I said that before – it’s just great to have great friends. ‘Cause those great friends are cool with coming with you and have a great time doing some sunset backlit shots somewhere in the fields around Darmstadt. I’ve had this kind of look going through my head all day and it felt great to turn it into a reality (that kind of reality that ends with .CR2, that is). I wish I could do this kind of thing way more often. Trying different lighting situations, angles, techniques… this is, to my mind, what you need to do to become a good photographer.

These pictures were all natural light, I just brought my little gold reflector with me to bounce some of the sunlight back into the face.

Last weekend, I was visiting a friend down in Wangen in Southern Germany. Beautiful, cute little town, definitely worth a visit. I took the chance to snap some spontaneous pictures, though, with a little twist: I only took my trusty 50mm f/1.8 lens with me and shot with the aperture left wide open.

It does increase the miss rate, but it forces you to focus, in the literal and the metaphorical sense. So you’re just not tempted to take crappy church tower pictures that you don’t look at in one year, anyway. Instead, I focused on my friends and got some nice portraits that i will still be looking at in one year. So as my personal advice: Restricting yourself to some basics is a great thing to do. Go and try it yourself.

Here’s a little birthday gift that I came up with a few days ago – for understandable reasons, I couldn’t share it with the world until yesterday, but now it can go public safely. As you know, I am sort of in the process of diving into the whole “Strobist” movement. This came in quite handy when I spontaneously decided to get my girlfriend, who has just moved into her own appartment, a nice cocktail recipe book so she can mix some nice drinks for me for her friends. But a normal book from the shelf wouldn’t be nearly as cool, I thought – why not have some friends and her family pose with some nice drinks to come up with a personal recipe book? Well, one of the many merits of having great friends is that you can call them and talk them into doing all kinds of funny and weird photo projects. They were all quite excited about the idea, so I had them come to a nice bar, whose owner was kind enough to let me set up my equipment. The rest was easy: We had an amazing time enjoying yummy cocktails and snapping some pics for the album. The setup was quite basic, I had one umbrella with a CTO gel as a main light, used some of the ambient as fill, and added a snooted flash on the drinks to make ‘em pop. I was looking for a nice, warm, summerly theme. As it went a little too chilly outside, we moved inside and used the stylish bar as backdrop. Finally, I added the recipes, and with a little help from my designer friend Valentina, we created a cool layout for the whole book.

I had the whole thing printed, and it turned out really nice – and my girlfriend just loved it! Don’t you just love these little weekend projects? Oh, and before I forget: The Caipirinha shot (which is the cover shot for the book) was a little evening project from another day: I placed the drink on a glass, lit it from below and from above through a sheet of paper (cheapest softbox there is!) and threw a flash with a CTB gel against the white wall. Easy as pie, but it looks professional, doesn’t it?