How important is your photo equipment to produce better pictures? My answer is that a good photographer can produce good pictures with any camera. The photograph is not made by the camera, but by your view of the world. The camera is only the last part of that expression of creativity. You might have seen the fashion shoot with an iPhone camera. If you haven’t, follow the link and have some fun, watching it.

There is one thing about that shoot, I took note of and it is the consistent use of a tripod. I recently, upgraded my tripod to a lighter and more versatile version. I used to carry about 4.5 kg around. The new tripod is half the weight. The tripod goes with me almost everywhere, I go with my camera. You might argue that a tripod in the age of modern DSLRs is outdated.

There are at least three reasons for me that this is not true:

1. Focus on composition,

2. Images only possible with tripods,

3. Movie functions of new cameras

Let’s have a look at these points in detail.

Focus on Composition

Portrait in combination with long exposure

Since I am carrying my tripod around a lot these days, I use it also more. I noted, the tripod slows me down. That is a good thing! HA! How can that be a good thing? It helps with me with composing the image. How often did you find elements in the images, you didn’t see, when you took the shoot? It happened to me.

There is another element to that. When you photograph portraits, you can put the camera on the tripod and instead of hiding behind the camera, you interact with the person in front of you and relax him or her.

I use that in conjunction with a cable release and make myself even more independent from the camera.

Images only possible with tripods

From the fan walk on 6 July

Last night, I photographed people at the fan walk in Cape Town. It was at night and I was fascinated by the movement of the masses of people. In one particular situation, the complete crowd was moving with the exception of a police officer. It would have been impossible to hold that shot in my hand.

Another example for this, is the portrait of the two gentlemen in front of the soccer stadium. You can properly compose the background and even run a longer exposure in combination with a portrait lit by flash in the foreground. Added advantage, you don’t have to worry about losing control over what happens in the background while focusing on the people in front.

Movie function on new DSLRs

That is almost a no brainer for me. When it comes to moving pictures, the camera has to be on a solid base. There are exceptions to the rule, but for best quality and sharpness, you want to use a tripod.

I photograph for a living and invested in a solid Gitzo tripod that is as sturdy and as flexible as a tripod can be. You don’t have to go for that price class, when you photograph for a hobby and not use a tripod every day. Get a good and solid one and one that is not too heavy and you will discover that something can be liberating even though it might look like a burden to carry around.

One more thought: The use of a tripod is not dependent on  the size of your camera. I use the tripod with my DSLR and my Panasonic LC2.

Cape Town at full moon.

Please click image for larger view. The image print is available for sale. Please email jurgen@jurgen-photo.com for more information.

I have been fascinated by a particular view for the last week. One of Cape Town’s highways has a beautiful view over the harbor. Whenever I returned from town this week, I stopped to take pictures from a particular point.  Today, I experimented a with HDR photography. HDR stands for high dynamic range, which means that the image is a composite of several images all exposed with different exposures. This allows a wider light range than with a normal photo. The effect can be surreal. Let me know, what you think.

Please click on the image for a larger view.

Morning light

During my visit to Germany, my parents gave us as a present a new cooking knife. I love cooking, almost as much as

photographing. In both, you can create with some simple ingredients something really nice or … not. Over the years, I became a great fan of Jamie Oliver’s cooking. Hardly any of his cooking books are missing in my collection. He understands to explain in easy terms on how to cook well and

fast. Most times, I don’t have much time to cook, but love the process. Cooking also requires the skill of improvisation. Not always, you have all the ingredients in the house and you need to come up with creative solutions. How often, do you find that you left an extra flash at home, when you actually need it the most? Time to test the new knife.

So, I prepared the “Working Girl’s Pasta” from “Jamie’s Di

nners”. The ingredients for the recipe are:

• a handful of fresh basil – not available at 20:30 in the kitchen
• salt and pepper, yep
• zest and juice of a lemon, yep
• extra virgin oil, always around
• tuna steaks or canned tuna, luckily I had stock
• pasta
• anchovy fillets, nope
• garlic, always
• capers, nope
• olives, luckily a fellow photographer gave me a glass full of of olives
• dried chillies, yep, note to self get some new
• ripe tomatoes, yep
• white wine, luckily getwine.co.za had a sale
• flat-leaf parsley, nope

As you can see, I had a good selection of ingredients in the house and others not. I had to use dried basil and add some flavor with onion instead of capers and anchovy fillets.

Overall, I loved looking for alternatives and work with what I had available. It got my thinking going and ever so often it happens like this, when things are not optimal (and they hardly are) on the photo set. A little bit of brain function can not only substitute additional ingredients, but can create totally new solutions.

My supper was delicious!

Why is the thumbnail for this post a picture of my cat Ginger? Very easy. Cats love tuna and he decided to hang with me, while I was editing images of the food.

At the beginning of January, I wrote a post called: “Whats’s coming in 2010?” It was a overview of what changed in 2009 and some general ideas, on what I have planned for 2010. Since I started Jürgen’s Photography, I always had the question in my mind on how I can make the experience of  Jürgen’s Photography as convenient and transparent as possible for my clients.

