It’s been a long time since I’ve updated. So much has happened, and life is so busy. This may be why I haven’t posted recently (lack of time).

So! Since my last post, I have bought my dream camera, the Canon 5D II. The first week after I spent the whopping price, I brought it into shoulder deep water with me.  Luckily no water got on to it, and the pictures turned out amazingly (one is posted below)!  I’ve also had my own photography studio for the past 3 months.  I currently have 2 lights and several modifiers.  I’m eagerly waiting for a 64″ umbrella-soft box thing to come in the mail right now.  What else…  Oh!  Well, I’m getting regular business now, that’s definitely good.  I’m also currently working on shooting all the club and group pictures for my churches new directory.  I never realized there were so many!  I can’t wait to see all my shots published in a book.

Here are a few of the best shots I’ve taken over the last couple months:

And…

- Jonathan

I moved back to Stratford Ontario to live with my parents again. I’ll probably be here for a year or so, then hopefully move somewhere exciting. I moved back on a Friday night, then got a full time job on the following Monday. It’s a factory position, not photography or anything, but it’s to earn money for photography equipment quickly. A couple days ago I ordered two Alien Bees strobe lights with some accessories, and some Radio Popper wireless transmitters. Radio Popper seems like the top dog currently in the wireless transmitter world with some of it’s abilities, like controlling the power of your lights wirelessly, syncing to over 500 feet, and word has it that it can high speed sync up to 1/8000th of a second! They’re in the mail right now, I can’t wait to start playing with them!

In other news, a photo set of mine has been published in an online magazine.  It’s called Fashion Berry and it’s a magazine that studies upcoming trends, and art in the fashion world.  Click here to see the issue.  My set is right before the middle with, “House of Who?”  Check it out and tell me what you think!

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before or not, but I have a new website layout with new material, as of a month or two ago, make sure to check it out at www.JonathanSippel.com.

I’ll try and be on to update more, but I always have lots of things on the go.

Thanks for continuing to follow, guys!

Jonathan

That and I haven’t made a post in over 2 months! For that I am sorry.

This will just be a quick update on all things new in my life right now.

-I have moved back to Stratford, my home town. I’m back to living with my ‘rents for a while so I can save up money to buy new camera gear. It’s going to feel like a long year or so, but this is life, and this is where I have to be to get where I want to.

-I just bought a 27″ iMac computer. Yep, that’s right, and just got the screen calibrated, it’s currently as good as it gets for editing photos. I love it.

-I just completed a series called, “Colour Me Softly” as written in the title and shown at the top. It’s a glamour series studying light and colour. I have had a lot of fun putting it together. It consists of 6 different colours with a different model for each.  I would like to say thank you to Nikki, Denise, Nicolette, Bianca, Liz, and Kat for posing!  And thank you to Labels for Less the clothing store on Dundas Street in downtown London Ontario for lending clothes for some of the shoots!

-I have lots more to write about, and it will be easier to do so, now that I finished college (did I mention that? (graduation is in June)), but it is 3:00am now and I have to go to bed.

Thanks for reading, and please feel free to comment and tell me what you think about my new series.

Thanks!

Jonathan

Anyway, we had a lot of fun, and got some great shots.

Often I’ll get my subjects from modeling websites, or after seeing them model for a friend, or them even being a friend, but this time it was different.  Often I’ll come by people who just have the coolest look in the world, and yet I just pass right by them.  Whether it’s on the bus, at school, or on the internet, there are so many people that stand out, and the normal thing to do is pass right by.  This is something I’ve been wanting to work on for a while, and actually talk to them.  This was a start.  I found Bianca through facebook.  We were both tagged in the same note by a mutual friend.  Her profile picture caught my eye, so I checked sent her a message explaining that I’m a photographer, and I’d love to do a portrait session with her.  She quickly and eagerly replied.  She’d never done it before, but was very interested.  I didn’t have a specific idea for her at the time, so I sort of put her on hold.  A couple weeks passed by, then we got talking again and chose Saturday night.

