Ken Knoll Photography

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to do a co-op shoot with the incredibly talented fellow photographer Claudia Wycisk. Weeks of planning went into this little project: Claudia agreed to leverage from her network to get us two models and a make-up artist, while my responsibility was to get a location. Claudia came up with the wonderful models Laura and Ina and the make-up artist Yulia Nekrasova, while I scouted an old public swimming pool that hasn’t been used for years and can now be rented as a photo location. We had about four hours time on location, so we had to be quick. This post is just a glimpse of the many beautiful pictures I was able to take. Be sure to check out Claudia’s website as well to see her pictures that make me look like a beginner with a lack of talent! Big, big thanks to Claudia, my assistants Basti, Verena and Xue (who owes me a BEHIND THE SCENES video – stay tuned!!), my models Laura & Ina and the wonderful make-up artist Yulia! Enjoy! If you can’t get enough, check out the series section for more pictures!

Hey folks,

I had such a great time shooting with Kevin! He is, hands down, one of the coolest guys I personally know. You know, one of those guys that you immediately feel at ease with. I met him in my gym last year and he became my trainer. Ever since he’s chasing me through the studio, but I just never get to curse him ’cause he’s just too nice a guy! I learned that, among the many other talents he has, he’s also a musician. Of course I had to take some nice pictures of him. Actually, as my facebook friends might have seen, a couple of weeks back I had already helped him out with some shots of his work (see my Commercial gallery – since there’ll be more work following this up this project, I might blog about it soon).

This time, I wanted to do something for my personal portfolio. So I went with something simple and classy. Just one light in most cases so I could focus on the subject and the mood rather than on the complex lighting. I put it to a quite extreme angle so that every slight turn of the head resulted in a different look. Also, I felt that it matched the mood. I played some music and we were having a good time shooting and grooving. What really made the shots for me was the microphone – it’s a Shure 55, a classic model back from the time when Elvis was rockin’. I borrowed it from the super awesome, friendly and competent guys at Musikhaus Crusius in Darmstadt -thanks so much, I really appreciate it!

Sit back and enjoy – do you feel the music?

Last weekend, I had an amazing shooting with Elena. Unlike my normal routine, in this post I won’t start with a whole lot of words but let the pictures speak for themselves instead. There isn’t much to say about the technique anyways – Softbox and ambient light is what I used for these outdoor shots. But I might mention that I was blessed with a VAL (=voice activated light stand) in this shooting.

Alright, I might lose a few words on these two shots below since this setup was actually the original idea for the whole shooting, while the outdoor pictures were more of a byproduct. In these shots, I moved the softbox in really close from above (thanks to a boom that I recently purchased) and placed a hair light in the back. The background is actually a white wall. Does that seem weird to you? If so, you might want to read Zack Arias’ excellent explanation on the topic of light-and-subject-to-background-distance. My assistant provided us with a little wind made with a reflector – I don’t own a huge fan (only a huge online fan base, scnr). Softbox from above, some wind, and boom went the dynamite! Actually, I started out with another softbox from below which gave an even more even lighting – but it stood in the way when we tried to create wind. And despite these shots being “beauty shots” I liked the fact that this light still has some character – too perfect can be boring.
I would love to get your feedback on these pictures! How do you like them? What do you not like about them? Please shoot me a comment or an email – thanks!

Finally, I want to give you guys a chance to glance behind the scenes of that birthday shoot i did for my brother. My goal was to create rather dramatic shots (as opposed to creating perfectly-smooth lit images), so in most shots I opted for my newly built DIY beauty dish. This decision was rather spontaneous, so I actually ended up building the dish the night before and the paint on it was still wet – literally! Basically, the beauty dish is a big salad bowl (you wouldn’t believe how many stores I had screened to find the right shape!) and a flower pot saucer lined with aluminum foil on the inside acting as a reflector. The light it makes is somewhere in between soft and hard – seemed like a a good match for a “manly” shoot.

As you can see, I used the dish on the shots on the bridge from up high and left. Why the oblique angle, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you: a) He’s wearing glasses, so any light source at the standard 45° angle would show up as a reflection on his glasses and b) my goal for this shoot was to try different things and go away from the same old. I thought it looked rather interesting. In fact, it looked a little too interesting (in terms of dramatic), so I decided to fill in some light from below and right with a silver reflector. The reflector is being held by my lovely assistant of the day. This lighting technique is basically what I used on almost all the shots – dish from above, sometimes fill in a little with a reflector. Really easy. And the light was really smooth enough so I didn’t have to touch it up a lot in Photoshop – in fact, I think I never went above 1/4 power which allowed for fast recycle times and still gave me apertures around 4 which was enough (or little enough) depth of field for me. As a matter of fact, being a “strobist” I do take some pride in trying to exposing somewhat correctly – I always try to hit the correct exposure by chimping on the little screen since I don’t want to have to bump up the exposure by 8 stops afterwards in the raw converter.