Very soon, after I started the business, I learnt that my customers enjoyed having access to their images in an online gallery. After extensive research, I decided to host my images with a company called Photoshelter. Photoshelter allows me to give all my customers individual access to their images and can even make images available for download in different resolutions. Images can be sorted in lightboxes and shared with friends or myself. This tool has been very successful in making access and sharing easier.  In addition, I always offer the viewing of the pictures together with me on a calibrated monitor.

The focus of February, is communication and interaction. As a first step, I moved my invoicing system over to an online solution. Estimates and invoice are made available online (via secure server) and accessible from any computer with an Internet connection. During the course of the next weeks, I will also enable online payment via credit card.

I have the desire of making things transparent for my clients and answer questions as for example: Why does it take so long to view the images? What’s going to happen next? Where are my images?

The how to make it possible took a while to answer. I needed a solution, which was on the one hand flexible, but also efficient and effective. Now, I found a solution, which lives up to my requirement. As from the beginning of this month, I am able to communicate clearly with my customers on how far the progress with their images is. They can see, if I am adhering to my own timelines and view the next steps ahead. I am very excited the development and hope it will make things clearer for everyone involved.

I promised you some new videos. The first video is produced. This is the first one. Andre van Rooyen did the filming and the sound.

2009 was an interesting year for Jürgen’s Photography. The Web site went through some major changes and brought back to it’s core, what it is all about: Good photography. A good friend gave me valuable insight and advice on how the online presentation of Jürgen’s Photography could be improved.

I started the year, using a flash based Web site design, which I thought, looked great, but didn’t help you, the viewer much. The site took far too long to load and I can’t imagine on how many of you, got bored waiting while waiting for the first image to load, before aborting the load and moving on to another, fast loading site.  After I realized this, I created a hand coded page in simple html, which loaded fast enough, but was too text centered. That’s, when I received the honest response from my friend @mountainkat:

“You’re a photographer, for heaven’s sake! Show your photos!”

Today, I am still wondering, why these words were not all capitalized. That brought me back to the drawing board and it took me a month or two to come up with what I am standing for as photographer. My site found a clarity it didn’t have before. It just took one more evolutionary step to get to the site, you are looking at today. Blog, homepage and archives have the same look and feel. There are still some flash elements, but they are not essential to load the page and understand, who I am as photographer.

The current design of Jürgen’s Photography’s web site has been around now for a couple of months and I still like it. There always some minor tweaks and the need to update galleries with newer images.

2009 is also the year, where I understood much more about social networking, including Twitter and Facebook. Twitter connected me with a community of photography friends across the globe who continue to inspire me. (Please check  @mountainkat @conflagratio @kellyshipp @wahliaodotcom @andrevr @jchernandezjazz @CJulienPhoto @scotbaston @rtd13 @carybranscum).

The Facebook fanpage of Jürgen’s Photography is growing consistently and is yet another source to meet and connect with great people, who share the passion of photography.

The first quarter of 2009 saw the launch of the Cape Town Photography Meetup Group. When I started the group, I looked at it as a great source to learn about what people want to learn about photography. At the end, I learnt so much more about photography and how other people see the world than I would have dreamt of. We will be meeting for our next practical meetup on 9 January. Please visit our Facebook page for more information.

So much about the past. 2010 will bring some more exciting developments. Sign up for Jürgen’s Photography’s Facebook fanpage, as I will introduce some special promotions for members of the fanpage only.

I will be traveling to the Northern hemisphere in the first half of 2010, in particular, Northern America. Contact me, if you want me to photograph your wedding or portrait or headshot while I am on my trip.

Over the next few months, I will also create more videos for the blog and web site. I found a lot of inspiration via the Nikon Festival, for which I created this video.

You will also find more of my personal work with a lot of b/w and landscape during 2010.

Finally, 2010, will see the creation of a workshop in cooperation with another photographer from Cape Town. You don’t want to miss this, if you want to learn more intensely  about photography. Watch this space.

There are a couple of more ideas, I am working on and you will be one of the first to see more about that during the course of this year.

2010 will be exciting. The top image was inspired by a challenge from @scotbaston to photograph the first sunrise of the new decade. Thank you Scot, for coming up with the idea and communicating it within the community of Twitter.

I spent some time over the last few days to prepare a small movie for the Nikon Festival. The theme was “My day in 140 seconds”. For you Tweeple (Twitter people) the 140 seconds will make sense as we are restricted to 140 characters for our tweets. My idea was to combine things that I love doing: running and photography. It was the first time, where I not only used still images in combination with music, but also movie clips. I worked with my Nikon D90, which is the first DSLR that also records movies in HD quality. Working with mixed media was fun. The combination of film, photography and music creates a new way of experiencing the world for me. When I saw the first examples of what other came up with, I was enthused to participate in the competition.

