Picture No. 5,000

Published by wjl on July 20, 2010 in family, fun and photography. 0 Comments

Just uploaded 150 photos to my Malaysia 2010 album on Picasa. Amongst them, there was the 5,000th photo I took with the Olympus E-520, which I have since last November. That sounds like a lot, but pro photographers like Kirk Tuck take that many in a week, instead of over half a year.

To come back to photo no. 5,000: that one was taken in the home of the parents of our sister-in-law, with on-camera flash. So let me proudly present:

From Malaysia 2010

“Baby Luca”

A description and presentation of all those pictures will follow during the next days.

Some portraits I took

Published by wjl on July 19, 2010 in family, fun and photography. 0 Comments

We’re back from our trip to Malaysia to visit relatives there after what was a much too long time, and I haven’t yet found the time to really write something about the journey.

But after putting some family photos on the web and discovering that those who they were made for couldn’t download them, I also put some onto my Picasa page. So here they are, in no particular order:

From Malaysia 2010

Haniff

From Malaysia 2010

Hasnah

From Malaysia 2010

“I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name…”

From Malaysia 2010

Hanna Zuleikha wearing “The Fez”

A longer blog post will follow soon. As always, clicking the pictures or links to them will lead you to bigger versions to download.

Thanks for watching. And thanks to our cute family members for letting me take their photographs. Love you all.

Portraits of a princess (a Howto), and photos of a soccer game

Published by wjl on June 25, 2010 in fun and photography. 0 Comments

I want to use wide angle lens settings a lot more, since I want to learn on how to get close, and to still compose a nice picture without getting in too much distortion.

And I also want to play around with flash and ambient. In theory, I know how to do this, but there’s nothing like practice, so this is what I wanted to do today.

Since we had nice and bright sunshine today, even in our flat, this was an ideal opportunity. The sunshine was lighting up our living room, and we had let down the shutters at the dining table already - an ideal place for putting the flash and finding some object which I could use as the foreground. After trying with my watch first, I decided to take one of Zuleikha’s newest toys - a little princess.

From selfmade

I set the lens to 17mm (34mm on a “normal film”, or “full frame” camera), and the aperture to f=5.6. With these settings, I measured the background first, and the time the camera would have chosen for it was 1/15 of a second. So I set it manually to 1/60 of a second to get the background two stops down. That’s how it is done: you control the intensity of the flash on the flash itself, and with the aperture. The intensity of the background is controlled with the time settings.

Since my flash has a guide number of (roughly) around 30, and I bounced it over the ceiling - which means it was about 4m from flash to ceiling and back to the object, you can do a simple calculation like 30/4 to get the aperture you’d have to take with the flash on full power, and the camera on ISO 100. In this case, it would have been f=8. But I had the camera at f=5.6, so the flash could operate at half of its power. In fact for this one I even dialed it down to 1/4 of its maximum output, since the flash has a bit more than GN 30. I focused manually, and took the photo above.

That was the result. Pretty close and nice as a first try. But as soon as I had it in the computer, I saw two errors. First, the lighting still wasn’t perfect - the face was a bit dark, since the flash was at about 90 degrees to the princess’ left (or camera right), and so the face was partly in the shadow. This would work with a real human maybe, because we are much bigger, but for this tiny thing it wasn’t optimal.

But the really more severe error was in the composition - do you see it? There’s that nicely lit living room in the background, with a painting on the wall over the couch, a light hanging from the ceiling, the sun shining in in a nice diagonal, and - ouch! - a halogen light sticking out of the princess’ head. Uuuh. This is bad. So I had to do it again.

From selfmade

I put the figure to the other side, so she was facing the flash to avoid the shadows in her face (the figure looks so human, it’s actually hard to say “it”). Plus I used the flash at 1/2 power now, which was the perfect exposure according to the camera. And now the background of the figure is a door and a plant, but she’s covering most of these, and nothing sticks out of her head. The head now makes a nice contrast to the darker background - a much better result. This was also focused manually, at the closest distance my 14-42mm kit lens allowed.

