Category: photography

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My name is Carnival

It’s the season again, so I decided to show you some early work I did in April of 2011, when I was still a rookie in nude art photography. Don’t worry – this one’s “safe for work”:

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My name is Carnival – Sarah, April 2011

I took this portrait of Sarah at Haenson Studios. A camera with only 10 Megapixels, but a good lens mounted to it.

If you click on the title, you’ll get some music I love, and click on the photo to go to Flickr where you can get it bigger, like almost always.

Thanks for viewing.

P.S.: Before I get some comments on this: it is early work ok, but I still consider to include it into a series like “The unretouched woman”, by Eve Arnold. I’m a photographer, not a painter, and today I see and know what could have been done better.

P.P.S.: what I also like about this picture is that Sarah’s lipstick is a bit smeared, and that it’s kind of imperfect. Like Bettina Rheims, who tells her sitters something like: “I want you to imagine that it’s 3 o’clock in the morning. You’re not that fit and perfect anymore, but just relax and be yourself” (translated from my memory, that was in the documentary about the photographer which I saw on Arte lately).

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Two photos of Tuna (our cat)

Kirk Tuck was praising the small “one inch” sensor cameras lately (and you have to put that in parentheses because their sensors ain’t one inch at all), and Bill Beebe lately wrote why he is still sticking to Olympus µ43rds, like I do as well.

Today I was using my older E-PL5 camera with its “kit zoom” set to 17mm, which equals an angle of view of 35mm on film cameras. The newer E-M10 is much faster to operate with its two wheels, but sometimes I just love to have an electronic viewfinder which you can tilt upwards 90 degrees, and to get another point of view with the lower camera.

Using that combination of camera, lens, and viewfinder I took two photos of our cat today, which I both cropped and processed as black & white photos using RawTherapee’s “channel mixer” (no film simluations, but the built-in possibilities of that raw converter):

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Oh, and photographers should watch a documentary about Bettina Rheims which I saw and recorded yesterday, and which you still can see on Arte+7 for about a week or so. Even if you don’t understand German and/or French, it’s still worthwhile to see one of the great living photographers of our times at work. Fair warning: most of her stuff isn’t really “safe for work”, but it’s real art nonetheless, and it starts with an exhibition of hers at Christie’s in London – one of the higher priced auction houses worldwide as you might guess.

Wonderful, and at least as good as the BBC documentary about David Bailey I once saw.

Thanks for reading and/or viewing.

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Flowers

Today was Mitchie’s birthday. She got her presents early in the morning already, and during the day both Zuleikha and me had the same idea and also brought some flowers.

Just took a picture of them with using only the modeling light of one of my studio strobes; the one with the gridded beauty dish over our dining room table:

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Flowers

Again, happy birthday to my sayang.

Thanks for reading.

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“Ghosts”

I like long exposures. Especially if they contain “ghosts”.

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Buildings, humans, and a ghost (or two)

I took this photo not only because of the contrasts in lights/shadows and movement/non-movement, but also because at these early hours, don’t we all walk into our offices (office containers? boxes?) like ghosts? Doesn’t matter if you look from IBM Frankfurt to these Deutsche Bank buildings like I did here, or vice versa…

Taken from my colleague Torben’s window. Soon we’ll move to the opposite part of our building, then we’ll look into the garden and into the direction of the rising sun.

Olympus OM-D E-M10 with Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4 lens at f/4, 2.5 seconds at ISO 200, which was one stop underexposed compared to the camera’s center-weighted metering.

Thanks for viewing.

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A simulated film look

Yes, I sometimes use film in my Olympus OM-2N camera. And so does Zuleikha in her Olympus OM-1. But how do you get close to the look of film when using digital cameras? Easy, you say: buy Silver Effects, bind it into Photoshop or Lightroom, done.

Not so fast, young lad…

Last week, Olympus came out with their digital reincarnation of the Pen-F camera they once had (and which used film, but made two exposures on each 24x36mm frame in portrait mode). This new Pen-F has both colour and black & white film emulation modes, like some other cameras (Fuji for instance) had it before. And then there’s the Leica Monochrom of course, and people love all these. Film look out of the camera; perfect.

So does that mean that you have to spend money on a new Pen-F, any of the Fujis or even that Leica? Or spend money for Photoshop, Lightroom plus 3rd party plugin software?

Not really. Since a while we have that in open source land as well – Pat David and some others created a very nice “film pack” for both Gimp and also RawTherapee – see his website for all the possible emulations.

I have that in RawTherapee since a while as well, so let’s have some Kodak Tri-X look on two of yesterday’s photos:

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Both taken with my Olympus OM-D E-M10 camera and the Zuiko Digital 50mm/2 macro lens at f/2.8. “In-camera” black and white conversion simulating an orange filter, which you can also apply afterwards in Olympus Viewer 3 (I’ve got the brand new 2.0 version today, for free). Film simulation with RawTherapee, and the “film pack” described above.

No, it’s not film. But it comes close.

Oh, and Zuleikha took my photo – danke Schätzchen!

P.S.: here’s another one which I took some minutes ago. Same processing, same Tri-X emulation:

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Thanks for viewing.

