I can’t stop smiling when looking at this picture and I keep thinking what was the pigeon thinking when I was taking the picture. The tilted head can mean: 1) What’s up, Doc?; 2) What are you looking at?; or 3) Hey, what camera is it? Isn’t this pigeon a funny fellow?

I have noticed that I’ve recently been taking quite a lot of pictures of birds and I’ve done that unintentionally. They are very interesting to photograph and very hard at the same time but I’ve been wondering if there is a reason (which I don’t realize of) why I take so many pictures of them. If there is one, it’s time to find out what is behind it; if there is none, then well… I just keep continue my ‘natural affair’ with photography as it has been so far.

The photo I share with you today was taken in Maastricht (the Netherlands) in January 2010 (as in the previous post and probably next one ). Shot with Nikon D90, 1/250s, f/5.6, ISO 200, natural lighting.

Every kid has nightmares once in awhile. I remember when I was a kid, I had quite few nightmares and bad dreams and oh boy… how scared I was of those monsters hiding under my bed and in my closet. But I remember one particular nightmare quite vividly: a scary, dark and empty playground with mysterious noises coming out of nowhere.

When I was in Maastricht (the Netherlands) in January 2010, I saw this playground surrounded by white snow and I couldn’t stop thinking about my nightmare from childhood. I grabbed my Nikon D90 without any hesitation and just when I was about to take a picture I realized that I should make a picture (besides, there was something missing – dramatic lighting). I pull out my SB-900 speedlight and asked a friend to hold it up at about 75-80 degrees between me and the object and point it directly at it. I also underexposed the picture in the camera in order to achieve more dramatic lighting and contrast. Few post-processing tweaks here and there and voilà! – Playground from hell – almost the same as in my childhood dreams (still brings chills when I look at it).

I sometimes try to compose photographs in such a way to make it look dark, mysterious, even scary. But sometimes such decisions are made in the post-production process or both. Birds can create this great scary effect in a picture and not only Hitchcock’s black crows can do that but also white seagulls – this is at least my personal opinion.

I’m not a person who gets very excited when photographing birds probably because I hardly even can come up with interesting and unique ideas and composition concepts for photography which includes birds. Therefore, I have a standard rule in such situations: make it scary and mysterious. That’s what I did when I was in Poland for my winter holidays. There were so many seagulls that I couldn’t pass them by without taking few pictures. I have to admit that I’m not extremely happy with this photos but at the same time I don’t think that they are too bad – so I would like to share them with you

It has finally started to be a bit warmer in Brussels and it’s possible to stay outside without freezing to the ground after 5 minutes. I couldn’t miss this opportunity and I spent a weekend walking around and doing my first Brussels Photo Walk. As I’m not so familiar with a city yet, I got lost few times but that actually was the fun part! I moved to Brussels in September 2009 but I have been so busy, that I didn’t have time to do any proper photo walk before. I plan to have a photo shoot outside soon but I need to wait at least another month for much warmer weather.

I hope to have time for another Brussels Photo Walk soon, so feel free to get in touch with me if you’re interested in joining!

This is once again a picture taken in Gdansk, Poland during my winter 2009 holidays but this time a little dark, scary and mysterious.

My father took me to Wisloujscie Fortress (you can read about it here ) on a beautiful but very windy day. There was a watch tower used to observe whether any enemies tried to enter land from the sea. Although the view was beautiful, I couldn’t stay there for more than 5 minutes because of extremely cold wind. So I quickly snapped few pictures and went back down. The result you can see attached to this post: ‘When dark clouds take over the sky’.

Another delay with posting new pictures and another apologies. It has to stop soon! I should start posting new pictures on time, few days after they were taken the latest! But I can’t do much about it at the moment as I’m really busy with my day job and with various photography projects and assignments. Probably, I will be even busier if my little dream and goal comes true in the next couple of weeks; but I will tell you about it only when it happens! I can only tell you that I’m really REALLY excited about it.

Anyway, it’s time to share with you some pictures from winter holidays, which I spent in Gdansk, Poland. I can sum up them in two simple words: ‘cold’ and ‘busy’. The temperature was on average -8 Celsius degrees (around 17.6 Fahrenheit) so it was freezing cold. I don’t remember such cold winter in years. Of course I couldn’t miss a walk at the sea side. I saw few swans hanging out at a beach and I think they actually were pretty good models

Some of you might know that I moved to Brussels (Belgium) for professional and work-related reasons in September 2009. Having more luck than anything else, I had my first Brussels-based customer for PR Photography a couple of months before actually moving to the capital of Europe.

