Half a week of portraits

Last Tuesday I was in Mainz, and I showed some pictures from there in my last blog post. And Wednesday, I took a photo of a colleague.

And then I took more. And more. Two on Thursday, four on Friday, and so on. And I decided to go on and take at least one portrait a day.

Yesterday I wasn’t really lucky. Tho I had some photos (and some of them of strikingly beautiful young women), somehow it wasn’t my day. They were either unsharp, or taken in too crappy light, or they just didn’t fit into what I was taking before – tight shots of faces. It’s also a learning experience, not only technically but at least as much in what is nowadays called “soft”, or “people skills” – so these photos still benefit a lot, even if only to learn from errors.

So here are some photos which I took since Wednesday:

Markus

Arno

Matthias

Marion

Roland

Gertrud

Jonathan

Sophie

Babi

I took some more, but like I wrote above I also made errors. The photo of Sophie above for instance isn’t as sharp as it could (and probably should) be, and it’s also more about the dress and costume than about the person. But ok; I’ll try to learn from that, and to improve.

Technical: the first two were taken with the Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4, all others with the Micro Zuiko 45mm/1.8 lens, all used wide open on my Olympus OM-D E-M10 camera. In-camera black & white with simulated orange filter, and in post processing with the Olympus Viewer 3 software I also turned on “auto” gradation in most cases. Slight but global corrections with RawTherapee, which I also used to add some Exif data like title and tags, but no “retouching” of any kind – so these photos are as good as out of camera, as most of my photos are.

Thanks for viewing. And of course thanks to those whose portraits I was allowed to take. You’ll get some prints in a few days.