rberiot

The toilet seat reads “la sensation du samedi matin” , which means “saturday morning’s feeling”. bad hang over.

Self portrait for a little photography contest we started with some friends. this month’s theme was “sensation” (feeling).

there was a nice overcast sky outside, unfortunately the window is prety small and in front of the sink, which means that the subject (me) was in the shadow. That’s why I had to add a flash to nuke the daylight in the back.

technical info:
one YN-460 speedlight with shoot thru umbrella in front of the toilet at about 1m from subject hung with a rubberband to a coat-rack. triggered with RF-602.

saturday morning, in my kitchen, the soft light is a courtesy of my velux (roof window) and the overcast weather.

Yesterday I received a new ebay collapsible diffuser/reflector (translucent, white, black, silver, gold). prety impressive quality for the bucks. It comes from Yongnuo, the ones who make the RF-602 flash trigger/rcvr I use as well as the YN-460 manual flash. Here’s a test shot using it as a diffuser. I think it will be my new lighting swiss army knife for head shots now.

few days after new year’s eve, I finally had time to process the sushi shots of that night.

I tried some “packshot” yesterday. wasn’t as easy as I expected and I’m really not happy with the end result. I tried glass, stainless steel and metal/dish (this shot). That white bed sheet background didn’t work at all even after boosting its brightness and lowering the contrast.
After the shooting session I had the nice surprise of finding my sdcard EMPTY. none of the day’s picture where there. fortunately an hour later CardRecovery had all my pictures back. really bad joke there. also at the very same time my xbox died.

my girlfriend is making sushi while I’m assisting with my dish-washing skills and taking pictures. this is just a quick post a few hours before new year.

A picture from a week-end trip in cambridge with my friends. after 2 days of depressing overcast weather the sun finally decided to show up as we were exploring an old graveyard.

These are some pictures I made this year. The first picture is my first attempt at HDR (or mostly tone mapping in this case). It was taken on tripod during the golden hour. The hdr treatment wasn’t really needed, it’s purely aesthetic.

The 2nd picture is a drafty smallgantic shot of a famous square in brussels. It was the only eligible shot I had for a smallgantic. it was done using a very simple method in photoshop. Now that I look back at it, I think that the (artificial) depth of field is way too shallow for that vertical shot and does not serves its purpose very well,making the scene look like it’s a miniature.

The third picture is, well, my hand. I like the result of the color to black&white processing. It takes more than zeroing the saturation  to get a nice black&white result.

This last picture is a pretty dull and corny country side picture. The only reason I like it is because, despite the lack of a subject, the composition is pretty much ok I think. This is unusual in my pictures. I still mostly “point and shoot”.

This is a heavily photoshoped (according to my standards) portrait of my father. Although I like the end result I’ve gotten bored at the end of the editing session. So, excuse the lack of polishing.

Most of the editing consisted of “carving” my father’s face details using the Dodge & Burn tool (exposure control). The original picture had a very neutral lighting, miles away from this dramatic look. If anyone is interested I’ll post it for the comparison.

a paused portait and my first real try at toying arround with the tonal curve