Again; the formula for this is easy: roughly calculate the needed aperture with dividing the guide number through the distance, and set the background one or two stops lower than what the camera would take without any flash at all. If you want the background brighter or darker, prolong or shorten the time. If you want your object brighter or darker, open or close the aperture, or change the settings of your flash up or down accordingly.

If you don’t want the flash to look like flash, take a lower setting like in the first example. You can even soften out both the highlights and the shadows if you put a translucent umbrella or some transparent paper in front of your flash, and still point it to the ceiling (over the umbrella, which would only soften the direct line between flash and object in this case). If you don’t want any highlights on the object at all, put a solid thing like a book in between flash and object. But then it gets rather flat; only you can decide if you’d like that or not. I don’t.

If you want to really learn this and much more, read strobist.blogspot.com - David Hobby is far better than me in all that.

Ok - on to a totally different topic.

On a Sunday almost two weeks ago, I took a walk alone. I need these little escapes sometimes. When coming back from a nice place, I ran into a game of soccer (we Germans call it football, since like John Cleese explains, it’s played with a foot and a ball - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sD_8prYOxo for his wonderful rant). Our local sports club “Rot-Weiss Walldorf” was just playing against a team from Frankfurt.

I went in to the officials and asked if I’m allowed to take pictures, and they said something like: “Sure, go on”. So I took my very first own soccer (football) photos ever. Like this one:

From Soccer

These were all taken with the longer of my two kit zooms, which has a range of 40-150mm (equivalent to 80-300mm on an “old” film camera), and the complete album is at http://picasaweb.google.de/wjlonien/Soccer?feat=directlink - feel free to watch them, use them, whatever you like.

This is also what I mailed our sports club two days later, and I asked them to forward the link to the Frankfurt team as well. Now I’ve got an official invitation to come back when and as often as I want, and to take as many photos as I like. Nice. Glad they liked them.

Ok; enough for today. I need a break. A 3 week break ;-)

Focusing manually

Published by wjl on June 17, 2010 in fun and photography. 0 Comments

I just love that lens. An Olympus OM Zuiko 50mm with f=1.8, bought second hand for 36€. No auto focus. No auto nothing. Just like good old manual music. Here are some shots, taken during the last day or two:

1. Training bike

From selfmade

2. New life III

From selfmade

3. A mouse of the 21st century

From selfmade

4. … on the shoulders of giants

From selfmade

No big art around here, I know, but still it’s lotsa fun - and shouldn’t that be the one most important thing, in everything we do?

Thanks for watching.

The Making of the Little House on the Prairie

Published by wjl on May 15, 2010 in family, fun and photography. 0 Comments

Today Mitchie asked whether I had seen any shops of craft suppliers around here, which I hadn’t. But a search on Google showed at least three in a 15 mile circle, so we started to get some stuff. Apart from a birthday present for one of Zuleikha’s friends, we bought a small farm which you first have to assemble, and then to paint. We also got some acrylic colours to do the latter, and went back home.

When we got in, the postman had just been there, and I saw that the last item which I had ordered from China finally arrived. That was a translucent umbrella, approximately 33 inch (some 84 centimeters) in diameter, through which you can fire a flash to make it appear much bigger as it actually is, and so to make the light much softer. This is standard equipment in studios and at beauty and model and fashion shots; however for me it was something I have never done before.

So during the time Mitchie and Zuleikha had built that small farm, I had set up the flash together with a receiver, an umbrella holder and that umbrella onto my tripod, and quickly popped my first shots with it:

From selfmade
From selfmade
From selfmade

Nice and soft shadows, as you can see, or none at all if you have the right angle of both the camera and the flash. Just a bit like the big guys ;-)

Meanwhile, my girls were already busy colouring the farm, and I was back to using only the available light:

From selfmade
From selfmade
From selfmade
From selfmade
From selfmade
From selfmade
From selfmade

Finally, when the farm was ready, and transported over to our living room floor, I took a last photo of it, this time with flash through that umbrella again:

From selfmade

Oh, and to give you an idea of what a flash on a tripod with an umbrella in front of it looks like, it’s like this:

From selfmade

What you see here costs less than 100€, including the tripod, the flash with holder and radio receiver, and the umbrella of course.

