your photos. But see for yourself: (Move your mouse [...]

[This post is the "TECH TALK" extension of the article "Punchy sunsets with HDR" from the blog] Background You might have seen this: When taking pictures pointing at the sun, or even when it is a bright day, only parts of the photo are exposed correctly. Either the sky is white and the foreground is correctly exposed, or the foreground is black and the sky is correctly exposed. The image sensor of your camera can only display a limited brightness range, which is much lower of that of the human eye. For example: While the sun is setting, the sky [...]