Yesterday night my hometown Leuven won the tv show Mijn restaurant (the Flemisch version of My Restaurant Rules). Of course I was there and took a lot of pictures. I put the decent ones on the blog of the city of Leuven; the article (in Dutch) is here. Underneath you see the chef partying like it were the last day of his life.

I wanted to give you some insight in how some of my pictures were taken. This picture (and many others) was taken above my head, aiming down and hoping for the best. The place was way too crowded and I couldn’t get close enough so the only angle that would get me decent shots was from above. There was nothing to step onto that would raise me above the crowd, so the only option I had was to raise the camera above my head and aim down. When shooting above my head I always keep the neck strap of the camera in my left hand and stretch it to give the camera a bit of stability. Another crucial thing in this kind of situation is to select one autofocus point. I always take the middle one. If you let the camera select the focus points automatically, it will focus on the foreground, which is the crowd. You will end up with out of focus celebs and tack sharp backs of the crowd’s heads. The disadvantage of course is that you may end up with a focused back ground like this one

Both these pictures were taken in manual mode, 1/80, f2.8, iso 800 and the flash (with diffuser) in ETTL mode.

Some beautiful portraits of some colleagues came out as well last night, which I will post in the weekend.