We’ve been working with professional portrait photographer Damien Lovegrove to bring you some videos that will inspire you to get more from your camera and help you take your photography to the next level.
Part 4 of 5
Damien goes down into a darker basement to make use of the ambient light to create some wonderful portraits.
We hope you enjoy and please feel free to share with other people who might also like it.
About Damien
Damien Lovegrove is a renowned photographer and lighting guru. He specialises in portrait and beauty photography and teaches professional photographers his craft across the world.
We’ve been working with professional portrait photographer Damien Lovegrove to bring you some videos that will inspire you to get more from your camera and help you take your photography to the next level.
Part 3 of 5
Damien takes his model Claire to the edge of a field and tries different compositions and usage of the natural light to produce very different images.
We hope you enjoy and please feel free to share with other people who might also like it.
About Damien
Damien Lovegrove is a renowned photographer and lighting guru. He specialises in portrait and beauty photography and teaches professional photographers his craft across the world.
We’ve been working with professional portrait photographer Damien Lovegrove to bring you some videos that will inspire you to get more from your camera and help you take your photography to the next level.
Part 2 of 5
Damien takes his model Victoria outside to a magnolia tree and shoots into the light using an X-T1 and XF56mm.
We hope you enjoy and please feel free to share with other people who might also like it.
About Damien
Damien Lovegrove is a renowned photographer and lighting guru. He specialises in portrait and beauty photography and teaches professional photographers his craft across the world.
We’ve been working with professional portrait photographer Damien Lovegrove to bring you some videos that will inspire you to get more from your camera and help you take your photography to the next level.
In each of these videos, Damien talks you through his thought process when shooting portraits with different available light. He provides you with examples of his work and describes how and why the shot was taken in that way.
Part 1 of 5
In our first video in the series, Damien shoots some mid shot portraits of Victoria in a well-lit classic English country house – typical of the type you might find in a UK wedding venue.
We hope you enjoy and please feel free to share with other people who might also like it. Make sure you subscribe to be notified as parts two to five are also released.
About Damien
Damien Lovegrove is a renowned photographer and lighting guru. He specialises in portrait and beauty photography and teaches professional photographers his craft across the world.
“I’m inspired by beauty and as I have matured as a photographer I’ve learned to see beauty in just about everyone and everywhere. It’s not what I look at that matters to me, it is what I see.”
“I love people and I suppose women in particular. I love their mannerisms, fashion, style and beauty. I love photographing women. I also get a buzz from teaching.”
Although the above video was completely free, you can also purchase “ILLUMINATION –
The ultimate training video experience in lighting portraits on location” from Damien’s website. You get the following:
Jens Franke is a professional designer and photographer from Stuttgart. His passion for photography started during his exchange semester in Rio de Janeiro. He was so impressed about the versatility and tensions between the different population groups living together in one mega city.
To share his impressions he started a blog where he posted his personal view on the city. Back in Germany, his aroused wanderlust took him to exciting destinations in Columbia, Morocco, Europe and the US.
Capturing fleeting emotional moments of people, whether of happiness, sadness, joy, anxiety or loneliness became his goal of each journey.
Stuttgart
X-E1 with XF35mm – f/1.4, 1/125sec, ISO800
With all the possible exotic places in mind, and having grown up in the Bavarian Alps, I thought Stuttgart would be quite a boring place to live when I was here for the first months. To keep myself entertained I started to watch out for the subtle adventures of every day life. My camera got the main pretense for my everyday strolls through the little neighborhoods here. It worked out for me! I sensitised my view and step by step I got used to the rhythm of the city. Sometimes i feel like Daniel Quinn in Paul Auster’s fiction `City of Glass` when he is loosing himself in the city of NY.
X-E1 with XF35mm – f/1.4, 1/4000sec, ISO200
I really like Austers quote in this book: “In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.”
X-E1 with XF35mm – f/8, 1/125sec, ISO800
While I started photographing the people in the streets of Stuttgart, I got more and more interested in individual portraiture and the story behind the people. In my last Exhibition “Little Districts”, I combined street photography and portraiture to enable my visitors to see my city from both an intimate and a mysterious perspective at the same time.