This shot in the cafe was done in no more than two minutes including set-up. As David Hobby once wrote, pretty soon you get the kinda-scary ability to guesstimate the settings on the camera and the strobe: I ended up at something like f/2.2, iso 400 and a sixtieth of a second. As you might have guessed, little reflector on the side. Oh, and cloudy white balance to warm it up. This is the out of cam exposure (as are all images in this post), so comparing to the processed images below you get the idea what the on-set lighting already gave me without a whole lot of photoshop editing.

In this shot, you can see the spotlight character of the dish and the nice shadow it creates. Without the fill-in reflector it’s definitely a relatively harsh light (since I had to place it at a certain distance to the subject due to the framing), but I like it that way. The exposure on his face is a little too high on the neutral setting, so for the final image (see posts below) I went with two different raw exposures that I merged into one image (which is something that I end up doing quite frequently whenever I want to darken the background).

I hope you enjoyed this short explanation – if you have any questions, shoot me a comment!

Before I hop in the tech stuff I promised in my last posts, I want to share some pictures that I took last weekend testing my new softbox – it’s 28′ by 28′ and I love it. Super smooth, yet directed light thanks to a recessed front.

Unfortunately, due to the spontaneity of the test shoot, I had forgotten to take spare batteries, so I only flashed a couple of frames. I switched to available light (wow, that stuff still works!) and took some more quick portraits. I still only have my trusty 50 on my camera, so like in my last shooting I tried to find alternative perspectives and move around more while shooting. “Do the reshoot now”, as Joe McNally always says.

There is this saying that somewhat goes like the shoemaker’s son always goes barefoot. In my case, since I fortunately don’t have kids yet, that applies to my family: I never had the time to take nice pictures of them. My brother has been asking me to take some pictures of him for way too long – so for his 28th birthday I finally agreed to take some nice portraits of him.

I will save the techie stuff about these pictures for another post so I can focus on the thought process behind the portraits here – so stay tuned for the next post, tech folks!

I need to elaborate on my brother a bit to give you an idea about the kind of pictures we had in mind. He’s without a doubt the most creative guy I know of – coming up with new ideas is as natural to him as breathing. He’s an entrepreneur – of course. The ideas that rumble through his head are often business related, so he’s constantly starting new businesses. I think, right now he’s working on at least three different startup ideas. On top of that, he’s got a job many people would kill for. Oh, also he’s a great friend and a good listener. Ok now, convey all that in a couple of portraits…

For the first set, I scouted a location that was supposed to reflect the business side. Also, it should be modern, chic and stylish. To be honest, I had never spent as much time on getting a location – including phone calls to the right persons and making friends with the security personal. But I think it was well worth it.

I had written up a small shooting script with the ideas I wanted to realize. So I pretty much knew what I was going to shoot beforehand and I could focus on more important things like my model. We started off with a couple of portraits on a bridge inside an office building. Pictures he could use for his new job (they want pictures of their employees for their magazine) or as editorial material in articles or blogs.

My personal goal for this shooting, however, was not to only do my standard 3/4 headshot routine, but to choose different angles and play around with space, perspective and sight lines. So I got down on the floor (and cleaned up the dirt with my t-shirt) and took some whole-body shots as well. I really loved this bridge and I’m happy with the way he interacts with the location – kind of like: Hey, I’m CEO, but I’m down to earth. Doing business without ties, literally.

After the bridge shots, we went to a small staircase with wonderful glass stairs that were lit up by neon tubes – I’m saving some of those shots (which were among my personal favorites) up so I can illustrate the tech stuff in the next post. The mood in these pictures was the same, some more serious, some friendly shots with a chic background.

More pictures in part 2 of this post.

Finishing up on the office building location I wanted to do some lost-in-space-kind-of pictures. So I had him sit down on the couch with his laptop. The idea here was to show that his professional life pretty much revolves around the web and geek stuff. The bird’s eye view picture we did afterwards was a lot of fun – I kinda had to yell my commands downstairs. My idea for this shot was to show him not as a loner, but as somebody who is unique. I let the floor go dark (happy with the way this came out!) by putting only one light on him (more about this in the following tech post).

On our way back, he surprised me with a great photo idea – surprising not only because the visual concept is really cool, but also because it does require some courage to set up a photo shoot in the middle of the city with a thousand people walking by every minute. I set my camera on an improvised tripod (I normally don’t bring one to my shootings because I prefer the non-static shots) and we let it roll. A couple of pops from a flash during the exposure helped to make him stand out from the moving crowd – no photoshop in here!