Thanks for watching and reading…

Minimalist flash approaches

Published by wjl on May 14, 2010 in fun and photography. 0 Comments

Today I had a day off, so the day started with getting my motorcycle through its biyearly technical surveillance. And my now 16-year-old Honda passed like a charm.

Then later Mitchie and me went shopping, and I got some additional rechargeable batteries for my flash. Thinking of that later on today, I did some more experiments with using off-camera flash.

Like always, I started without flash at all. Sat myself on the couch, put the Olympus E-520 with the Digital Zuiko 40-150mm onto the tripod some 2 and a half meters in front of myself, set the lens to 79mm and f=5.6 and the camera to ISO200, which resulted in an exposure time of about 3.2 seconds, and fired it with the remote trigger. Voila:

From selfmade

As you can see, there’s a light source at almost 270 degrees of me (so it’s to my left), which is a dimmed halogen light, pointed to the ceiling. In my eyes you see the reflection of another light source, that’s the dining room energy-saving tube over the table. There’s another one at maybe 25-30 degrees (so it’s left behind the camera) which is an illuminated globe, but with its 5W bulb, that one is negligible. All in all, a very “warm” colour temperature. I set the white point to my t-shirt, and that resulted in some 2,400K.

This is an - ahem - nice image, but it isn’t really sharp. I really like available light photography, but even if I had set the camera to ISO400 instead of ISO200, that would have resulted in an exposure time of then 1.6 seconds - way too long for most people to really sit still (wonder how they did that during the early days, with exposure times well into the minutes? Yeah I know, they bound peoples’ heads and more or less glued them to the background. But that’s another story…).

From all I’ve read over at David Hobby’s Strobist blog and from the books of guys like Joe McNally and Kirk Tuck I knew that you can preserve some of the available light if you don’t go lower than - say - minus 2EV. Which means that with using ISO400 I could set an exposure time of about half a second, and still have some effect from that halogen, maybe even from the dining room light. The rest has to be done with using a flash then.

Ok - so I put the flash into our bookshelf, pointed it to bounce at me over the ceiling, and put some Rosco Sun 85 CTO (orange) gel in front of it (between flash and diffusor) to get it near the colour temperature of all that available light. With the flash effectively some 4.5-5m away from myself, and that CTO and the diffusor in front of it, I set it to 1/2 of its maximum power. Put the transceiver onto the camera, the receiver under the flash, and again fired the camera with its IR remote. Here we go:

From selfmade

This time setting the white balance point onto the top of my t-shirt gave me a little to blueish result, since seen from that flash, the t-shirt is almost in the shadow of my jacket and hand. So I manually adjusted it to around 2,700K, some 200K more than the measurement gave me. Still blueish, but that is because even with the full CTO, the flash is at some 3,000K, while the available light sources still are at around 2,400K. If you really want those to match, you have to add even more CTO, and power up the flash to full to adjust the loss of light.

The result? Well, colours don’t seem that “natural” anymore maybe, but the resulting image is lots sharper than the first one. You can compare them on the Picasa page, where they are 1920 pixels wide. Plus the bounced flash gave nice shadows on the wall from our bamboo tree, which is now as high as the ceiling. All in all I would say it’s a step into the direction of taking more “professional” looking portraits, even with using only one small flash for under 50$.

Of course, taking a better-looking model helps a lot:

From selfmade

This last one was taken hand-held yesterday, with the manual OM Zuiko 1.8 50mm lens at f=5.6, and the flash at 1/8 of its power (closer, and without any colour-correcting gels). An exposure time of 1/30s preserved some of the background from the kitchen light, which turned almost dark-brownish without correction.

I think I’m learning. Maybe I’ll turn into a photographer, should I ever grow up ;-) Anyway, it’s great fun, that is the main part of it.

Thanks for reading and viewing and/or even commenting…

Update:

I decided to set the colour temperature to the one of the brightest light source, which is the flash with the CTO in front of it, and all of a sudden the image is much nicer. The even warmer touch of the halogen doesn’t disturb it at minus 2 EV as it seems - like in the brown kitchen background from Zuleikha’s photo.

