Tom Leuntjens Photography

At the time of publishing I’m attending the LIME workshop “Capturing Romance” by Pieter Van Impe.

My expectations from this workshop are to be able to go out with a couple , (re-)ignite their love and capture that on photo, in ways I didn’t think of before. Learning (lots of) new tricks.

As a photographer, photographing couples is all about pulling tricks out of your trick bag. The most important and most difficult trick of all is making the couple feel at ease, once you have done that you can work your other tricks, making them pose without them feeling posed, suggest poses, let them ‘play’ with that, make some adjustments on how to make a certain picture better.

That last part is something I know I need to work on, when I get home and review the pictures I see how I could have improved this or that picture, but I should have seen that when reviewing the picture on location, it’s a digital world, we have that LCD on there for a reason. I’m not talking about under/over exposure or other technical aspects, pick up any book, go out shoot pictures and you will learn that rather quickly. I’m talking about the non-technical aspects: the social interaction, working with couples, poses, angles, seeing-things as a photographer, staying relaxed yet focused. This you only learn from experience. Every shoot I did was tons of fun, for me and the people I worked with, laughter and jokes all around. But sometimes I get caught up in technical aspects or I want a certain shot that is in my head but it just isn’t working out as I want it to, I feel like I’m another planet with my nose in my LCD. I wonder if they notice that sometime …

I hope this workshop teaches me some of these things, even if it means I completely have to re-design my own way of working.

But the workshop isn’t all fun & games … one week ago Pieter issued all of us some homework.
1) Bring 5 pictures from a same shoot , unedited
2) Bring your best 3 pictures.

I don’t have all that much “romance” themed shoots under my belt yet, but what defines romance ?
With that question in mind I browsed through my library and came back with these 3 shots, I don’t consider them ‘my best’ but they all have a meaning.

The first look
I don’t believe there is any way of ‘tricking’ this kind of photo. But when working with a couple this is THE Benchmark of all romance shots. Even if you can pull it of ‘on command’ for 50%, you know you succeeded.

Romance = Love
This whole shoot is one of my favourites. Capture the love, for each other, and in this case, for little Hasse.

It only takes two, strip it down to the essence, no graphical elements. Capture the couple.

I could easily have shared 100 pictures with you, they all have a story, they all teach me/you something. But on location you have to be able to put it all together. I hope the workshop can teach me to do that better.