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January: 2 “explored” images

I took lots of photos in January, well relatively speaking, for an amateur who still has a day job and not really as much time for photography as one would like to have. All in all, there are over 500 photos left in my January folder (and some didn’t even make it there from the cameras), resulting in 9.5GB of occupied space on our hard drives.

Of course I uploaded some I considered good enough or some I wanted to write about to Flickr, and of these, two were “explored” and as such they also got lots of views and “favorites”. These two were:

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Cat in a box (1,259 views, 59 faves, and 4 comments as I write this), and

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Zuleikha, January 2016 (5,831 views, 98 faves, and 11 comments as I write this).

None of these were lit on purpose; the first one was taken with our normal room lights turned on in the evening, the second one was mainly daylight from a window behind me (and the veranda door / big window on Zuleikha’s left side). Both with the lenses used wide open, the first with the PanaLeica at f/1.4, the second with my older Four Thirds 40-150mm kit zoom at 76mm, where wide open means f/4.7. First with ISO 3200, second with 1600 – so in both cases there wasn’t too much light.

Anyway – if you were amongst the ones who “liked”, or in Flickr parlance, “favorited” one of these, then thank you. Sometimes it just feels good to have a little feedback just like this. Oh, and Zuleikha loved those faves as well. I bet Tuna is a bit jealous now that Zuleikha has some more… 😉

And as always, thanks for reading.

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Trying different focal length lenses

Olympus Germany has some special offer which runs out tomorrow. You can get some of their single focal length lenses (primes) for Micro Four Thirds discounted, between 50€ and 150€ cheaper than usual.

I thought about the 17mm for a while, but we have 14mm (me) and 20mm (Mitchie). I also thought about the 60mm macro, but we have two 50mm macro lenses, one OM which is still a manual one, and the ZD 50mm/2 macro from my Four Thirds camera which has autofocus and a one stop advantage over the newer 60mm one.

And then there is the 75mm/1.8 on offer, and it’s about 30% cheaper than usual. Surely an incredible lens, and a very good offer, tho it still costs some serious money – more expensive than any of our camera bodies for instance.

So like I usually do, I take some of my kit zooms and try them on the focal lengths on offer. Did (and showed) a 17mm portrait of my colleague Arno lately, and today I was testing my longer zoom at 76mm inside of our flat.

And that is the keyword: indoors. I knew from my days with a film camera that a 135mm lens was always a bit too long for me, at least when using it indoors – so during that time I always wished for a 100mm or even a 85mm. And today? Let’s see:

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Tuna with 76mm

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Tuna with the 50mm macro lens

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Zuleikha with 76mm (across the dining table)

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Zuleikha with the 50mm macro lens (same distance)

I’ve tried some more, but what I found is the same as some 30+ years ago: indoors, a lens of 135mm or even more (the 75mm Olympus one would have an angle of view like a 150mm lens on film) is good for only one purpose: really tight “head shots”. If you don’t keep some distance you have to use it in portrait orientation to even get the shoulders.

Which means that my 50mm macro or the 45mm/1.8 M.Zuiko lenses we have already are much more useful when space is restricted.

That 75mm lens would be wonderful to have for things like half portraits (belly-up) outdoors – when used wide open at f/1.8 that would blur your backgrounds quite nicely, almost like that 135mm/2 from Canon which can really separate things from the backgrounds. Or rather like a 85mm/1.8 on film (most of which aren’t as sharp as this Olympus when used wide open).

But indoors? I think we can be glad with what he have already.

Technical: the first three photos were taken with a mix of daylight and some lights which were switched on during the day. The last one was taken using two studio strobes, one from above through a gridded beauty dish, and one reflected from a wall on the other side of the table.

P.S.: here’s another one I took using my 50mm macro today, a still life:

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Oh, and before I forget it: since late last year, an Irish photographer sold a photo of a potato for 750.000 Pounds (approximately a million Euro or Dollar), I’m offering this one on Alu Dibond under Acryl in 30x40cm for the sum of 2.000.000,-€, no negotiations possible. And all those who don’t have that much can still download it in full resolution on Flickr – see side bar or click on the picture to get there. If you have it printed yourself, you’ll save some spare change, which you can send to us. SCNR… 😉

Thanks for viewing.

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Arno x2

One week ago, I took a photo of my colleague Arno with my Olympus E-PL5 and its 14-42mm “kit” lens set to 17mm. That small zoom lens opens up to f/3.8 at this focal length. Looked like this:

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And today, I took almost the same photo of him, but this time I used my Olympus E-M10 (different camera but same sensor) with the Panasonic Leica 25mm/1.4 lens fully opened to f/1.4, which then looks like this:

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Both are in-camera black & whites, with a simulated orange filter (at least this is what I’ve set when converting them from the raw .orf files using Olympus Viewer 3).

I like both. 17mm shows a bit more surrounding, while 25mm concentrates more on the subject. And of course the wider aperture of the prime lens blurs the background more than the zoom can do. But I also like the reflection of the Deutsche Bank building in the first picture, so it will take some time to decide whether I prefer one of these over the other.

Thanks for viewing.