Yesterday Craig invited a bunch of photographers to join his studio workshop. So we went to Michael’s studio from ‘FirstZoom.TV’ in Shilin. They have plenty of space in their basement studio and we could split into 3 groups with different setups. As usual one of the models were late and Agnes jump in as model for our first setup, special thanks to her :)
Equipped with (unfortunately) Canon hot shoe flashes, remote triggered and in manual mode we got some plenty nice shoots. Also the models were gorgeous so I think every one got a few great images.
Finally last Sunday I could make it and join my second photo walk here in Taiwan. This time Craig invited us to walk from Zhuwei MRT station to Danshui.
Last Monday night I was lucky and was able to take some long time expose photo’s from an incredible clear sky full of stars. It was the first time for me that I saw so many stars on Taiwan’s sky.
All photos was taken with my Nikon D3 mounted on a tripod with a wide angle lens f2.8/14-24mm @ 14mm. ISO set to 3600, shutter speed to 30 sec. and f2.8. The clouds are lit by villages in the mountains and some far behind from Ilan.
Click on the images to see a larger version on a dark background.
Finally I got my first studio gear settled and found a volunteer who was brave enough to stay in front of my camera. I decided to go for a set of two Elinchrom BXRi-500 strobes, inspired by a review from Scott Kelby on his PhotoshopInsider blog. Here is the link. As light shaping tools I used different spot reflectors, one Rotalux octagonal 135cm and one Rotalux rectangle 90x35cm soft-box.
Julia, a colleague from Germany who spend some weeks here in Taiwan, agree to be my first ‘guinea pig’ in my studio. We both had no make-up experience for studio lighting at all and we decided just to skip this part and concentrate on light and pose.
By trying a lot of different setups, poses and a bottle red wine we had a lot of fun with my try and error approach till late night and we was somehow satisfied with the outcome.
Now I’m looking for the next volunteer and hope there will be more photos on my blog soon…
Here some more photos from my first studio session. ->Julia
Yesterday I got aware that Skype is available for iPhone. In the case I live in Taiwan, ~8000 miles away from home, it is a good opportunity to bypass the expensive cellular network providers. It seems that this application is not available in all iTunes stores, especially in countries where the telecommunication companies still behave like monopolists. According to the German ‘Mirror Online’, the German T-Mobil is going one step further, they simply block this application. Their argumentation: Quality reasons….
Recently Scott Kelby host Zack Arias as guest blogger at his Photoshop Insider blog. Zack Arias delivered an unconventional blog post in form of a video where delivers inspiring thought. Highly recommended!
Hi, mid of December last year I had the pleasure to join a photo shooting organized by a Taiwanese photo club ‘PhotoSharp‘. It was quite interesting to see the streets which are normally so crowd that you can not see further then 10m now totally empty in a nice morning light. It was really fun together with photographers all ages and a quite experienced (not only beautiful! ) model who can handle a bunch of wilde photo shooters ;-)
Normally it is not possible to see the little preview images of your RAW files browsing through your files and folders with the Windows Explorer. Only JPEG, GIF and TIFF pictures could be previewed. With the help of the quite usefully Plug-in form ArcSoft you can see the little thumpnails from most RAW formats, also the camera independend DNG format from Adobe. You can download the Plug-in from ArcSoft for free. During the installation wo are asked to enter your email address for registration but you can cancel the registration process later when it switch to your Internet browser. I tried already and it works fine so far…
