20 October 2018 at 6:37 pm (Zaventem, Belgium)

BY BERT STEPHANI

This year we had the best summer I can remember but in the last few days fall has finally started to make itself felt. The days are still beautiful and warm but the nights and the mornings are chilly. The color palette is changing too in the leaves of the trees and in the sky. Until six or seven years ago, these signs indicated a period of staying indoors most of the time. But since I took up a photography project about hunting and eventually became a hunter myself, the signs of fall indicate a couple of months of being part of nature and spending days outside whatever the weather is.

The 15th of October is the official opening of the hunting season here in Belgium and today was the first hunting day for the little group that I usually hunt with. The fog, the rising sun and the chill in the air added to the anticipation of the first day in the field. We know that in our area the vegetation is still too dense at this time of year to have a lot of success. But for all of us it’s about being out there, enjoying the company and check if the work that we put in outside the season to improve the area for all wildlife has paid off. Despite of what a lot of people think, most hunters are not ruthless killers, we like to see nature doing well and we only harvest what’s sustainable. The areas our hunting group manages, do considerably better than some neighboring land managed by a nature conservation organisation.

We manage to flush a couple of pheasants and a fox but either there wasn’t a safe shot or our aim was a bit rusty. Then we here the calls of a skein of invasive Canadian geese. Suddenly the appear magically through the fog, shots ring out, the dogs do their work and real organic meat enters the food chain.

13 October 2018 at 1:30 pm (Zaventem, Belgium)

BY BERT STEPHANI

The familiar seems strange and the strange seems familiar. It’s about the same ingredients but different priorities. The focus shifts and makes me focus on the shifts.

6 October 2018 at 5:05 pm (Zaventem, Belgium)

BY BERT STEPHANI

It’s been a busy week after a busy Photokina week after a busy pre-Photokina week. On Thursday night, my body had enough of it and gave me no other option than to take and aspirin and go to bed. After a sweat drenched flue-like night, I wisely took it a bit slower yesterday. By late afternoon I felt much better. Just in time for Noa’s return after a five day school trip to the coast.

Pizza and a movie and staying in bed until 10 am, those are things that I hardly do these days. But I truly enjoyed them and today was a productive day, catching up on work and healthy food.

29 September 2018 at 8:52 am (Cologne, Germany)

BY BERT STEPHANI

I’m so proud and grateful that I was asked to speak for Fujifilm at Photokina again. They have let me play with the GFX50R, I get copious quantities of food and beer. On top of that, they even pay me for taking some pictures on a stage for 40 minutes each day, using cheap IKEA stuff as modifiers. I’m in a nice hotel and I get to hang out with friends and heroes. And yet it’s hard, exhausting and relentless. The stress to be on stage, the intensity of the conversations, the e-mails that have to be answered, the late nights and the ever present noise are getting to me. Yesterday Pat and I took it easy, went for dinner in the hotel restaurant and added some extra hours of rest to our schedule. Today is the last day, one more presentation and I intend to squeeze the last drop out of the friendships that will become virtual again from tomorrow on.

September 22, 2018 at 11:16PM (Zaventem, Belgium)

BY BERT STEPHANI

It hasn’t been a good week. I can see in my photography that it took a lot of energy. Even an exciting new camera, doesn’t push me to create. But today was good, not in a creative way but I got to spend it with my kids and a good friend that I don’t get to see very often. It opens up my mind and I know that with Photokina coming up, the creative juices will start flowing again soon.

September 15, 2018 at 21h41 PM (Molenbeek, Belgium)

BY BERT STEPHANI

Today Noa played her first basketball game of the season. She’s no giant, she isn’t the female Steph Curry but she plays her heart out. Even with a little ankle injury and a huge lead she went for every loose ball and encouraged her team mates to play tight defense. That’s true sports.

We are KAGE | Backstory

Last spring we received an email from one of the organizers of the Photon Festival, a gathering focused on photojournalism that takes place in Valencia, Spain every year. They were doing an evening featuring photography collectives and wanted to spotlight KAGE as one of the groups. Obviously we were very flattered and even thought of attending in some capacity—the logistics, unfortunately, didn’t pan out.

We decided to create a short video documentary to explain our motivations both as a group and a collective, something that would ultimately give a sense of who and what we are, why we stick together. As is usually the case, the schedule proved rather tight and we had to scramble in order to put something together in a relatively short amount of time. So I asked everyone to record about a minute of audio, something personal about their relationship with photography, the collective… Material I’d be using as the main thread throughout the film, the backbone. It sounds easy enough but we don’t often stop to think about “why” we do what we do and I believe this proved to be an interesting exercise for all of us, forcing us to reflect on a subject we don’t necessarily question all that often. In fact, it triggered an emotional upheaval we hadn’t expected: our friend and colleague Craig Litten, faced with this forced introspection, realized his life had taken a different course and decided to move on; mirrors sometimes send back images quite different than the one we expect...

The project was of course completed but with one compromise: there was no time to create an original soundtrack, so the film was edited on songs and music for which we didn’t have the rights. This is par for the course in this day and age of video sharing but as creatives, we all take licensing issues very seriously; you can’t expect others to respect your rights if you trample on them yourself. So we agreed that the film would remain private until a new soundtrack could be added.

