Having a little time under my hands this morning, I went to the shed, fired up the gas heating and built a flash mount from parts I already had — a L-bracket with Bowens S-mount, a grip, an aluminium-rail (left over from some other accessories), some screws and 45 minutes time.

This thing is primarily to be used with my beauty dish. This is my favourite lightformer anyway. So if you want to use your compact flash/speedlight — a Nissin DI-622 in my case — along with your deauty dish (or other stuio lightformer), you might be interested to read this little DIY-tutorial. Sorry for the crappy photos, which I took with my HTC…

So, these are the parts I had.

First I had to make the existing rail a little longer with another a piece I had. So I drilled a hole into it — with a gimlet that must be 100 years old (as the bench vise), but I love it!

After assembling the whole thing with nuts and bolts and mounting the L-bracket it looks like this. Nifty…

Later at the studio — the complete kit on my 5dmk2.

and the backside…

And this is what the outcome looks like — no editing at all. Raw. Gotta love it, no?

BTW: This is Sally, my light-model. She is a very patient person. And I love her.

My little dish is ~40 cm in diameter. It now sits a little left from and over the lens. Perfect. In my view it doubles the useability-factor of the speedlite by at least x2. And the dish can still be used on strobe-heads in studio AND with the speedlite. Dual use is always a good thing. I can think of many occasion where it makes sense to use this combination.

It is heavy, a bit clumsy, yes. But the light is worth the effort IMHO.

And light is, what photography is all about, right?

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask and I will gladly help if I can.

Had a shooting with the lovely Valerie early this week at my studio at Kaiser Medienservice. I am quite happy with many of the portraits. Here is a small selection. Hope you like them too.

I think I finally found a way to create a gallery that is primarily meant to sell photos — either by email-order or instant download. I have spent days, literally, with my research, but all I found was either not functional, oversized or way too expensive.
The ingredients: WordPress as the general framework for the site, an iframe-plugin to display the respective gallery, generated by Fotoplayer, and paypal.
And here is why: WP is flexible, good looking and easy to customize. But the regular WP-galleries won’t do the job, as there is hardly a way to use them for e-commerce-purposes — at least not in Germany where you have to follow extremely rigid regulations.
This is where Fotoplayer comes in handy. Not only it is available also as a plugin for Lightroom — thus integrates flawlessly into my workflow -, it creates beautiful looking flash-galleries, has tons of options to tweak the look and extras and comes with a nifty shopping-cart, where clients can choose various image-sizes, order prints or download hi-res-files immediately after payment. It also can export the galleries directly via FTP to the site — into a folder that is not part of the WP-loop. But: You can use an iframe in an article or page of WP to display it. And bingo — all requirements met!
I got it working on my local Xampp and after some more testing I will use it on my business site ASAP.

It has been a while that I posted something here. But I had … other things to take care of. Anyway, yesterday I took my little Lumix out to the christmas market in my hometown. It was not like shooting a rangefinder, but fun nevertheless. The Leica-lens performed quite well at f2 and 800°. And I like some of the snaps. Hope you too.

Christmas Mood

Chinese Christmas

Must be an angel

Full-frame angel

Binky Boy

Santa’s Mobile

XXL

Late Call

I got my second strobe-set today. Hensel this time. And they offered it for a fair price. So I now can finally set up my second studio (with a turntable) for product-shots (also 360°) and don’t have to change setups all the time. Yay!

It has been hard work, but now it is done.

The website of my Start-Up ist online since last night.

Sorry, no english version though…

Any feedback is appreciated.

As I found out that I have a problem with color fidelity in my workflow I decided to do something about it without any further ado.

I spent way too much time fixing tints in my studio shots especially. The critical color is: red. As many others report this too I guess that part of the probem is that the Canons tend to be too red per se. Things get even worse since my strobes which claim to give me 5600K (+-200) are not reliable for that matter and add even more red or plain magenta.

As long I take single shots this is easy to deal with (and doesn’t matter much anyway), but I’ve been doing some portrait-series lately and when I look at several shots from the same shootings side by side I notice an inconsistency that is bad. Especially as these photos often also hang side by side on the wall at my clients’ places.

I managed to repair that though (shooting RAW is always helpful!), but it takes too much precious time. And it is not that professional either. Way too much guessing in the game for my taste. Even more so, as Adobe LR does not offer AdobeRGB (my prefered color space) in processing, but only ProPhoto. This is manageable as long as photos are exported in AdobeRGB to PS which is an option in LR, but I’d definitely prefer to stay in one color space all the way. As much as I like Lightroom, I am also testing Capture One now as RAW-processor and a possible alternative.

So here is what I’ll do: Manual WB for each shooting and sub-shooting with the help of the Colorchecker Passport. And I will also calibrate my monitors involved — studio-laptops (for tethered shooting), desktop-PCs (for editing) — with the Spyder 3 Pro. I ordered both the Colorchecker and the Spyder today for a total of 200 €. This seems a fair price for the time I hope to save in process. Besides I’ll tweak the camera settings and make some dedicated profiles for my use.

Soon I’ll report if and how it worked.

Actually I was pretty tired today, as it has been a hard week, and I had planned to chill out a bit after doing the nasty paperwork. But my niece Lorette called me and asked if we could shoot a little — as we had planned for some time. And it was a real pleasure. We’ll do some more soon for sure. Before the camera she acts like a fish in the water, which makes my job very easy.

But see yourself — and, if you like, tell me what you think.

Yesterday I started to build the fleet of my young enterprise. I guess some would have lent some money from the bank and get a fancy car — like a Mercedes or Porsche or something. Damn posers…

I prefered to buy a used Vespa Cosa 125 and pay it cash from my pocket. This iconic beauty is 18 years old, has 12.000 km on the speedo and still runs like a charm. I got the test certificate for another 2 years without any problems.

The color is almost exactly the same as in my corporate design This’ll make it easy to turn into a rolling advertising vehicle for my regular tours to town. Besides it is quite practical as I can park it virtually anywhere. And I am actually faster than by car.

Coming from a BMW R1100RS with 10x the capacity and HP it is something I need to get used to, but it is a fun to ride, yeah. I’ll sell the BMW now, as I cannot hope to ride it often anymore. No more time and also too much pain in my neck and back. On the Vespa Cosa I sit bolt upright. No problem at all.

I think I will also trade my Mini Cooper soon for a VW bus. I just need more transport capacity for my gear. And I can use it as a camper too.

May I introduce you to Werner, the caretaker of the house where i have my studio and office. Almost 80, he is working every day and he is a caretaker literally. He mows the lawn, takes care of the garbage, has an eye on the parking, checks the doors … — everything. I am glad we have him. He never had an easy life for various reasons, but I never heard him complain. I like this guy.

This was just a quick spontaneous portrait this afternoon, almost in walking by. Nothing special, yet I like it. Soon I’ll devote him some more time.