Canon DSLR: The Ultimate Photographer's Guide David Bicho A rising star in Stockholm, Swedish fashion photographer David Bicho didn't shoot a paying job until age 30, and then only marketing job for a Swedish governmental institution. "I spent all my awake time for a couple of years, just building my portfolio," he says. "They liked it! I got the job." Bicho became interested in photography at an early age, as many of us do. "I went on a father-son trip to my father's home town of Lisbon, Portugal. I borrowed my mother's SLR to take some snapshots but was totally captivated by the creative possibilities just by looking through the viewfinder. I shot constantly through the whole trip." Unfortunately, he wasn't as excited about the results. "After returning home to Sweden I had the negatives developed," he goes on. "I wasn't as fascinated by the results as I was when I took the pictures, but, I was bitten by capturing the world through a viewfinder." When he was 15, Bicho took a course in television production and spent the next 10 years as a photographer and producer. "I loved the studios; lots of big lights, space, everything about it. Then the IT boom came. I totally reset my priorities, started working as a system developer and dropped everything else," he says. "Then, one day in 2004, I borrowed my mother's Ricoh XR-2, and I haven't stopped shooting since." Bicho never envisioned an actual career in photography. "People began to see my work, and I got bigger and better clients," he says. "One day it struck me that it might be possible to make a living from this" (FIG 5.35) . FIG 5.35 Blue David Bicho composited two photographs of the blue glass table top to get this somewhat disturbing image of his model, Margareta, seemingly pursued by malevolent hands. The first was made with the model under the table, lit by softboxes and a gridded parabolic reflector. Bicho wanted a cartoonish feel to the shot, so he used a 50 mm f1.4. "Normally, I'd think this lens too wide for this close perspective and, in fact, I did have a problem with the wide field of view and the relatively small table top," he said. "I had to flip the table quite a bit to hide the edge." EOS 5D, 50 mm f1.4 at f9. Makeup and wardrobe styling by Maria Tseva. 120