A New Look at August Sander’s ‘People of the Twentieth Century’ – New York Times, Lens blog
Good one…
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
Long time no selfie… (Olympus E-M10 with 25mm lens)
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:
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.
A nice Sunday walk
I decided to end my free week like it had begun – with a nice walk. Alone this time, through the woods, and with only one camera and lens. Here are some images I took during my walk, which I all left in black & white:
As always, thanks for viewing.
Using my compact flash
It’s definitely getting dark earlier, and getting bright later already here in the Northern hemisphere. No wonder in the middle of autumn, and with winter approaching soon.
That leaves you with a problem when photographing indoors – either accept very bad light (and thus, quality) in your “available light” photos, or make some light when and where you need it.
Setting up the studio strobe(s) is quite a long process tho, and we don’t own any compact TTL flashes – only inexpensive but very nice and reliable Yongnuo YN460-II models. And because even measuring the light is an additional step which takes some time and action, I wanted to get used to guessing the right exposure again. Turns out that I’m not that bad, I’m usually correct within 1 stop or so.
To try it out, I took two:
Tuna the cat, October 2016, bounced flash (f/2, flash on 1/8th power) and
Remarkable – Zuleikha reading, October 2016 (f/2.2, flash on 1/4 power from across the room)
I’ll continue to do that, and maybe get some more of these flashes. The experience and the knowledge always pay off when using them somewhere else as well.
As always, thanks for reading/viewing.
My free week is half over…
I have a week off of work, but since we don’t visit anybody and the weather isn’t that nice, I spend most of it at home.
So since our last Sunday walk, most of the photos I took so far were also from our home. At least I used all of my cameras, several different lenses, and even the polarizer filter which you still can’t emulate after taking your pictures. Here are some taken since Sunday, just for the reference:
You are next… (E-PL5 with the 14mm/2.5 lens)
While photographing a plant, I was watched… (E-M10 with the 25mm/1.4 lens and a polarizer)
Tuna the cat, looking out (E-M10 with the 25mm/1.4 lens and a polarizer)
Pegs (Clothespins) – “shooting” the DSLR (E-520 with the 40-150mm/4-5.6 lens at 150mm, 1/40th of a second, hand-held)
Occupation: box tester (E-M10 with the 25mm/1.4 lens)
I also filled the remaining few photos on an ISO200 colour negative film; a cheap one from the grocery, and I brought away that film for development already. With this I used my OM Zuiko 50mm/1.4 lens wide open for these last shots – I wanted to see its quality again. But as always when using film, that has to wait a bit. After I have these photos back, I’ll decide what to do with the three black & white Kodak 400TX (Tri-X) films which are still waiting to be used.
Anyway, thanks for reading/viewing, as always.
Qotd for October 24th, 2016
“Debian may not talk a lot about security, but then fish rarely talk about water, either. “
(Bruce Byfield in “Why Security Distributions Use Debian” on Datamation. Found via LXer)
A short Sunday walk, and another self portrait
We’re using Google’s “Fit” on our smart phones, and today Zuleikha wanted to have a short walk to count her steps. So that is what we did, and while doing so, I took her picture using my Olympus E-PL5 camera with the 14-42mm “kit” lens:
In the end, both Zuleikha and Mitchie went a bit further than me, they both had around 7,000 steps. I had a few less as you can see:
And now that Zuleikha went to bed already, I took another “selfie” using the smart phone. As a trigger only, the E-M10 camera and the Panasonic 25mm/1.4 “Leica”-branded lens took the photo, with a little help of one of my studio strobes:
As you can see, the small LED reading light behind me was switched on, so without that flash I would have been a dark silhouette only.
Thanks for reading.
“Selfies”
This week I’ve got my first “smart” mobile phone ever. I’m still not sure if I need such a device (who would?), but since I have it, I could as well try to take some advantage of it.
The newer one of my two cameras has WLAN and can act as an access point for such a phone or tablet device, so you can share photos vie these mobile gadgets or use them the other way ’round to act as a remote control for the camera. Which is exactly what I did yesterday, first in the office:
and later at home:
These look a bit different than your usual “selfie”, because you don’t grab the imaging device itself, only the remote. Plus you can of course use all the controls of such a better camera, and like in the second photo, even studio strobes (camera-external flashes).
Such an “external viewfinder” – in my case with a 5″ screen diagonale – is fun, and much better than the infrared remote which I have for my DSLR. Like on the touchscreen of the camera itself, you just poke yourself in the eye (or tip onto any other point you want to have sharp) to select both the autofocus point, and to trigger the camera (and flash and whatever). This could also be used for shy animals, who would possibly approach a camera, but only if there’s no human behind it.
Real fun.
Thanks for reading.