...to Amriphotos Blog.

We are going to use this blog to give you news from our shootings and about equipment, etc. While we will not cover all of our shooting it should still give you some insight into our work. For registered users we plan some "behind the scene" info, "making of´s" along with tips from the pros.

Beside that registered user are going to be informed about special deals in a newsletter. We hope you enjoy reading and are looking forward to your feedback.

...aber richtig synchron

wie schon im vorigen Blogpost erwähnt, hatten wir bei unserem Schwimmshooting das Glück auch zwei aufstrebende Synchronschwimmerinnen als Model dabei haben zu dürfen.

Die beiden geben dem Wort synchron eine völlig neue Bedeutung: nicht nur sind sie im Wasser völlig synchron, sondern sie sehen auch synchron aus und sprechen synchron - aber nur manchmal ;-). OK - 4x Wortwiederholung in einem Satz - aber in diesem Fall passt´s einfach, wir glauben fest an den Erfolg der Mädels.

Das Shooting an sich war sehr spannend und vor allem auch sehr anstrengend. Wir hatten uns zwar vor einigen Jahren in Apnoetauchen geübt und es auch geschafft, bis zu 3 Minuten die Luft anzuhalten. Zum einen ist das aber eben ein paar Jahre her, zum anderen war das ständige Wiederholen einzelner Übungen doch etwas ungewohnt. Aber die Girls haben das locker weggesteckt - und haben sich dabei sicher mehr bewegt als wir.

...over and under water

A great oppertunity saw us heading towards the "Südstadt", where we were allowed to shoot swimmers in an empty pool. It was our first shooting of that kind, and it was just great. Thanks to our models.
On the one hand we had two swimmers, on the other two young aspiring synchronized swimmers, but more on these in our next blogpost.
Being the first time we shot swimmers, it was quite an experience. Even as sports photographers you consider swimmers being much slower than biker or runners and easy to shoot. Well - it´s rather the opposite.
Of course you can easily photograph them, but that would result in a snapshot. If you have some quality criteria, there are certain points to consider. The possibility of using flashheads is rather limited, and since most cameras don´t have faster flash synch speed than 1/200th, you have to decide whether you´d like to have rather dull images with high shutter speed and high iso, but without flash (much easier because you can easily shoot multiple frames a second rather than one every 1-2 seconds) - or you´d like to freeze the action with the help of the flash duration, reducing the ambient light to a minimum closing the aperture. Well, for the latter you need a lot of flash power. Not too easy because battery powered flashheads (don´t think about using anything else near the water) that can light something in a longer distance at f14 are anything but cheap. Even our pricey 1.200WS heads didn´t bring enough power to create the images in our mind.

Lesson learned. Next time, new try other things. What did turn out well though have been the underwater shots. Not too easy either because the pool was made of reflective metal, but we are quite happy with them. Still we have some ideas in mind to create even better ones.

...or clubbing businesspeople

Who cares? The shooting was awesome. Many thanks to our great Boxing models who - being real boxers - made some very realistic moves in front of our cameras.

Lighting a low key shot like this is one of the harder tasks. Dark dressed people in front of dark background needs quite some flashheads, lightformers and the right placement of all the equipment too. You don´t want the people to get sucked up by the background and you also don´t want the background to get too much light. Being pretty self-critical photographers, we still see some room for improvement. But taking into account the amount of action on the set and that all the shots came out of movement, we are quite satisfied with the results.
And we love these facial expressions!!!

...are pretty hard at times

Being mobile photographers, we are greatful for good weather. Unfortunately this summer doesn´t play our rules and so we had postpone shootings all too often. That´s the time when you start thinking whether it would be more cost-effective to travel to California, or perhaps to Mallorca to shoot several themes rather than postponing again and again.

Well, luckily there are times when the weather is fine - just as on that day when we had the familyshooting on the left. Meteorologists were talking about rain showers - glad they were wrong. And then there´s our Austrian winter, we love so much. So I guess we´re going to stay here. Anybody got a great studio for sale?

 

...Sunglasses without reflections.

After shooting some images with models, our job was to shoot some product shots from sunglasses by Kris+ for their catalog and website. If you ever looked straight into a sunglass from the front, which we are pretty sure you did you know that this can´t be an easy task.
To start with: it won´t be possible without retouching.

Therefore almost all reknown producers of sunglasses use either complete 3D models, or they shoot the frame only and create the glasses in post production.

Ambitious as we are, we wanted to shoot the real glasses, even though the time in post production is much much higher than the time you need for taking the pictures.
First of all we had to create shots with very little reflections to give us a good start. Almost no camera or surroundings should be visible in the glasses. The rest of the time was spent in front of the computer, not only retouching the reflections, but also the dust on the glasses (you won´t be able to go without right from the start). Finally we had to clean up the white background to not have an ugly offwhite surrounding of the glasses that would look horrible when placed on a website or catalog.

...wedding, wedding, wedding.

Currently almost all saturdays see us shooting weddings. Unfortunately we don´t have enough time to list them all here, but most of them you will see in our wedding gallery. Since we still need to produce some content I´m going to write about one ;-).

We had a great location, Grand Hotel Sauerhof in Baden - perfect for weddings and wedding shootings. You don´t even have to walk to the close Rosarium which is famous for its abundance of roses. In the area around the hotel, there are plenty of lacations - even indoor for bad weather.

Talking about bad weather - after two weeks of sunshine and exhausting temperatures, we had hard rain on the way to the wedding. 30km/h on the highway - an experience to be had. Unfortunately the wedding had to move into the hotel instead of the courtyard as it was planned. Too bad.

So it was a bad weather wedding? Well in fact not - we had the umbrellas in our car, that held the rain away. Every now and then we even had some sun.

...for Kris+

We had to postpone this shooting several times - when taking pictures of sunglasses, you need the sun. And in 2010 the sun was rare in Mai/June. But it was way worth the wait.

Kris+ is a new brand of sunglasses and the shooting in the Austrian province Burgenland was not only a success in regard to the final pictures. Thanks to a well of new - partly rather crazy - ideas we all had great fun on the set, laughing all day.

This time we completely renounced the use of flash and solely worked with reflectors. If the sun is out for once...