Fast forward a couple of months: Charlene Winfred joins the group. Perfect opportunity to recut the video, dive into creating an original soundtrack and finally get this ready for public release. Here it is.

For the techies out there:

  • The video was entirely edited in Apple Motion 5.
  • The score was written, composed and recorded in Apple Logic Pro X. All audio elements were also assembled and finalized in Logic. 

A lot of work overall but it’s nice to sit back and finally have something to explain this project.
Plus: now you’ll know how to pronounce the name too :) 

In Praise Of The Camera You Have

In Praise Of The Camera You Have

It took me a while to figure out why I was often really nervous before a portrait shoot, especially if it was for a new client, in a new location, or with lighting gear I hadn’t used before – until I realised the nerves I was feeling were entirely familiar, and something I’d felt before: years ago, as an actor waiting to go on.  Stage fright.  I was worried about my performance in the role of ‘photographer’ on this set...

Behind The Scenes : Fashion Consciousness

BY DEREK CLARK

If you take a look in the Stories section of Kage, you will find an essay by me called Fashion Consciousness. That project came about in a rather unusual way, so I thought I would use Chronicle to give a little behind the scenes look into how I ended up shooting backstage at a fashion show.

Every couple of weeks I meet with two photographer friends (both called John) to put the world right and talk about photography—mainly because our other halves don't listen to us (!). John 1 asked if we'd be interested to shoot some pictures for the fashion department of one of the big colleges in Glasgow. There was no budget, but the deal was that we could shoot it any way we wanted with no outside interference. John 2 and I both saw it as an interesting opportunity, so we jumped in with both feet. Gaining access is the key to all documentary projects, so for me this was a way in to who knew what.

The first visit involved shooting models wearing clothes the fashion students had designed. These students are on their way to a career in the fashion industry, so the standard is pretty high. I would point out here that I'm no fashion guru, but we each chose a model and wandered off to wherever location we found interesting in the building, with the idea that we would come back together at some point and switch models (I think we were working with five girls that day). 

The college building was fairly new and the architecture was modern with lots of glass and wood. I used the frosted glass of the front entrance revolving doors to frame the shot above, moving higher or lower to get more or less of the model in shot. I had brought lights, softboxes and umbrellas, but was lucky enough to actually get decent natural light. There were a few areas that had floor to ceiling windows that were a couple of floors high: combine this with white walls and you get the type of soft beautiful light that you see in the photo below; no need for a softbox or reflectors.

We shot for two days at the college, not only covering the models, but also the details too. On the second day we were asked if we would like to shoot the upcoming fashion show that the college puts on every year, to which they invite members of the fashion world looking for new talent. This was exactly what I was hoping for. Unfortunately the Two Johns had other jobs booked and wouldn't be available on the date of the show, so it was down to me... And I got full access.

I showed up on the night of the show with my small Fuji kit of two cameras and three lenses and went straight to work. Backstage was hectic and no one could care less that I was there with a camera, which is perfect for a documentary photographer. The two dressing rooms were quite a distance apart. One should have been for the guys and one for the girls, but there seemed to always be girls in both. I moved between each dressing room, not speaking too much, just observing and getting what I felt would be useful. Every now and then there would be a flurry of excitement as one group of girls came off stage and had to do a quick change to be ready for the next catwalk. I cursed the backstage lighting which was mostly fluorescent tubes, but hey, you just have to get on with it and get the job done with whatever you're given. 

I also moved out to the front of house to shoot some of the catwalk, but to be honest, my heart was backstage amongst all the hustle and bustle, the panic and safetypins and anticipation. The atmosphere in the corridor where the models stood in line, waiting for their cue to pull back the curtain and strut out into the lights was electric. It was fairly dark, but there was a shaft of light coming from another room and each girl had to walk through it to get to the catwalk, almost as though they were having the final touch applied as they moved through the beam. A bit of glow. A bit of power. 

A few words about the picture above because it always manages to raise a smile. The girl was helping put the finishing touches to the guys' clothes and one of them asked her what was on her finger: she said that she had got a tattoo while on holiday. When they asked her what it was, she just raised a finger under her nose to reveal a moustache tattoo. I grabbed two shots in quick succession. This is the second one, and although both were ok, it was this that seemed to show the humour best. The moment was over in a flash—they always are—but I was happy to have captured it.

I love how documentary photography takes us on a journey, not just for the viewer, but also the photographer. We need to have our eyes and ears open at all times, ready to pluck the slightest thing out of the air that could possibly be a story. I'm constantly scanning everything to see if it could result in a documentary shoot. I could have looked at this with my business head on and dismissed it because there wasn't a budget for photography, but I looked at it in the longer term and it paid off.

My aim with this story was to show the hectic backstage pressure cooker of a fashion show. There is no room for modesty and there is no time to be self conscious. Everybody needs to pull together or the event won't work. I hope this won't be the last time I shoot behind the scenes at a fashion event, as I feel I have just scratched the surface. I have an idea how I can move this into another phase, but I need to do some research first. Stay tuned.