Portrait Photography / Blog                 Bookmark: Del.icio.us Digg FURL FaceBook Stumble Upon Reddit Google Bookmarks

I've just been for three weeks in Vietnam to visit my wife's family in Long Thanh in the South. It was an unforgettable experience, this is my third time in the country and I always like it, the people, the food etc... And obviously the weather was really hot and humid. We stayed in Long Thanh for around two weeks and also went for a swim in Long Hai and stayed in the Swiss Village Resort in Mui Ne, Phan Thiet.

Every thing was an excuse for taking pictures. I took with me my mini Polaroid PoGo printer which the kids enjoyed a lot. Having their pictures printed out instantly was exciting for them.

As a tradition between my wife and I, we are always doing jumping shots anywhere we are going :-D And this time was no exception and it was contagious.

For more details about the shot above, please have a look at its Flickr page. Also check out this other photographs of me against my wife.

More photographs from the series can be found on my Facebook fan page.

-30-

Thank you to all for your comments and feedbacks on both this blog and my Flickr stream, much appreciated!

In exchange, I will share with you the secrets behind these photographs. What you will find inside today's post:

  • three terrific video footages of the photoshoot in Micheldever Wood. These were filmed by SnapperJack and edited with the help of Event DV.
  • analysis of the shots in the wood
  • analysis of the shots in the field
Lyvia the Elf of Micheldever Wood

Twitter, what a great invention! Updating the world with what's is going on in your life, networking with talented people, promoting your business, you name it!

DwikoArie is a wedding photographer I've first met on Twitter. We have tweeted a few times but never actually met in real life. I've invited him to join the London Strobists and LPMG groups but never had the chance to meet yet. Two of my mates from the London Strobists group told me about Dwiko and having a look at his blog I was quite impressed of the quality of his wedding shots. One day Dwiko suggested that we should do a shoot together which I of course accepted.

It's only after couple of months that we managed to get a date where we were both available. After few selections, we finally chose to shoot in Micheldever Wood, Winchester.

I started to use off-camera flash in my photography works back in 2007. At the time I used to photograph everything with available natural light, playing around with reflectors and finding angles that would match the ambient light. But then I started to learn using a flashgun in a proper way and became addicted to the fact that having a flashgun in your bag makes it your own available light that you can carry with you where ever you go and use it whenever you need it. But as exciting as it is when you start to get nice balanced shots, you tend to go all the way with flash only and forget the natural light. Don't forget that lighting with flash is not The way but just A way to light your image. So recently I forced myself to include natural light shots in my sessions.

Ever woke up on a Sunday morning feeling bored and wondering what you can do? Then you want to go out and take some pictures but drawing the curtains just reveals a dull and depressive cloudy day. Well I can tell you this happens to me quite regularly here in London... But what can you do? I can say bye to everything here and go back to Montpellier in the south of France or back to my parents there in New Caledonia that wonderful tropical island. But I can also accept Frank's invitation to go by the coast and instead of staying at home vegging out in front of the telly...

Being also a web developer, I'm being sent to Oslo (Norway) for a training course on eZ Publish, a advanced Content Management System (CMS) that we are using at the company.

I left London from Heathrow T5 at 1pm today and arrived at about 4.30pm, Oslo time. There was still some snow on the street and obviously it was quite cold but not that bad though. I was expecting the sun to be still high as we are up north but I did not realize that in winter the sun goes down even sooner than in London. At this period of the year the sun raised at 8am and set at 4.30pm... That's not cool for evening shots as I'm hand holding my camera, but at least I don't need to wake up to early to try some nice shots in the morning.

Since about June 2007 I've followed on a nearly daily basis the evolution of Strobist, a blog setup by David Hobby, an ex photo journalist working for the Sun in the US. In a friendly and simple way, David Hobby is teaching you how to use small and portable flashguns to the maximum of their possibilities and achieve high quality photographs. The Strobist blog is reinforced by a Strobist Flickr Group where the blog readers could participate in the group discussion threads and posting their work into the group's photo pool and get comments and critics.

I remember going thru several pictures of skateboarders, cyclist... doing high jump with a great sky in the background. This made me want to get some similar photographs. So, with my wife, we started a serie on our trip to the Isle of Wight.

Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
        1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31