Fujifilm Corporate Blog | portrait photography

Illumination – Location Portraits using Flash and Natural Light

by Fujifilm EMEA June 27, 2014 Comments2

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stYeNPos4Co

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.”

See more like this

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:

Full HS 1080p
19 chapters
115 minutes
Speedlights
Big flash
Natural light

Click here to learn more about this Lovegrove Training masterclass presented by Damien Lovegrove.

Filed under Be Inspired Portrait

Jens Franke combines street photography with portraiture to capture images that are both intimate and mysterious

by Guest Blogger June 3, 2014 Comments7

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

Rotebühlplatz März 2013 — 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.

Friedrichstraße Februar 2013 — 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.”

Herderstraße Januar 2013 — 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.

Königstraße Januar 2013 — X-E1 with XF35mm – f/1.4, 1/60sec, ISO400

Morocco

Marrakech, Medina, Januar 2014 — 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!

Marrakech, Januar 2014 — X-E1 with Contax C/Y Sonnar 85mm – f/2.8, 1/320sec, ISO400

Sidi Ifni, Januar 2014 — X-E1 with XF35mm – f/1.4, 1/1200sec, ISO400

Tafraoute, Januar 2014 — X-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.

Links:

To see more, you can visit Jens Franke’s website here or follow him on Facebook here.

Filed under Be Inspired Portrait Street

Fujifilm X Magazine – Issue 1 reader images 1/3

by Fujifilm EMEA December 3, 2013 Comments0

X-series users from across the globe share their finest images and the stories behind them

Here’s a selection of users’ images published in our Fujifilm X Magazine. If you would like to see your images in our magazine, and if you’re an X-series user, we’d love to see your shots. Email your images, along with details of the story behind them and some information about you and your photography to: xmagazine@bright-publishing.com

VICENTE DASÍ LÓPEZ – STROLLING WITH MY X100

Vicente won his X100 in a Fujifilm-sponsored competition. “The theme was street photography and I entered an image taken in Valencia using my X10,” he says.

Now that I’ve got the camera, I often go walking around Valencia and take it with me; that’s where I took this image. I find the X100 is really comfortable to carry and delivers excellent results with the high-performance Fujinon lens; it’s perfect on detailed subjects like this. There’s very little noise when working with high ISO settings and I like the way the controls are distributed – the design helps me enjoy taking every shot and encourages my creativity.

http://vdlfotografo.blogspot.com.es/

BERND TWIEST – DUNCAN

This is my dog, Duncan. It was one of the first shots I took when I went out testing my new X-Pro1 in a forest near our home in Holland.

I love black & white photography, even more than colour. This image was taken using the Monochrome Film Simulation mode and I tweaked the colour temperature in Adobe Lightroom to give the image a real vintage look.

The X-Pro1’s size and weight are crucially important to me. My health limits how much photography I can do and if the camera was too heavy, I wouldn’t be able to take pictures at all. I also like the image quality – the pictures are sharp straight out of the camera. 90 per cent of the time, I shoot JPEG instead of Raw because the quality is that good. The ISO performance is magnificent, too

I don’t feel scared to push it to ISO 6400.

SHANEA GAIGER – FRECKLES AND SPECKLES

This is my daughter Derryn who has for a long time had some severe body dysmorphic issues. We had talked about a ‘demon-confronting’ shoot for a long time and the idea was to create a few images of her without make up, without retouching, just using natural light, so she could see how beautiful she actually was, despite her own feelings. It worked, so well, in fact, that she gained enough confidence to take up modelling as a part-time hobby.

I moved to the X-S1 from an S100FS and it feels much more solid and produces better results. I was recently asked to do a basic photography lesson with a young autistic lad interested in photography and we used the X-S1. He had never attempted to use a ‘real’ camera before but he found it really easy to get to grips with and by the end of the day he was talking about buying one himself.”

http://harpyimages.deviantart.com

Filed under Be Inspired

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