I had one idea that I was thinking about using with someone else, but decided it would be easier to do it with her.  It was “the Bowling Ball shoot” as I have been calling it.  I thought it would be cool to do a main color shoot that goes with the color of a bowling ball, and the only colored background the school had was green.  I also bought a purple piece of fabric that could have worked as well, but green did the trick just fine.  I called up 2 bowling alleys, each said they could lend me a ball on different conditions.  I ended up going in to the second one, and a girl who worked there, Christen (don’t know her last name) lent me one of her own bowling balls.  Very nice of her.  To go with the green bowling ball and background we bought the socks and underwear from American Apparel, and the jacket was her idea.  We got some really great shots during “the Bowling Ball shoot” shoot, and loads of fun.

Bianca had a couple ideas of her own for what she could wear and the style of the lighting, so that’s where the black and white shot on the left originated.  And to finish it all off we did some shots to show off her new tattoo.  It’s a line of colored stars flowing down her spine.  I chose to continue with high key lighting, and we used a white mesh like sheet to cover her up.  The last shot on the right is an example of it.

This was a good shoot!  I’m really glad she agreed to pose, and she seems to like the shots too.  She’s good at following instructions, fun to work with, easy going, and drop dead gorgeous.  We’re already planning another shoot together.  So thanks again Bianca for the great shoot!

Thanks for readin’ y’all!

-Jonathan

Today I did a shoot with Nikki Fritz! That’s right, no time for my family today (Sorry Ma and Pa), I spent it doing homework…kind of. Nikki came in today to pose for my female business portrait assignment, and then do a just for fun shoot. We have been wanting to shoot together for quite some time now. About 3 months ago she sent me a very nice message offering to pose for me if I ever needed someone. Since then I have wanted to do a shoot with her, but had never gotten around to it. Just the other day I sent her a message asking if she would come to pose for an assignment and she eagerly accepted. I told her to just bring some stuff to shoot in after wards, and we’d figure it out as we’d go, so she brought a ton of stuff! We had a nice selection to choose from.
Anyways, we only had a little under an hour in the studio so we did my business portrait assignment right away.  Then we had about half an hour to do whatever we wanted.  I asked her to bring something comfortable and warm looking, something pretty, and something sexy.   We decided to only use the sexy in the studio since we couldn’t really use it outside of the studio later.  We spent about 20 minutes shooting in the studio until the time ran out.  We basically did a quick lingerie shoot with a red sweater on.  You can see one of our shots here.  Our time quickly flew by, and we wanted to shoot more, so I got her to change into her warm comfortable looking clothes, and we headed to the Oasis Cafe at school.

The Oasis Cafe is our colleges main cafeteria.  It has a giant wall made of windows, and it always gives stunning natural light for portraits.  I’ve shot here a couple times before, and I decided today would be a good day to do it again.  I went to the coffee store and asked if I could borrow their medium display coffee cup for the shoot, and they didn’t have a problem with it.  We headed on over to the windows and set up.  It took a few minutes to get everything right, because there were a bunch of distracting chairs and tables behind her, in the path of my lens.  We joked about how it looked like chairs were sticking out of her head, it was fun.  I decided to use my 50mm 1.8 Canon lens for this at its max open aperture to focus strictly on her eyes, with a shallow depth of field.   The shot in the top right is taken was taken here.  Recently she got a new tattoo, so we took some shots to show it off too, you can see one of them here.

Today’s shoot with Nikki was awesome.  She is sooooo nice, and very trustworthy.  She sent me a couple messages before we met saying that she may be a couple minutes late, and when I showed up about five minutes late, she was completely okay with it, and just happy to see me.  I apologized to her for the person who was in the studio before us for taking up our time, and she said, it’s okay as long as we get my homework done.  She is beautiful, easy going, hard working, has a stunning smile, and is very willing to help you with your ideas.  I can’t think of a bad thing to say about her.  Hopefully you guys will see more of her in my work in the next couple months, I definitely would like to work with her again.

Thanks Nikki for the great shoot!

That’s all for now.