Holistic Massage Studio - PR Photography

Holistic Massage Studio - PR Photography

It’s not a secret (if you read the title of this blog post) that my October customer was Jari Menari, Holistic Massage Studio (www.jarimenari.be) in Brussels. Tom Ackaert, the owner and manager of the massage studio, asked me to take few pictures for a new website. It was a very exciting experience for me to work for PR photography with him and his models. I must admit that it was also quite challenging for me because the room we worked in was about 7 m2 (square meters). I was really afraid that working in such a small room would be impossible but looking now at the results, I think the pictures turned out pretty well.

The good and very helpful thing was that Tom knew what he wanted from the very beginning. This saved us a lot of time but also put some constrains for me at the same time – because he knew exactly what he wanted, I didn’t have much room for my own creativity. I don’t complain here at all! I guess that I have to get used to limiting my creativity in times when customers know what they want and just do what a customer says. In other cases, I let my creativity, imagination and innovation take over my mind, body and soul

I guess that my adventure with Jari Menari (Holistic Massage Studio) is not over yet as Tom mentioned lately he would like me to take some more pictures for his new massage project (it’s a secret at the moment so I can’t reveal what it will be). I think it’s a good sign when a past customer comes back to you asking to do some more work for him, also for PR Photography – another happy customer who wants more of my work and services!

I don’t take low-key lighting pictures often. Don’t ask me why, I just don’t know. But sometimes, I can’t resist to take such pictures. I personally believe that low-key lighting photography can have a particularly strong effect for certain type of portraits. I like to use low-key lighting especially in those portraits where a person’s personality and background are enhanced by a tool/instrument/object within a picture that is associated either with a personality, a hobby, background or an occupation. Those of you experienced with low-key lighting will realize that it might be hard to use such type of lighting both for a person and an object within a frame. I understand that some of you might not be familiar with low-key lighting, so what is it?

Low-key lighting is a style of lighting in photography and can be seen as an opposite to high-key lighting. Low-key lighting provides higher contrast to a picture and the controlling color of a picture is black. Low-key lighting provides an opportunity to highlight only the contours of a subject or an object and to use fill light or a reflector to illuminate shadow areas in order to control the contrast.

I met with some of my university friends for a small reunion in November 2009. I hadn’t seen one of them, Anna, for a long time because she spent considerable amount of time in Alaska in the past few years. During one of the conversations, I heard that Anna plays a guitar and without much hesitation, I grabbed a guitar from a corner and I handed it over to her.

The result are those low-key lighting portrait pictures, which create mystery and at the same time focus light on particular subject within a picture – in this case a musician and her instrument. I didn’t use a reflector for these pictures, just SB-900 SpeedLight.

If you have ever taken pictures of small kids then you know how hard it is. Posing is out of question as well as any chances they would stay in one place for longer than 2 seconds without moving. However, these and many more challenges connected with photographing small children can lead to interesting results. I also always say that challenges are always exciting for me.

Portraits of Children

I met with my high-school friend in Poland during summer 2009. It was a great pleasure to meet her husband for the second time and even a greater pleasure to take few pictures of their kid Tim. While the kid is awesome, it was not easy at all to keep him stay in one place for longer than 2 seconds. So what did I do? I made a mistake – I was snapping pictures like crazy. Honestly, I didn’t have much of a choice, especially shooting with high aperture of f/1.8 and f/2.2 (shallow depth of field). I decided to use my AF-S NIKKOR 35mm F/1.8 lens for shallow depth of field as a special effect.

Portraits of Children

Well, I ended up with around 450 pictures out of which I have chosen only 45. Imagine that you have to go over 450 pictures and not only choose the best ones but also to edit them and do post-processing. You can imagine how much time it took. In fact, it took me 8 days (more or less). But I think it was worth it at the end. I believe that some pictures came out better than I actually expected. I’m presenting you only some of them here.

… an interesting model. I write ‘interesting‘ and not ‘good‘ , ‘excellent‘, etc because I think (or rather I hope or even expect) that he will read this article and I don’t want him to become narcissistic, although he already is! . After all, the most important thing a housemate should do is to read your articles and follow your website closely, right

Anyway, Anis (my housemate) asked me few days ago to take a picture of him for his CV. So I set up all the equipment in our living room and I shot few pics – traditional, sitting, upper-body part pictures against white background – typical ID-type pictures. Then, I took that picture you see in this article. When I uploaded it to Aperture, I realized that this guy could serve me as a model; so we made a deal Now the only challenge is to set up something when both of us have time.