Finishing up we had a coffee in a cozy coffee bar. There were candles on the table, a red leather couch and a brick wall – so I went with that mood, lit him with just one light (like in 99% of all cases) and took some pictures while we were enjoying our coffees. A two-minute deal.

I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed this shooting – and how happy I was when I looked on that small screen on the back of my camera. Sometimes you just know when you have nailed a shot. I’m extremely happy with the pictures and I had a great time processing them (even though it took a couple of weeks).

Ever had that feeling that, if you had said nothing at all, things might have turned out better? Or even, if you had said less, you could have achieved a better outcome? Well, I have. I like to talk, and as they say, talk is fight, right? No. It shouldn’t be, at least from my perspective. The reason is simple. When you talk, you can’t listen at the same time, and without listening, you cannot learn. One of the many goals I have for this year is to learn more – listen more. And for that, I probably need to shut up more. Also, shutting up more makes sure that saying something that, with more consideration would have never been uttered, stays where it should. Obviously, shut up may sound a little harsh, but I think it conveys the idea rather clearly. All powerful mantras are simple, n’est-ce pas?

Well, as a friendly reminder (and, not to forget, for the fun of doing it) I decided to transform these two wise words into a photograph. Featuring myself as the model. Here’s my trial-and-error thought and work process of creating this image: I had a backlit situation in mind, so I set up two lights in the back aiming at the camera. Nice rim on the cheeks, positioning corrected. Got rid of the snoots after some test shots – the flare looks stupid with the snoot and zooming in the heads to 85mm did a good-enough job to control the beam spread. Alright, now, the background should still look dark, I want those two lights come out of dark like car headlights in the night. However, my face needs some light. OK, softbox camera up right to my face. Damn – I don’t have a boom, so the light falls on the background (which is the bamboo room divider in my smallish room). When I take back some of the power, the background stays dark. But my face, too. Idea: Handheld reflector from above – catch some of that background light and direct it to my face. That worked. A little too well, though – the background caught some light again. So far, 12 minutes spent on the shoot – that’s enough. Photoshop will have to fix the rest. And I’ll buy that boom. Soon.

Every once in a while, my colleagues from the company that I currently work for ask me to bring my camera to take some snaps of some event that takes place at our site, mostly speeches, presentations, get-togethers, you get the idea. Even though I am not a big fan of documentary style pictures, I jump on the occasion whenever I can. The downside is, and I guess I am hurting nobody’s feelings here, that these pictures are not really the kind of pictures that I normally like to take. The not-as-beautiful office location is dimly lit, the use of flash mostly not welcome due to the distraction, sometimes even the shutter sound of my 5D is already perceived as a major annoyance. It’s not that everybody’s waiting for the photog to show up and let him do his thing, it’s more like I sneak in, squeeze a few frames until I get annoyed glances and sneak back out five seconds later. And most pictures reflect that. But they document the event for other colleagues. So, whatever, I’m making somebody happy.

However, after the last event I felt like making myself happy as well. So I came back to my desk with just my camera and two bare speedlights and I felt like composing some pictures just for myself and the fun of it. Since my co-workers weren’t gonna move away from their computers I had all the freedom I needed to prop whatever piece of equipment around them. Since I didnt have stands or light modifiers I looked around for alternatives. What’s a good softbox for the key light? Bingo, bounce some light against the flip chart. Hair light? Put the other bare speedlight on the book shelf. Flare? Admittedly, I got lucky here. The sun was setting right at this time and cast a wonderful color into the office room. Popped two, three test frames to balance against the sunlight and, to quote David Hobby again, Robert was my father’s brother. Lucky for me, my co-workers were playing along nicely (even though it must have felt weird to have that flip chart stand 1ft away from their nose….). Oh, how I love this kind of distraction.

Finally! Took me a while to process the pictures I took on my trip to Barcelona, and it took me an even longer while to come up with a new gallery. Since I’ve been wanting to work more in series, rather than compiling random collections of pictures, I wanted this to be reflected in the way that I present the pictures. The horizontal gallery is easy to navigate and it reduces the noise of the website a great deal (and so does the smaller header, I believe). I would love to get your feedback on the new gallery type – how do you like it? Shoot me a comment under this post or write on my wall! Within the next days, I will transform all the other galleries to the new layout, that is, if your feedback is positive. Oh, and shoot me a comment if you like the pictures. By the way: I have another series (my last trip to the states) sitting on my hard disk, waiting to be published!