Beauty treatment

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It was a bright early spring morning when I drove out from Brussels to visit Skin Esthetiek, a busy beauty clinic in Tervuren. The owner, Katrien, had booked me to shoot photos for her website and social media accounts.

Katrien told me that she had asked a friend to model for the shoot. While we waited for Indra she showed me around and explained in a bit more detail what she wanted. Her idea was to tell the complete story of a client’s visit to the clinic – from the welcome and the diagnostic consultation, through a full facial treatment to the sale of after-care products. I was pleased that the treatment room had a large window that would allow me to balance my Rotolight LED/flash unit against some natural light.

When Indra arrived we got started immediately. She told me that she had never modelled before and was not sure what to do. I assured her that she looked great. If I needed her to do something special I would ask, but otherwise she could just relax and enjoy Katrien’s treatment. I think she may have fallen asleep at one point.

For the treatment itself I set my lighting to a soft, warm tone, and shot at f4.0 and 1/180 at ISO 400. For the central element of the facial Katrien painted Indra’s face with a bright blue gel and then gently blew steam onto it. Gradually, the gel bubbled into a fine foam, and I got some fabulous extreme close-ups.

It was an intimate moment, and I feel lucky to have shared it with the two friends. I’m happy to see that Katrien has already used some of my photos on her website and her Instagram account, and I hope they help to bring her a lot of new business.

Windows ate my Lightroom catalogue

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On Thursday my PC got the latest Windows 10 update. On Friday, my external hard drive had disappeared. Lightroom still showed my photographs using its previews, but it couldn't find the originals. Every single folder displayed a question mark. Hundreds of thousands of image files had gone missing.

The more I researched the problem online the more worried I became. Neither the online help systems nor the user forums of either Microsoft or Western Digital turned up the simple, clear, recent advice I wanted: “It's a well-known issue, just do x and y.” Instead, the articles and threads were long and confusing, with multiple options and many comments of the “I tried that, but it didn’t work” type. Many suggested reformatting the hard drive as the best solution.

WTF!

I told myself to stay calm. It was true that everything was backed up in the cloud. But still, downloading terabytes of data and rebuilding my Lightroom catalogue was not the way I had planned to spend my weekend.

I turned off the PC.

I unplugged the hard drive from the USB port and powered it down.

I turned on the PC.

I powered up the hard drive and plugged it back into a different USB port.

It worked! Everything is back to normal. Windows sees the drive again, even on wake from sleep or hard reboot. Lightroom knows where to find each photograph.

Microsoft 0 – Simon 1

Photographs for a corporate website

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I am working with Brussels-based communication agency ESN to create images for its new website, which should be online by the end of 2018. It’s a work in progress — I probably have another day of shooting and editing still to do. But it’s already been a great learning experience and I wanted to record my impressions while they were still fresh.

The brief was to shoot three sets of images to give the website a real flavour of the agency’s human side — full portraits of key people and group shots, as well as simple headshots of the whole team of 50. We decided to shoot most of the portraits and groups at a handful of well-known locations in central Brussels.

For the group shots, we set up loose scenarios in which the subjects discussed an actual project. I found that if I could get them talking about something that really interested them we could avoid the kind of acting that always looks exaggerated and false in the photos.

I planned to crop these group images to the ‘cinematic’ 16:9 aspect ratio, since they will probably be used for page headers, so I tried to shoot for this format. But it still isn’t clear whether the agency is going to use them in colour or in black and white. In the end, I have delivered both versions of each image. Which do you think works best?

I’m doing the headshots in an empty office with simple LED lighting to balance natural light from the window. It’s a fascinating challenge to try and capture each individual’s personality in just a few minutes. As usual, a number tell me that they are not photogenic or don’t like having their picture taken, but I’ve gently insisted on making at least 20 or 30 images of everyone, and so far I think we have succeeded in avoiding the classic photobooth look. Some subjects gave me a little longer and were willing to play in front of the camera.