Reinier van Houten – Photography

Another grey day today. No reason to go outside. Not much else to do. So…let´s take some more portrait shots in the studio. Most of the portraits I´ve been doing so far have been taken with an aperture of f/11 or f/13. But this time I wanted to have less depth of field. As we all probably know (or should know), the aperture you use (if not using a flash meter) is the result of dividing the strobe´s guidenumber divided by the distance from strobe to object (with the strobe at full power and camera at ISO 100). This time I wanted to use aperture f/5.6. According to my calculations this means that I divide the guidenumer with the aperture to calculate the distance. My Elinchrom D-Lites 400 have a guidenumber of 64. So, 64 divided by 5.6 gives 11 meters (roughly). However, that is with the D-Lites at full power. Brought this power back with about 4 to 5 stops by setting the strobes at 2.5 (instead of 6.0 which is full power). This gives a distance of roughly 1 meter between strobe and object (model in this case). Have a look at some results.

Decided also to do some experimenting with a bit of backlighting as you can tell by the last 2 images. Above pictures and more have been added to the Portrait gallery as well.

All in all, it was another sunday afternoon well spent, I feel.

I must confess that I’m no expert in the field of food photography. But now my wife decided to start her own blog on cooking and recipes (I recommend a visit to www.ellenvanhouten.nl), it goes without saying there’s a need for some images of her creations. Yesterday evening I watched her taking some pictures of things she made with her point-and-shoot camera. With available (tungsten) light. The results were, at least, disappointing. Of the pictures, that is. Not of her cooking! Anyway, I felt I could do a better job and brought one of my strobes and my DSLR to the kitchen. Given the fact I have no experience with this type of photography, I’m not disappointed with the results. But I also see room for improvement. Because I was too lazy to bring two stobes to the kitchen, I took the pictures with just one light source with a softbox. Resulting in images that were, to my interpretation at least, just a tiny bit overexposed at beginning. I was able to correct this in the post-processing step (the U-Point technology in Capture NX2 is ideal for this purpose).  You can judge for youself.

On the image on the left I used a small reflector to lighten up the shadow of the plate a bit. I know, next time I’ll use a proper strobe.

But again, since these are my first steps into this kind of photography, I’m relatively satisfied with the overall results. We decided however that on future occasions, we will setup something in the studio and bring the food over from the kitchen. Wondering how this is going to work out for deserts with ice-cream in them…

If you’re interested in the food instead of the photography, you’re at the wrong blog. Go and visit www.ellenvanhouten.nl for the recipes. Enjoy!

If you’re interested in the history of photography and if you have enough time on hand, then I most certainly advise you to watch the BBC series Genius of Photography. It was originally broadcasted in the UK (on BBC4) and afterwards published on DVD as well. It’s a six hour series of six separate 1-hour episodes. The good news is that the BBC made the entire series now available as a channel on YouTube. Free for you to watch. It starts with the very beginnings of photography and takes you all the way to the current digital age. It doesn’t go in to the technology, but concentrates on the thinking behind the picture. It discusses things like Henry Cartier Bresson’s the decisive moment.

So I strongly urge you to visit the YouTube channel. The series is in English and no subtitles. Each one-hour episode consists of four 15-minute parts. The video quality is slightly less than the one from the DVD, but still very acceptable. Enjoy watching it!

Time for a commercial break. Well, sort of. My eldest son, Bob, finished the design of his own personal website yesterday and asked me to take some pictures of him that he can add. He’s currently at the final stages of his study Product Design and Engineering and hopes to graduate later this year. He created his website to promote his design business. I certainly recommend you all to have a look at www.bobvanhouten.nl and be impressed with his amazing work. My pictures of him only form a small contribution to the site.

One of the pictures is to be shown across the full width of the site. We decided, for this purpose, it would be best to take a picture of him lying on the floor and use a landscape format. He will probably modify it with Photoshop to adjust it to meet the needs of the website’s design.

The other picture is in standard portrait format. To be used at the Contact page of the site. Instead of having him on the floor, I put him on a stool this time (and had him slightly looking up to me).

I’m quite satisfied with both results and I think they fit the bill. Bob’s happy with the images as well. Soon on display at his site.

Again, a visit is highly recommended. Stay tuned!

Last Friday I visited the Gabriël Metsu exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. I was impressed by his paintings of day to day life. More or less to be compared with what we call street photography these days. Also his portraits (inspired by Vermeer) are impressive. Especially the way he uses the light in these paintings. Of course, I couldn’t leave the museum without admiring Rembrandt’s (and Caravaggio’s) work. The true masters of clair obsur. While absorbing their pieces, I realized how much we, as photographers, can learn from their techniques. The way they handled light and dark in their paintings is truely amazing and very inspiring. Probably even more so than the work of photographers.

Anyway, the Gabriël Metsu exhibition can be seen at the Rijksmuseum until March 21, 2011. It’s certainly highly recommended by me. Watch, learn and get inspired!

More information about the Gabriël Metsu exhibition can be found here.

Since this is a site about my photography portfolio, it makes sense to include some actual samples of my work to start with. Have a look at a few recent portraits and let me know what you think.

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