Rene Kuipers: Classical Light in Contemporary Portrait Photography

I really like the old Dutch masters painter style. My photography is mostly a bit dark in the lighting. And I'm also a big fan of Photoshop and compositing images. That is what all came together in my winning image. The image is made out of 13 separate images. 12 for the two sisters, Delinda and Jennifer and one for the background. I work a lot with dancers, because I like how they can do different expressions. This is what I asked of the girls for this image.

This is mostly just a good feeling I have with certain images. 

As stated in the first question, I started with a Minolta Dynax 7000i SLR. Nowadays, I work with a Canon R5, but I also went back to analog film with a Yashica MAT124G TLR.

I can say now that I'm definitely a portrait photographer. I make most of my portraits in a studio where I have complete control of the light.

For my portraits, I use a Canon R5 and Godox AD600BM flash with an octabox of 150cm, this is my most used setup. I love the soft light this big octabox gives to my models.

I like it when people stare at the eyes of the person in photo, and get captivated by them!

I had to stitch all the images together in a way it looked like it was taken in one shot. I took a few hours to get everything right. 

A girlfriend of mine has a dance school, which is where I find most of my models. I like how they play with different expressions. It's actually difficult to make believable expressions, and some of them are really good at it.

I like the work of Julia Fullerton-Batten and Gregory Crewdson, and I also learned a lot from Glynn Dewis.

Just go for it! It's really cool to compete with other inspiring photographers, and you can learn a lot from the critiques you sometimes get from other photographers and juries in competitions.

Don't be afraid to make errors, just learn from them, it eventually will make your work better!

I love to make and edit my creations with Photoshop. Off-course it's best to make the base image go right in the camera, but you can get much more out of an image if you do some good post-processing. Editing images was done in the early film days, too, like dodge & burn, so it is not new. Even Ansel Adams used it!

I like how A.I. can help edit images in Photoshop. It makes it easier to make selections and remove unwanted things. I am not a big fan of generating completely new images by just entering a prompt, though. I think it is not your photo if you didn't at least have some parts made with your own camera. 

I like dance photography, and especially ballet! It would be awesome if I could get a chance to be a photographer at the National Opera & Ballet in Amsterdam!