Jonathan

In other news, I GOT A JOB!  A photography job!  I’ll be taking pictures for a few of the schools contemporary arts programs.  I’m pretty sure my shots will be shown on the school website, and books and stuff.  I’m pretty excited.  Going out on my own and emerging myself into groups of people, and organizing thought out shots seems like something out of my comfort zone, but I’m really looking forward to overcoming that fear.  It’s not even really a fear, but whatever it is, I’m hoping to put it behind me soon.  I’m looking forward to it, and it starts next week.

I may also have another part time photography job under my belt.  I have a meeting about it scheduled for early next week, so if I get that more details will come.  I hope all works out, because it sounds very creative ,interesting, and awesome.

Also, I think I am going to make a couple different portfolio folders on this site, and update them regularly.  I made the test port a few weeks ago, and haven’t touched it since.  I’ll try my best to keep them current.  There are a few ways I could do this, please take my poll, and it will help me decide the best way to do it.  Thanks.

View This Poll

When I got to the studio and started setting up, and it wasn’t long before I found out that the focal length I wanted to use for distortion was too wide for the backdrop at the distance the subject was at.  In other words, I had to move the subject back to about 3 feet from the backdrop.  Even there it was tricky to not get the edges of the backdrop in the shots.  There is where I came across even more problems, lighting the backdrop, and not having it effect Patrick in a negative way, since he was so close to it.  I managed to blow out the background just right with two bare strobes, one on each side.  After toying with the two backdrop lights, the main, and the fill, I finally reached what made for a good exposure, and finally we got shooting.  The sides of the backdrop were in many of the < 20mm shots, but luckily I could white out the rest of the background in photoshop.  The shot in the top right is one from this look.

After that we did some shots with a black backdrop, and a white dress shirt.  I used a different technique for these shots.  I turned the DJ equipment on an angle, so I could get the whole table in, while shooting the backdrop head on.  This let me fill all the empty space with the backdrop, and nothing outside of it.  You can see one of the shots from that technique here.

This was one of my more, “technically challenging” basic photo shoots, and it was really rewarding problem solving the whole way through.

Thanks for reading all of y’all.

PS: This is a quote I stumbled by on the net: “An image is only as strong as it’s weakest part.”

-Jonathan

I’m back in school, the holidays were cool.  I’m getting back in to the swing of things again, shooting as much as possible.
The other day I got a message from a model I had made contact with in the past (Holly).  She wasn’t interested in shooting when she messaged me, but her friend was.  Holly actually recommended me as a photographer for her friends first photo shoot after seeing my work.  Her friends name is Baleigh Hoekstra (Pronounced Bailey).  Baleigh has been interested in modeling for a while now, but has never gotten around to doing an actual photo shoot.  She said she saw some shots of Holly doing some sexy poses during one of her shoots, and wanted some of her own.  So she came to me.

I’m quite honored that people are this inspired by my work.  Baleigh came to do the shoot this afternoon.  She came with Holly, and one of Holly’s friends.  Holly did her makeup, and picked some clothes for her first look.  At first things started a little slow, Baleigh was having a bit of trouble getting in comfortable looking poses, but after a few minutes she got a lot better.   We did some nice basic poses, lighting, and portraits, and then she asked how long it’d be to get to the more, sexy shots?  So we got right to them.

Holly and her friend left about now.  We chose the clothes in the shot in the top right corner together, and started shooting again.  It was like a flick of a switch, Baleigh all of a sudden became much more comfortable in front of the camera, and began throwing in some of her own poses.  We took our time, and the shoot really started to flow.  Pretty soon we ended up going down to a bikini, and shooting some low key lighting shots.  You can see one here.  We also did some implied topless shots in this lighting.

We switched back to normal lighting with a 50mm 1.8, and did a few quick selective focus shots until our time ran out.  You can see one here.

All in all it was a great shoot, and I’d gladly shoot with Baleigh again.  I’m still flattered that she drove about an hour just to do the shoot.  She seems to be really happy with the shots, as am I.

Thanks for reading.

-Jonathan