11th birthday

Today, November 25th, but 11 years ago I wrote the first entry (welcome message aside) on a subdomain called “wolfgang” of the TLD “lonien.de”. I had registered and used “lonien.de” long before that, but then I decided to split it up so that each of us could write his/her own blog.

It’s lost and never made it to our current server, but it was archived, so in case you want to browse some older entries, here’s my “Here we go…” post on the Wayback Machine.

Thanks for reading.

Beautiful light

I changed back my lighting modifiers, so I have a gridded white beauty dish over our dining table again. And with a silver reflector lying on the table, I profiled my setup:

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Then I asked Zuleikha if she would sit for me for a short moment (danke nochmal, Schätzchen!). Zuleikha has dark brown hair which wouldn’t contrast enough with a black background, so I added another studio strobe on lowest setting from a bit further away, just for a tiny bit of hair light. With these lights, I took her portrait:

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Zuleikha, November 2016

Thanks for viewing.

Two photos from Sunday, and two from today

On Sunday, my colleague Gertrud invited us to a concert in which she performed. It was also the 90th anniversary of her band, the “Mandolinenorchester Winkel 1926“. Here are two photos I took:

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It was a bit dark in the Brentanoscheune, so I took that first photo with my 40-150mm lens at ISO 6400. The light was a bit unforgiving for portraiture as well, so I converted it to black & white.

This next one was taken with my 25mm/1.4 lens at ISO 4000, while the Mayor held his speech:

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This shows the whole band, and it was a nice concert they gave – so thanks again for the invitation, Gertrud! We enjoyed it very much.

This morning when I came to work, I read Ming Thein’s blog for a few minutes (this article in case you’re interested), and then I decided to take a photo of my work place:

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But the real nice light was outside, so I opened my window to take this, hand-held at 1/6th of a second:

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As always, thanks for reading.

Slow and deliberate. Spray and pray.

When I’m taking photographs, I’m normally kind of old-fashioned. My camera is set to take a single exposure, which I carefully try to frame in my viewfinder. I also try to think about the end result right away, and sometimes set the camera to show me the image in black & white, sometimes with contrast raised a bit, or even simulating some filter in front of my imaginary black & white film camera. Sometimes when I’m in a really kind of nostalgic mood, I even change the aspect ratio to 3:2, like normal 135 film rolls had, or even to 1:1 like square roll film.

Of course, when taking both a jpg and a raw image at the same time, you can still reverse everything from the raw later. But that’s another story, and I usually don’t do that.

With an approach like that, I took a photo of Tuna the cat yesterday evening, when she was sitting in front of our veranda door, looking out into the dark. I know that cats see much better in the dark than us humans, but still I sometimes wonder what she might see there. Anyway, I liked the reflection of the cat in our veranda door, where she had some kind of brighter background, so you can see her ears. This was composed with an in-camera 3:2 crop, contrast +1 and a simulated yellow filter:

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In the company where we now look into the garden, we have an egret, also known as a great white heron. Sometimes it’s even two of these, but most of the time just one. That bird goes fishing in the 3 small ponds we have there, and I’ve tried to take its picture with my long zoom lens. That’s a 40-150mm/f4-5.6 lens, still from the Four Thirds system, which can be used with autofocus on Micro Four Thirds via an adapter. My attempts so far were not very good – that lens was optimized for phase autofocus from a DSLR, so focusing it with the mirrorless cameras’ contrast autofocus is kind of slow.

So today, looking at the birds outside which were eating sun flower seeds from our small bird house, I thought about that lens again. And I knew I could forget autofocus – much too slow for these. So I did what I normally never do: I took my tripod and mounted the camera onto it with that zoom lens set to 150mm, and set the camera to manual focus, and to high speed serial exposures. It can do 7 or 8 images per second that way; forgot (because I usually never do this). So with that kind of “spray & pray” approach, I shot through our window. Every time a bird was landing, eating, and flying away again, I pressed the shutter, and so I got 110 or so images of which I threw away 108 already.

Here are the remaining two, cropped to 1:1 in post:

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Like I said, I usually never do this, but that could be an approach to get a good enough image of our heron, so maybe I’ll take that lens and tripod to the company again.

Thanks for reading and viewing.

Retirement of a dear colleague

Today was the last workday of one of our colleagues from Filenet. His name is Detlef, and he and his whole (now former) team are so-called “mobile workers”, which means that we see them only about once a week, but we do so since we’ve moved into the IBM Frankfurt offices over 7 years ago.

Heike (Detlef’s team lead) and her team set up a champagne breakfast and invited our team as well, so I offered to take a few photos. I cannot show all of them, but here are some from today’s event:

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It was fun having Detlef around, and I certainly wish him a nice and well-deserved retirement time. We hope to hear from him once in a while…

… and as always, thanks for reading.

Some photos from film, and some of today

Got my colour negative film back from the lab, together with all images on a CD. Here are some of them:

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That last one is from after our holidays, when I wanted to test my 50mm/1.4 lens wide open. The earlier two are likely from spring this year.

Today we went to watch “Finding Dory” in our local 3D cinema. There I took this one with ISO 2500:

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And while setting up some lights and background for more photos, Tuna the cat jumped onto Zuleikha’s piano chair. So I photographed the cat with room light, also at ISO 2500:

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But I wanted to test some lighting setup – so here are some where I used 3 flashes / strobes. Edited only the Exif data, so the photos are like out of camera:

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Zuleikha, Hornist
November 2016

As always, thanks for viewing and reading.

Two cameras, two lenses, two subjects

Yesterday I was in Darmstadt, where I met some other photographers and models from the Model Kartei (see link in my side bar). It was really nice, and I’ll probably take some new photos with some of them soon.

Other than that, I didn’t take any mirror shots in the company’s lifts since a while. Which is why I’ll show you two here:

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Long time no selfie… (Olympus E-M10 with 25mm lens)

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Dark territory (Olympus E-PL5 with 14mm lens)

The light in these lifts is extremely crappy, which is why you have to under-expose shots like these – otherwise your head would be burned into oblivion. But I like challenges, so sometimes I still do stupid stuff like that.

And finally, here’s Tuna, our cat again. Same camera and lens as in the second lift photo, but here at ISO 2500:

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Tuna the cat

That was with our LED light in the corner as you can guess if you read here regularly. The image is a bit auto-cropped because of rotation in post-processing, but otherwise it’s not too noisy, and fully usable. Not too bad for a camera which was designed 4 years ago already.

As always, thanks for reading.