From selfmade

Update 2; one day later:

How do you get rid of colour casts, if you don’t want to turn everything to B&W? Just eliminate the weaker light sources by completely overriding them. So today I tried again, almost the same setup, but the focal length was now some 83mm, and with an exposure time of 1/160 of a second, the halogen light source was at lower than minus 5EV. Minus 5 f-stops means: it’s as good as invisible, since that calculates to 1/2^5, or 1/32 of a “correct” exposure light value.

I put the flash over to the other side this time, onto my computer desk. Its direct line to me was blocked by a translucent umbrella, but the flash itself was pointed almost straight up to the ceiling, from which it bounced back, giving the impression of not only one large and high light source, but actually two - a smaller part of its output was still coming through the umbrella very nice and soft, and so it didn’t produce any harsh and sharp shadows:

From selfmade

With the flash set to half of its power, and the camera to ISO400, I didn’t have to push up the exposure too much in post processing; even the jpg directly from the camera would have been usable just fine.

Of course, even with using “shoot-through-” umbrellas, photographing nicer looking models result in nicer looking images:

From selfmade

How to make a dull day interesting

Published by wjl on May 7, 2010 in photography. 0 Comments

Friday evening, near Frankfurt / Main, Germany, temperature 9°C, broken clouds. We had some light drizzle, and for May, it feels too cold. The sky is / was just gray and boring. No direct sunlight, so normally a good weather for taking pictures outside.

I was at home, however. We just brought the small one to bed, and I wanted to play around with my new flash a bit. Hmmm, maybe a portrait of myself? I was the only one in the room. Maybe in front of the veranda door, but with that gray sky as the background?

Yes! A few days ago, I got my gels. Now “Gel” in German means exactly the same as “gel” in English, namely something lotion-like, like shower gel. But when photographers speak of “gels”, they mean something different: a “color gel“, which is some kind of photographic filter, mostly used in front of light sources.

You need these in flash photography or when making films, believe me. A flash has a color temperature of around 5,600K, like sunlight. Tungsten bulbs, and nowadays even most energy-saving tubes, have a color temperature of around 3,200K, and some are as low as 2,700K. So if you mix them, how do you set the color balance for your camera? Impossible to solve without the use of those gels.

So the most used one of these gels is a so-called “full CTO” gel, which has mostly two uses: first of course, you can mount it in front of your flash and make a tungsten light out of something normally as bright (and blue) like the sun. Second, you can get fancy, and still mix those different light colors: put that full CTO in front of your flash, set the camera to Tungsten (light bulbs) accordingly, and then take the sky as a background - and a dull gray sky will turn blue.

Which is exactly what I did here:

From selfmade

I had the camera on the tripod, and the standard kit zoom set to 28mm (an equivalent focal length to 56mm on a “full frame” film camera). The flash was some three meters away on the ground, and its direct “line of sight” to myself was hidden. The flash was bounced over the ceiling, making the real distance from the flash to myself something like 5 meters. A full CTO gel was mounted, and the camera was set to Tungsten white balance. So the sky turned beautifully blue, while I was “correctly” lit (and interpreted) by the flash and camera, both set to orange.

Of course I should have used a higher ISO than 100 to get myself a bit brighter. And I also should have used a shorter shutter time than 1/20th of a second to get the sky a bit darker. But for just playing around I got pretty close, and that is actually the fun of it. Plus it prepares me for taking photos of others…

Got my flash

Published by wjl on April 30, 2010 in fun and photography. 0 Comments

Today, my cheap and manual Chinese flash arrived, directly from Hong Kong. It’s a Yongnuo YN460-II, and if you order it in China, it is about 45$ including shipping. If you oder it in Germany, it is 70€ plus shipping. So I ordered it in China, together with some radio remote triggers, so I can use if off-camera.

Works like a charm. Look:

From selfmade

Tho these aren’t the best portraits ever, they show that with getting the flash off the camera, you can achieve very good results. Note the ambient in the background, this is an energy-saving tube light from the kitchen, tungsten-color (around 2700K). The camera white balance was set to flash (which is about the same as daylight), thus the “warm” yellowish or orange color in the back, which doesn’t matter much here. I bounced the flash over the ceiling from the corner of our small dining area, and it doesn’t look that much like a flash photo. Mission accomplished. You don’t need 300€+ TTL flashes from the camera makers for shots like these. Manual flash and manual lens here, no auto focus.

