I have uploaded a few portraits of Nickita our daughter.

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var description = “Working with the 50 mm”;

Shooting kids in the studio, always a challenge. But what a fun job to do. For both me as for my daughter Nicki.
This weekend I decided to do another shoot with Nicki. I had this idea of a High-key photo shoot combined with flowers. So for the preparation we went shopping for a nice white dress and some artificial flowers. I had the idea to use roses and thought it was to risky to use real roses because of the thorns. So we went for fake flowers.
Set up the studio with a white background, a soft box, a standard flash, and a hand held reflector. First we did some test shoots so Nicki could adjust to this new environment that suddenly appeared in her living room.

The moment she was comfortable in the new environment we dressed her up and let her play with the props. And what a fun that was.
After a while she understood that she could smell the flowers, or at least she could act that she was smelling them and we could even direct her into the right position (all I used was a small background (1,25 meters wide)) The moment she started to loose interest we gave her a new flower to play with and this worked really well.
Ad the end we even introduced a whole lot of fake pedals to play with. Or should I say to throw with. That was the moment the fun for her really kicked in.
Some tech info:
All photos were shot with my Canon 5D, 24-70mm USM L, on 200ISO. I had to do a lot of polishing in Photoshop due to the fact that the background was very small. And as a final touch I used Scott Kelby’s 7-point system to enhance the

Found some tutorials on the net and started to play with them. Not the result I was hoping for, so again, I need more practice. I still thought that the end result was worth putting on the site.
I do like the rough look that is generated by using the high pass filter in Photoshop. But you can read more on that in the tutorial. I’m still thinking about doing this with a female portrait. Hopefully without offending the lady…
The tutorial can be found here link.
There are actually several tutorials and most of them are interesting enough to spens some time on

Just a tryout with my 16-35mm lens and flash while my daughter was eating a sandwich with apple syrup. (one of her favorites). I love the (slight) fisheye effect that the 16mm produces on my full frame Canon 5D. And I really like the fill-in effect caused the flash.

Basically the same technique I used while I was shooting Nicki with her sandbox toys in the garden. Set (in manual mode) the right exposure for the surrounding on your camera, and you the flash (also in manual mode) to make sure that you light your subject correctly. You can leave the flash on ETTL (auto mode), but I prefer to have full control over my camera and flash.
Next day I tweaked some settings in Adobe lightroom (exposure, clarity, and vibrance) to give it a little bit a vintage look.
Click here to see the larger version and the other photos from the same series.
[Canon 5D, 16-35mm, Flash]

I got this idea about doing some selfportraits. Here is the first try.
Played with Lightroom to get the light color temp, contrast and sharpness. When this was set correctly, I decided to use Photoshop to remove the gray background and switch from RGB color to black and white. At the end I shifted the whole composition to the left to hide the collar of my t-shirt. Peronally, I am happy with the result.
I’m thinking about doing a whole serie, the same way I have done while I was on the academy. so in the near future there will be more to come. My first idea is to start with all different faces, all black and white, in a low key setting. So we have to wait how it will workout.
Click here for the gallery.
[shot with Canon 5D, 24-70mm f2.8, daylight]