Daily Inspiration #341 by Daniel Maissan

Hi Steve,

First of all, love your site. Specially the work you do with Seal and of course your daily inspiration. Therefore I figured I would like to contribute as well. I am a Dutch photographer. After working in hospitality for over 15 years I decided to turn my hobby into a new career, and took the plunge.

Last week I had a studio shoot with some drag queens. These “girls” take their time preparing and I decided to also go for a behind the scenes with my Leica M9. It was amazing to see how these men transform into ladies. But the fun really started when we decided to hit the city of my home town Haarlem (Netherlands) after the shoot. All ladies were tired of a day in the studio and wanted to go out and have something to eat, so they invaded the local snack bar.

I’m working more and more with the Leica M9 after working with a Nikon D3 for years. First I had to really learn to work with the rangefinder, different feel, all manual, new approach of my subjects…. It felt like I had to learn how to walk all over again. Definitely some of your tips and tricks helped me to find my way. After a while I actually really started to enjoy working with it and now, I use it as often as I can for fun and also on the job. Most of the time I work with a 35mm summicron f2.0 and if I want to get in close I have my 75mm summicron f2.0. Somewhere in the future I definitely would like to work with the noctilux and explore its possibilities.

I really like converting the pictures to black & white using silver fx pro 2 with all its amazing possibilities.

If you like to see some more pictures of the drag queens or my portfolio, check my site www.danielmaissan.nl

Best regards,

Daniel Maissan.

 

26 Comments

  1. Interesting images! Coincidentally, Before seeing this article, I had hoped to try to get some images of cross-dressers on the street last night, outside a particular night club, as I have a roll of Ilford Delta 3200 in my F6, and wanted to finish the roll of that low-light film before an anticipated photo walk today under the bright Texas sun. Unfortunately, things were just a bit too busy last night, and I could not be in the right place at the right time.

  2. Very striking images. I especially like the last one, was wondering how it looks in color? Might be interesting with kodachrome like colors

  3. Thanks for sharing the photos! Glad you are enjoying that M9 and the career change. Takes guts for sure, and I envy your move!

  4. Daniel. Your images are truly ouststanding. They have have an otherworldly quality. Realy magical!

  5. Daniel, I checked out your website. This is by far the best work I’ve seen in awhile. Very inspirational…. Thank you for sharing!

  6. I like how the black and white conversion turned out. And how clean the pix look.
    You caught his concentration well in the first one!

    Groeten! Toon

  7. Love first shot. You have a wonderful Blog on the M9 experience that has great images of this same session. Would love to see the studio shots. Are the DSLR shots of the studio session online to look at?
    Thank you and Regards
    Jorge

  8. Magnificent work. Shot 1 is one of the best shots I’ve seen from the M9, outstanding capture!

  9. Great pictures Daniel! Thanks for submitting them to the daily inspiration. Ik ga je site zeker tjekken 🙂

  10. Love your images! Makes me want to see more, here I go….

    Jeffrey (my Mother was Dutch)

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