From selfmade

Another one. Note the daylight from outside, which you get if you set the camera to manual mode and take a time longer than the usual flash sync speeds of 1/60s or so. Here the flash was about 2m away in an angle of about 45 degrees, and pointed to the ceiling again. The whole exposure was a bit dark at ISO100, but then I’m still at my first few baby steps with flash. Raw Therapee fixed that nicely from the raw file. This was shot with the shorter of the kit zooms at an EFL of 84mm (42mm with the typical factor 2 crop from 4/3rds sensors).

From selfmade

In this last one of yours truly, taken with -2EV for the ambient, and so a shutter time of half a second, you can see the limitations and problems when mixing flash with ambient room light. Behind me is a dimmed halogen lamp which also has a strong tungsten color of about 2600 or 2700K, while the flash is a flash of course; bright as daylight, and of about the same color. So how to correct that one? With software, this is impossible. The solution is to put some CTO (orange) gel onto your flash, so that is has about the same color as the ambient. Then you would set the white balance of your camera to Tungsten (or manually somewhere in the 2700K area), and daddy would be a happy camper. That means it is really important to get those cheap add-ons for your flash(es), and then to experiment and learn.

And where can you learn all of that and more, and even for free? Take the “Lighting 101″ and “-102″ courses at David Hobby’s “Strobist” blog - and also bookmark the pages of other masters of flash photography, like for instance Joe McNally and Kirk Tuck. And if you can afford it, then order David’s DVDs or a book or two from Joe and/or Kirk.

I mean, really. While I always thought I hated flash photography, in reality it was only a blockade in my own mindset. But now I’m really eager to learn - and this is great fun!

Thanks for looking.

This is for Karim Ahmad. RIP brother…

Published by wjl on April 18, 2010 in escapes and photography. 0 Comments

Today after shopping I went for a walk. I mean, a long walk. Well, just a few hours, first following the train tracks from Mörfelden-Walldorf to Frankfurt Aiport, then from there I went some roads and through the woods again and around the “Langener Waldsee”, where the German wannabe IronMen have to swim.

As always, I had my camera with me, and today I used only the 14-42mm kit lens, mostly wide. Here are some pictures and comments:

From selfmade

A bird house. Lots of these in the forests here.

From selfmade

The forests finally have some nice spring colours again.

From selfmade

Dumped bicycle

From selfmade

Same dumped bicycle, other side. The front wheel was laying some 10 or 20 meters away, and when I see things like these I always ask myself what might have happened here.

From selfmade

Chainsaw massacre…

From selfmade

Hmmm. No one ’round here seems to take care of things anymore.

From selfmade

You have to cross this and walk up to the road - no other way. At least that small stream is nice.

From selfmade

And it seems to be good for the trees and meadows here - this is the other side. Green again, finally.

From selfmade

This is close to the road. People dump everything, these guys around here just don’t care for nothing at all.

From selfmade

The road finally crosses the train track, if you head to Langen - opposite way from the airport.

From selfmade

The next bridge is way smaller. A couple was walking in the distance there.

I took the next turn right (direction to Mörfelden-Walldorf), and crossed the street to walk on the left side. There, I saw:

From selfmade

Karim Ahmad died here, aged 24. Searched Google and didn’t find anything. So whoever you were, young man, and whatever reason led to the end of your life: rest in peace.

From selfmade

The other side of the road, and more dumpsters. Do I really wanna live here? Do we want our daughter to grow up with people like these? Hmmm…

From selfmade

This is the road. Left of this, Ahmed died, right was the dump. No pedestrian walkway. A car coming my direction even honked. How could I dare to walk on his street!

From selfmade

Back to the woods again. This is much nicer, and not as noisy.

From selfmade

I searched for it, and I found it: the “Langener Waldsee”, surrounded by a double fence. Nothing is free around here, not even swimming.

From selfmade

Barbed wire, can you believe it? Why don’t they shoot people who wanna climb?