For all of you following me on Twitter, you will not to be surprised to see the opening scene starting with my morning espresso and of course my Vibram Fivefingers had to feature.

I shot the footage in the Cape Town area and most of it during one day. The Zebras, you see are part of an attempt to rebreed the Quagga, a subspecies of the Zebra. It is one of these wonderful treats in South Africa that you literally can start your day by running and experience Zebras watching you.

Those strange looking shoes, I am running in, are called Vibram Fivefingers and are the nicest running shoes, I ever ran in. It is like running barefoot, but with some basic protection against, but without cushioning. The book “Born To Run” by Christopher McDougall inspired many runners to rediscover barefoot or barefoot like running.

Enjoy the movie and let me know, what you think.

After weeks of thinking, designing, rethinking and redesigning, my new website is finally launched. My website is the public face of Jurgen’s Photography. At the end of last year, I moved totally to a site designed in Flash. This was great for image presentation, but bad for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and load time. Flash also requires capabilities from the browser, which can’t be provided from all platforms. I wanted to make the site available for everyone, so that you can even view it from your iPhone.

I decided to create an immediate alternative to the flash site by hand coding it. My HTML was a bit rusty, but it is amazing how quickly you get back into things, when you have to. The created site wasn’t too bad at all, but every little change needed a lot of work in HTML. This was not a long term solution.

My twitter friend @mountainkat gave me some feedback and important pointers and recommended to read the book “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds. This book not only transformed the way I looked at my website, but also the way I do presentations (which I have to do on a regular basis in network meetings). Get this book, if you want to learn clear communication.

After I gained clarity about what I wanted, I needed to identify the right vehicle for the delivery. Hand coding was an option, but not very practical. As much as I like Joomla, I didn’t want to go through the hassles of fine tuning a template and deal with the restrictions of that platform, though it is very powerful. I looked into WordPress, but decided against it for similar reasons. This blog is running on the WordPress platform. Brilliant!

I needed something that helped me to create my vision more visually, but also creates a decent looking and fast loading website. Then I remembered a tool, I used in the past to create websites, Rapidweaver by Realmacsoftware. In cooperation of plugins by YourHead Software, the tool gave me the flexibility I was looking for.

It took me a while to decide on how to present my pictures. Lightbox was okay, but didn’t give me the look and feel I was looking for. There were other options, but I decided at the end for a compromise. For my galleries, I used flash. All essential information and image examples are available without flash and can be viewed from most platforms. I will keep an eye on that and create an alternative for non flash enabled browsers, if it seems to be a problem.

For now I am happy. Let me know, what you think.

Subscribe to my newsletter,  to keep up to date with the latest developments at Jurgen’s Photography.

Ferryman’s at the Cape Town Waterfront redesigned their upstairs restaurant. My assignment was to photograph the new interior design and create images that reflect the new spirit. I worked with up to three off camera strobes to balance the light against the incoming sunlight. Paired with a tripod, I was able to photograph a range of images with available light only.

Ferryman’s at the Cape Town Waterfront redesigned their upstairs restaurant. My assignment was to photograph the new interior design and create images that reflect the new spirit. I worked with up to three off camera strobes to balance the light against the incoming sunlight. Paired with a tripod, I was able to photograph a range of images with available light only.

You can find images of this session at Ferryman’s Website.

Are you updating your business website and need fresh images? Contact me.

You can find images of this session at Ferryman’s Website.

Are you updating your business website and need fresh images? Contact me.

Front page of Jurgen's Photography's Archive

Since the early days of Jurgen’s Photography, I was interested in making things as easy as possible for my clients. Getting the images to my clients as soon as possible in the most convenient way, brought me to offering online galleries right from the start. In the beginning, I used to upload the images to my webserver and secure them manually. Over time this was not sustainable and I started looking for more professional solutions. Finally, I decided to use the services of Photoshelter, an online photo storage company, which has been around for some years now. Photoshelter allows me the upload of my images straight from my picture library software (I uses Apple’s Aperture) on my computer. After the upload, I can decide, if I want to make the images in the gallery public, or accessible only via invite and password. The service is highly sophisticated and let’s me also control, how many images my clients can download in which resolution.

For my private clients, this is the first step of presenting the results of their photo session. After the upload, I invite my clients to a viewing in my office to make their selection for prints, framing, books etc. This is important for me, as I get immediate feedback on what my customers have to say about the pictures and I also ensure that they can see the images on a calibrated monitor in the best possible quality.

Photoshelter serves also as part of my backup solution for my images. All images are immediately backed up, once they are uploaded on my computer system. The images are also uploaded in full resolution to my online server at Photoshelter as backup. This prevents loss of images through theft or fire.

Another aspect of the online solution is the ability to sell stock images or photographs of local events. You can purchase and immediately download images from the site. Only images of public events or images explicitly photographed for the purpose of stock photography are sold here!

Let me know, if you have any questions.

Looking for a photographer? Contact me.

Find out more about my work at: Jurgen’s Photography and Jurgen’s Photography Archive