simonsenphoto.com

English blog of portrait and editorial photographer Stefan Simonsen (Hanover/Germany)

Welcome to my blog!

Thank you for visiting! For those who are new to this site, my name is Stefan Simonsen and I'm a portrait & editorial photographer based in Hanover/Germany. I like to meet and photograph people and hope that you can see it in my photographs.

Within the last year more and more people asked me to take portraits for them (children, couples, business clients, magazines) and I noted very fast that I want to do this for the rest of my life!

This blog is the best place to stay updated with my work. But I'm not only publishing pictures of my sessions - I'm trying to give beginners some tipps and views behind the scenes of photography's technics and business like I got from the internet when I started to improve my skills!

Have fun!
Stefan Simonsen

An afternoon with Sandra and Stephan

June 6, 2010 1:06 AM Category: Couple, Engagement, Generally, Shooting, Wedding

Hi, finally there is some time to write a new blog post. The last weeks have been very exhausting. Appointments for news agencies in politics and miscellaneouses, two concerts (STING and Green Day – both really awesome!) and assignments for companies – wished the days had 48 hours ;-)

A small ray of hope was an engagement shooting I did with Sandra and Stephan two weeks ago. It was my only really free day in two weeks, but I was happy to have the time for this really nice couple. It’s something really different from all this stiff politicians and the agency appointments where you have the feeling that bring in your creativity is like to throw pearls before swine…

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Category: Couple, Engagement, Generally, Shooting, Wedding Tags: Couple, Engagement

3 comments

Jim Horne - Hey Stefan – I’ve been anxiously awaiting a new post from you, and here it is – once again you have truly captured some spectacular moments in time….

-Jim

Stian - Hi Stefan! Outstanding photos as always.It is truly inspiring looking at you pictures.
Good luck with the wedding, im sure they will be very happy with the result :-)

Stian

Stefan Simonsen - Thx Jim and Stian, hope to bring a new post with some pics of Green Day and Sting on the way this week. And I have already three videos in the pipeline with BTS’s ;-)

PS: Stian, I corrected it ;-)

Wedding photo shoot with Caroline and Helmut

May 10, 2010 6:31 PM Category: Couple, Shooting, Wedding

The last saturday was very cold, grey and uncomfortable. But for Caroline and Helmut it was their wedding day and they were happy. After their town hall wedding and a first champagne reciption at a boat on the Lake “Maschsee” they met Steffi and my humble self to take some pictures.

Caroline and Helmut - aren't they cute? :-)

We had only three hours left to take the photos at two location in Hanover and an old witch tower from the medieval in Marienwerder near Hanover before they had have to go to their wedding feast. And man, they were very brave. With low temperatures in a range of 12 to 14°C (53 to 57°F) they did a good job!

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Category: Couple, Shooting, Wedding Tags: Caroline, Couple, Helmut, Octabox, Quadra, SB-800, SB-900, Shooting, Strobist, Wedding

4 comments

Jim Horne - Stunning images as always!!!

Marco Ghislanzoni - Great pics Stefan!

One question: what is your technique to get the skin tone right when shooting and in post-production?

MfG,
Marco.

Stefan Simonsen - Hi Marco,

I do my post-production with Lightroom or Aperture. If you use the vibrancy-slider instead of the saturation slider, both softwares give a punch to the colors but exclude the skin-tones. The second advise is to slightly use a flash to light up the faces. I have some photos from this shooting where the flash didn’t fire – it was not possible to get the same good colours in the faces in this pictures!

But see for yourself:
- Example without flash
- Example with flash

Alireza - Super beautiful pictures. I love your work. Good Luck…

New video online – Part 2 of the photo shoot with Anouk

April 19, 2010 3:41 PM Category: Behind the scenes, Flash setups, Generally, Shooting, Strobist, Videos

Hi there, hope you had nice early spring days with some time for photos in the warm sun :-)

I had a very busy week with travelling to Berlin at Tuesday, a visit at Joe McNally’s workshop in Hamburg (northern Germany) on Thursday (Joe was really humorous and made me laugh a lot) and a seven hours business assignment on saturday where I had to wake up at 5.45 AM. But the people there were great and we got some very nice pictures!

So there was rather no time for me sitting in the office and cut movies. But in my last post I promised a prompt follow-up with part two of the video about the shooting with the beautiful Anouk – and here it is!

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Category: Behind the scenes, Flash setups, Generally, Shooting, Strobist, Videos Tags: Anouk, CLS, Lastolite, outdoor, photo shoot, SB-800, SB-900, Shooting, skylite, umbrella, Video

1 comment

John - Your videos are interesting and helpful – thanks for posting them!
JH

New video online – Outdoor with Anouk

April 11, 2010 9:16 PM Category: Behind the scenes, Generally, Shooting, Strobist, Videos

I just uploaded another behind the scenes-video to YouTube and Vimeo.com. It shows the first part of an outdoor senior photo shoot with the beautiful Anouk. She was just 16 when we did this at the end of last October so her parents signed a release for her. Only 16, but she did it very well!

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Category: Behind the scenes, Generally, Shooting, Strobist, Videos Tags: Anouk, BTS, CTO, Forest, Full CTO, Lee 204, outdoor, Portrait, Quadra, SB-900, sunlight, Video

9 comments

Fredrik Selander - Really great video and lovely pictures.
This has inspired me to use my gel’s in a more creative way. Thx mr Simonsen!

B.r /Fredrik S, Sweden

Stefan Simonsen - Fredrik, you’re welcome!

Oh, if you wouldn’t mind please say “Stefan”, because I’m not an old teacher *haha*

Jim Horne - Outstanding shots/compositions – tack sharp!! Two questions: Do you shoot RAW/NEF? And what Post Processing work did you do (if any)?

-Jim

Stefan Simonsen - Hi Jim, when doing portrait-/industrial shoots I’m always using .nef’s and editing them in Lightroom. This days I’m trying Apple’s Aperture too, but the photos in this video were edited just with Lightroom 3 Beta 1, no Photoshop etc…

Fredrik Selander - @ Stefan: :-)