Monthly Model

 Welcome to the first edition of "Opticks Magazine". This month featuring the aspiring model Keren, who is also my art director, girl friend, and occasional voice activated light stand.

After doing some experiments with my new white background and flashes I decided to upload a selection of the images from the day. I wanted to add a little interest to all that white space so here is the result. Also, I had just started working with Adobe Illustrator so forgive me if it is a little jumbled. I wanted to try everything.

Beyond these opening remarks I have surprisingly little to add. There is enough chit chat in the images themselves, and that too, is not to be taken too seriously...

Also, a link to additional photos is added at the end.

BTS: Photo Shoot

In the third and last post about the photoshoot I went to a few weeks ago, I wanted to show a little bit of the "behind the scenes" of the event.

I always liked taking pictures of people taking pictures. Not surprising, when you have eight photographers and about the same amount of models, that even without trying too hard you get a lot of pictures of the photographers at work...

I tried to show both the look and feel of the day, and some of the process of the post production, giving a few images as they came out of camera.

Autumn Colors

Continuing with last week's photo shoot, I have another set of pictures, this time in the theme of Autumn colors (this was the original idea of the shoot though it kinda got lost on the way).

I had managed to get some alone time with today's model, Efrat, and posing on this tree I got some interesting shots.

Once more, the closed walls around this olive tree made control over the light really simple.

A few additional shots were made just before sunset when the light was softer and easier to balance with a small flash.

Model: Efrat Malachi

Makeup:  Eti Hazan

Film Star

This is Eden.

She is not yet a Hollywood film star but it seems very likely she will be.

I met Eden on a photo shoot arranged by some photographers / models / makeup artists through a local facebook group. Everything was voluntary, made for credits, and yet managed to look fairly professional. The whole thing took three hours last Friday afternoon, in a park in Ramat Gan.

I decided to go for themes in my editing of the images and their upload. This first upload features just one of the models from the photoshoot, in what I hope is a consistent look...

Don't worry, pictures of other models from the shoot will be arriving soon...

Model: Eden Bartov

Makeup: Kochi Yehezkeli

Look back: South America

It has been exactly five years since I came back from my trip around South America. Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Peru, with a dash of Ecuador's amazing Galapagos islands.

It took me this long to find the time to organize, label, and edit my favorite images. Most of the time I had more important things to do than sit on Lightroom and edit photos from ages ago. I mean, I usually had more recent photos to edit so the backlog just kept getting bigger.

Considering that my trip to Nepal was two and a half months and took four months to edit, this seven month trip, edited on the back burner for five years isn't such a shock.

BTS: AQUARIUM

Not so much a "behind the scenes" as it is a collection of "out takes" from the AQUARIUM shoot.

I try and go over all the pictures I have in a memory card before formatting it. This often makes for a hilarious stop motion video (the party at Aviram's house for example, was pretty amusing).

After the jump: the video of all the many-many shots we took to combine into the final products (not including the ones deleted in-camera...) and a couple of shots off my phone which I took while we were making the outside-looking-in picture with Aviram swimming on the top panel of the glass.

It's all rather self explanatory I think....

Blue Moon

 Today's post is nothing special. It just occurred to me that I have been writing so much about photography that I didn't take the time to go out and take pictures.

That's really missing the big picture if you will.

So this Friday instead of writing another long and boring article about exposure I went with my tripod and a couple of lenses to make some nightshots around my house.

I didn't take any of the pictures I thought I would, but I did get a handful of interesting images I didn't expect.

Only when I came back I realized it was a blue moon, and I had actually photographed it. What is so special about a blue moon? well, see below...