Gerard Maas Images

Experimenting with something different is a two sided coin: A risk of failing and the ONLY way to break usual patterns and grow your artistic vision. “Failure” is on itself a success when you learn from it and contributes to your growth, so in turn it’s a win-win situation each time you cross the barrier of the comfort zone. Of course, that’s personal growth, but when working with other people there’s an additional element to take into consideration: expectations. People you work with like to see good, nice results. Then failure is not an option, would you say? How do you grow, then? That win-win situation from the beginning is turned back to the flat line of the comfort zone just because of the expectations from others.
How to manage both? One method I’ve found practical, is to move in and out of your comfort zone in a way that you can manage and fulfil the expectations of your work and at the same time grow your artistic value. For a photo shoot this translates in getting a couple of good images in the pocket and then moving to the exploratory areas. Just make sure you have a good idea of what to explore, not to make the other party nervous.
Communication is a key enabler in this process.
So, get the creative juices going, just know how to control the flow.
-gerard.

Some people swear by natural light for natural subjects, but in a place like Belgium, you are better off if you take your light in your pocket. This photo of an anemone was taken using an Ezybox Hotshoe powered with a Speedlite 580EX. Note that I’m using the recessed border of the Ezybox to flag the background from getting illuminated. That way the flower gets ’soaked’ in light while the -otherwise busy- background gets obscured into a second plane.

In this setup picture you can see how cold and miserable the day was.

Always take your light with you.
-Gerard.

Exploring a bit beyond the initial ‘ focus on the eye’ images that we produced at the beginning of the shoot. By pulling the focus to the make-up in between the eye and the eyebrow I find that you can better appreciate the detailed make-up work of Daisy and the rest of the image takes on a dreamy, peaceful look.
Make-up: Daisy van Winkel.
Model: Annelies
Copyright: Daisy Van Winkel and Gerard Maas.
Light info:
One 580EX in an Ezybox Hotshoe 11 o’ clock with the camera at about 6 o’clock .

My living room is not very big, but with some improvisation and the compact form of the speedlites, it’s possible to create some interesting portraits. In this shoot, the make-up artist Daisy van Winkel said “I’m going to make it interesting for you… I hope you like it shinning”. Then, the clockwork started turning on how to cope with a highly reflective make-up and make it stand out.
My solution was to surround the model with light, ‘wrapping’ her with light all around not only in the left-right-up-down plane, but also mixing directions from the back and the front as you see in this “aereal” of the setup:

I don’t know how it all fitted there, leaving still some room for her to stand in front of the ad-hoc Ikea background. We had to jump around the light stands to move around but it’s all part of the fun
Thanks to Delphine for the modelling.

Despite having little time for the shoot, Nele gave her best looks during our work together. From the session this is my favorite image, with this strong eye contact that provides a great reflection of her energetic personality.

Light info: Ring Flash adaptor for 580EX II on camera. Simple, he?

-Gerard.

An experimental image taken during a photo session with Czech model Iva.

Light Info: one 580EX II on an Ezybox 60 in front and to the side and one 580EX + blue gel on the back directed to the model.
Combining different color temperatures in one image can give some interesting results.
-Gerard.

In the past, I’ve done many attempts to photography an orchid in a different way. So far, I always had the impression that either: looks way too straightforward *or* so abstract that you can’t see it’s an orchid anymore.
I was recently “playing” with a macro ring flash (MR-14EX) and its ratio function to trigger an 580EX off-camera flash. It’s meant to light the background, but adjusting the C: ratio and flash exposure compensation it’s possible to use it also to light the subject of your image.
Here’s my first orchid photo I’m happy with:

-gerard.

Image (C)2008 of Daisy van Winkel (MUA) and Gerard Maas (Photographer)
A joint project exploring beauty make-up from a very close perspective.
Expect to see more soon…

This is not the beauty you often find in this blog, but it certainly has its charms.

Portrait of an earwig (Forficula auricularia), an that got its name from tales of ear-crawling into a man’s brain.
It can strike a nice pose, don’t you think?
Pic info: MP-E65 (somewhere between 1x-2x) and a macro ring flash MR-14EX. It was handheld and a real challenge to keep up with the frentic movements of the insect. The ringflash is certainly a great aid when handholding. In the past I would have been holding one 580EX in one hand and the camera in the other, making it quite hard to keep a stable setup. On the downside, I do find the ringflash light often flat. It won’t be long until I get the 580EX in my left hand again and start experimenting with the C-group wireless capability of the MR-14EX.

This might be interesting for people using the EOS 5D with speedlites on or off-camera.

While doing some ‘frozen flash’ images I discovered some unexpected behavior of the EOS 5D:

Some background first:
FP Flash, also known as High Speed Sync and denoted with the (Bolt)H icon is normally used for fill-in flash in bright conditions where your shutter speed exceeds the XSync limit (1/200 on the 5D). That way you can keep using wide apertures to achieve a nice background blur and still flash your subject for fill-in. It actually works by firing a seemingly continuous beam of light for the length of time that the shutter is open (avoiding in that way the banding that you would have otherwise). This feature requires a much higher energy output than normal flash and therefore your flash range is dramatically reduced.

Well, all this background info is to be able to explain the bug in simple terms:

Even when FP Flash mode is active on the flash (H[bolt] icon active on the flash LCD or red led lighted up on the ST-E2), the FP mode should only activate when your shutter speed exceeds XSync speed.

The problem I found is that the 5D is activating the FP mode also when used at XSync speed (1/200). This behaviour is unexpected and certainly undesired, given that it will dramatically affect flash exposures. It reduces the flash range, increases recycle times and consumes batteries faster.

To make it very concrete: If you have FP flash active on the flash and your shutter speed is 1/200, the flash will fire in FP flash mode (also called ‘long burning’), so instead of having a typical flash duration of 1/10000, the flash will fire for 1/200, an exposure 5x longer!

The tricky side of this bug is that there’s no apparent visible difference between normal flash and FP flash. You can only observe this bug by photographing a rapidly moving subject, like running water. In my case I was photographing an hourglass running and noticed the bug when I was unable to freeze the sand grains falling, even with the lowest flash power setting (that is supposed to have a duration of about 1/35000 of a second)

This bug is more likely to annoy you when you less expect it: when you are in a (studio like) controlled environment and your camera is set to manual (1/200 and f-stop to match the desired effect)… the result is that you won’t have enough ‘juice’ from your flash and recycle times will be painstakingly long.
(From my own painful experience…!)

The workaround is pretty straightforward: turn off FP-mode on your flash when you don’t need it!

I reported the bug to Canon support and they confirmed the bug, but have not provided a solution. My guess is that it should be solved with a firmware upgrade.

You see some sample images on these posts (below):
http://www.gerardmaas.net/?p=36

I hope this post saves some other people from the pain of the unknown…

-greetz, Gerard