X-E1 with XF35mm – f/1.4, 1/60sec, ISO400
Morocco
X-E1 with XF35mm – f/4, 1/40sec, ISO400
During the last two years I’ve traveled to Morocco four times to capture the glimpse of the Moroccan spirit close to the western Saharan border and the region around Marrakech. But a lot more I wanted to illustrate the people in their every day life – Moroccos inhabitants are the real points of interest of the country!
X-E1 with Contax C/Y Sonnar 85mm – f/2.8, 1/320sec, ISO400X-E1 with Contax C/Y Sonnar 85mm – f/2.8, 1/125sec, ISO400X-E1 with XF35mm – f/1.4, 1/1200sec, ISO400X-E1 with XF35mm – f/2.8, 1/3000sec, ISO200
Technique
Most of my current images are taken with this Lineup:
Fuji X-E1
Every Day Lens: Fujinon XF 35mm f/1.4 R
Fujinon XF 56mm F1.2 R
Fujinon XF 18mm 1:2 R
I really like the unobtrusiveness of the X System. With my blacktaped E1 I got barely noticed on the street and my whole equipment fits in a small camera bag. Since Street Photography is often a matter of performance i also like the intuitive controls and the customizable function keys. I made my X-E1 behaving like the Contax G2 which handling i loved. I set the focus via thumb and set the lightning via pressing the shutter halfway down. For a better handling i use the additional and pretty ergonomically handgrip.
I also enjoy the analog developing process and some of my other work is photographed by analogue medium and 35mm cameras.
Why choose the X-Series? Read our guest blog by Martin Castein to find out.
About Martin
Martin has achieved 18 gold awards at SWPP (Society of Wedding and Portrait Photographers) which is one of the largest international photography organizations in the world. Is the 2013 SWPP architectural photographer of the year and has also been nominated by the judges as the SWPP overall photographer of the year for 2013.
The Fuji X-series journey for me began with the excellent X-E1 and now the X-Pro1. The weight-saving advantage of the X series is obvious. But let’s look a little deeper than that.
EVF and Sensor
For the type of photography I do, I like to bring out a lot of detail, colour and contrast in my images.
So for me it is vital that I get my exposures absolutely perfect and that the sensor of the camera is truly capable when it comes to delivering detail, dynamic range and the tone the sensor produces, particularly skin tones.
Let me give you an example. This image was processed in Lightroom. The sensor can handle the complex lighting easily, in fact better than some current top end DSLRs I have owned.
XF-18-55mm – ISO200 – f/2.8
Colour
I work mostly in colour. I love colour.
We live in the digital age where colour can be so expressive and powerful.
The Fuji X-series sensor can match and in most instances beat other manufacturers when it comes to these issues.
When the X-trans sensor is combined with the live exposure of the Fuji X-series EVF, we have the recipe for a very high hit-rate of usable images.
This next image was taken with a wall blocking half the image, the flare on the left is from a window, not post production. I could see this in viewfinder before I took the image, this aids creativity. Post production in Lightroom again, very simple with the brilliant colour of the X-trans sensor.
XF18-55mm – ISO640 – f/4
Manual focus
I really love the ability to use manual focus and then have the back button do autofocus should I require it. I use this all the time. It is like manual focus with auto focus override. With other systems we have auto focus with manual override.
This works because it is so easy to see what is in focus in the EVF.
I can see the focus peeking, working all the time. This way I can fire off shots freely, capturing moments and know immediately when it is time to change my focus. That’s the benefit of not needing to take the camera away from your eye. What you see is what you get.
LCD screen
Additionally, it is an advantage to have a rear LCD screen that can focus the same way as the viewfinder can. This allows me to get unusual angles and shoot from angles that wouldn’t be easy to manage with a DSLR. In the past I went through a lot of trial and error with a DSLR to get the same angles.
Advantages
So for me the biggest advantage of the X-series is the combination of the incredible performance of the X-trans sensor with Fuji’s brilliant implementation of the electronic viewfinder and manual focusing. Of course coupled with the savings in size and weight.
Lets remember
We are artists. As photographers we rely on our equipment to allow us to fulfil our artistic vision. The urge that drives us to create, that is what we are all about as photographers. The tool we do that with, our camera, ultimately either enhances this ambition or it stifles it.
The fact is our choice of camera affects how we feel about photography.
Fuji made that t-shirt we all like to wear, they made the camera that speaks to the photographer in a way that is hard to verbalise other than it feels right.
Jens Franke
