brother & sister

I'm there already. I'm getting the "Ahhh...dad...." when I ask my kids to pose for me. But with my studio still unpacked from a shoot and the kids back from the dentist and jumping around me, I had to do something.

Took out the 60' Softliter, pulled up two stools and got them to sit down — an achievement in itself. Placed the Softliter over and back with an Elinchrom head and let 'er rip. You can't see it but there are cases and bags everywhere — there's even a printer on the floor.

First shot: 3:59:14 PM EDT
Last shot: 4:01:25 PM EDT
Time elapsed: 2min11

Hey...You take it while you still can.

Comments

[Morten]

Brilliant :D

[Patrick La Roque]

Thanks man :)

[Neil]

Love these
I have twin 5 year old girls and getting them to pose together is equally difficult
In fact I love your images in general I've taken to checking your site daily and wish i could get images as good
I'm just a amateur based in the uk and now wondering about getting a lighting setup however I love the look of your images mine tend towards bright and vibrant but I'm thinking about different looks
You mentioned on one of your posts how you process your b&w shots can I ask what you do for your colour ones? (or is it a secret?)
Do you desaturate them?

[Patrick La Roque]

Thank you Neil - much appreciated.
I don't keep secrets… I've learned so much from amazing and generous photographers over the years that it would be downright insulting for me to do so. The reason I've never written about colour post-processing is that it's much more fluid than my BW work. I don't really have a standard set up and generally do it by feel and tinkering. That's why I'm not a big presets user.I work with brushed curves a lot, usually multiple instances (the way I'd do layers in Photoshop). I also like messing around with the tint wheels in the Enhance panel to give a very slight cast to the blacks. And yes, I play with saturation quite a bit.But it's all very freeform. For example the colour images in this set were processed in Aperture, sent to Flare and re-tweaked in Aperture.I've been using Flare quite a bit lately and find it surprisingly useful for what it is. To be honest I'm a little tired of Adobe and have been avoiding Photoshop unless absolutely necessary — this from a guy who pretty much lived in Photoshop for many, many years.I've been wanting to do an article on tinting and the various colour processing methods in Aperture 3. I just haven't gotten around to writing it…
But you've just given me an incentive to do so eventually ;)

Take care

[Neil]

thanks for the reply and the info. i've been a canon dslr user for some time but got an x100 for a variety of reasons mainly its portability but also i wanted to challenge and improve my photography and knowledge. as a teenager some 20 years ago i developed my own b&w but then went through a phase of just snapping stuff. more recently got back into photography as something more than just snaps though with 4 kids ive also taken a lot of snaps. i started off only using natural light and refusing to edit my photos but eventually bought a decent flash and have been fascinated by what some bounced fill flash can do - my next mission is to learn some "proper" lighting techniques. ive never photoshopped at all but did get lightroom when i switched to a Mac about 4 years ago. i switched to raw then and i think have spent several years where my photos possibly havent been as good as some of the off camera jpegs could have been so its interesting to read your adventures with jpegs. more recently ive kind of got used to lightroom and they have improved but i tend to go for a bright look which is fine but as in my post above im now appreciating there are different looks for a photo. Ive had a quick play with presets that you can download to try different looks but they never look as good as the sample images they give do. I will have a look at Flare. I realise you dont like LR - my problem with aperture which i briefly trialled is it seemed so slow even on my i7 iMac forever updating previews and doing faces etc my disks just seemed to be whirring all the time. anyway once again thanks for replying but mainly thanks for putting some inspirational photos on line.