From selfmade

This is where you can sit and drink beer and swim. 20,000 people do this on warm days. This swimming beach isn’t very big, like you can see from the other side, so I guess people lay around here like sardines in a can. Not for me; thanks but no thanks.

From selfmade

This is the end of the swimming area, and of course here everything is forbidden. I wanna go back to Bavaria… and no, that scooter isn’t mine.

From selfmade

A sign which explains the visitor where he is. It is behind the area where people are supposed to be.

From selfmade

Here, swimming is strictly forbidden - I asked some people: “Why all these danger of life signs? What is so dangerous about this lake?”. The answer was: “They don’t want us to swim here, that’s all. And they send security and/or police to shoo people away”. I asked who owns this lake, but the people there couldn’t even tell me if it’s the city of Langen or the Sering company who are digging this lake since over 80 years.

From selfmade

The view from the other side. Can you image 20,000 people on that small beach - and no one around the rest of it? I won’t come here when all these boom boxes sound off…

From selfmade

Small marina to the left, swimming on the right, nothing here.

From selfmade

I had to climb over this wall of Serings’ sand to actually get out of that area again. Unbelievable. They let you walk in, only to block your way once you surround the whole lake.

From selfmade

This is where they’re digging. Langener Waldsee to the right, Egelsbacher See to the left. “See” is German for “lake”.

From selfmade

Lake Egelsbach is explained as well, and here they actually have a reason to block it. This is wild bird area. No people. No boom boxes. Sweet.

From selfmade

And it looks much nicer, too. If you turn around, you’ll see:

From selfmade

Another broken tree.

From selfmade

Colours are nice here, and it was getting a bit late, the sun was low, and I experienced my first lens flare since I was young ;-)

From selfmade

This is cool. One of the nicest spots around for sure.

From selfmade

And this is opposite of it, if you turn back to the way where you’re actually supposed (and allowed) to walk.

From selfmade

After crossing that same road again, you come past lake Mörfelden-Walldorf. Also with an entrance fee, and this one is open already.

From selfmade

This is close to the small road into Mörfelden-Walldorf.

From selfmade

This small road passes the A5 motorway from Frankfurt to Basel (Switzerland). Looking in the direction of Frankfurt here, with some “MTK” hills in the distance (= Main-Taunus-Kreis).

From selfmade

And finally, back in Mörfelden-Walldorf. Shopping mall to the left, gas station on the right, and these houses take the sun out of your face.

From selfmade

Some nice flowers and colours even here. This was the last photo I took before I went home.

From selfmade

And this one was taken from our veranda, before I started uploading photos and writing this.

Hope you enjoyed the little tour. Thanks for watching!

RawTherapee

Published by wjl on January 20, 2010 in fun. 0 Comments

Today I read the RawTherapee manual again, and decided to give the described workflow another try (see Q & A in their manual). For those who don’t know, RawTherapee is a free and now also open source (GPL) RAW image converter for Linux and also for Windows.

It’s really nice. And since all the steps you do until the final conversion into a jpg file are done in 16 bit, you are not losing any detail. You *could* even avoid that last 8 bit conversion, and save the result as a 16 bit TIFF file - but even print shops mostly expect 8 bit jpgs today, so it’s pretty pointless IMHO.

An example:

From selfmade

I took this shot using a tripod, and my Olympus E-520 with the 40-150mm kit zoom at an EFL of about 200mm today. Since I worked with the raw file, I only applied a standard USM (unsharp mask) to the image - all white balance, color, and other things weren’t changed at all. No noise reduction. Saved as a 16 bit TIFF, and the final crop and conversion to 8 bit jpg were done using the Gimp. Since I still have the RAW .orf file from the camera, I threw away the TIFF afterwards.

I will definitely try this with more of my pictures from now on. Highly recommended.

Update, from short before midnight local time:

From selfmade

Shot Snow White again, and this time with only the relatively dim lights from the dining room, and at an EFL of 300mm (150mm for 4/3rds cameras). Here I had to adjust the brightness of the picture a bit, and now everything including the conversion to 8 bit jpg (at 100%, so it’s about 1.2MB) was done using RawTherapee.

The more I use it, the more I like it.