Under a blue light…

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Under a blue light…

… and a self-drawn Malaysian flag, Zuleikha played one of the nicest melodies which were ever written:

a Polovtsian Dance from Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor

see it here, here, or here.

Thanks for viewing.

Zuleikha: playing. Cat: sleeping.

Some hour or so ago:

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Zuleikha: playing. Cat: sleeping. (Me: using my Olympus E-520 camera with the 40-150mm zoom lens, manually focused. In-camera b&w setting used.)

Thanks for viewing.

Countershot

Yesterday Zuleikha took my picture while I took hers:

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Panasonic TZ7. E-PL5 with 45mm lens at f/2.

Haven’t seen her photo yet. But who knows – maybe she’ll blog about it as well?

Thanks for viewing.

Late Sunday portrait

Zuleikha, just a few minutes ago during dinner:

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Zuleikha, August 2014

I removed the background I usually place at that door, since here I did want to see the reflection (of my studio strobe) on the glass. And perhaps with the exception of the door handle, it makes a nice frame for her in my opinion.

Thanks for viewing.

Workflow variations

Today I decided to live without autofocus. I started in the company in the morning, and I was particularly interested in how this manual focusing would work together with face- and/or even nearest eye detection.

Well, using face detection works pretty well. The camera recognizes the person in the photo, and if you have focus assist switched on, the image in the viewfinder will be zoomed in up to 14x as soon as you move the focus ring. It will jump back and show you the whole picture if you don’t turn it for a moment, or if you half-press the shutter. With real manual lenses you’ll have to zoom in yourself, otherwise it’s the same. Without face detection turned on, you’ll have to move the focus point yourself first – on my little “Pen” camera I could even do this with a tap onto its rear display.

So it’s pretty easy to focus on eye lashes for instance. This isn’t sharpened at all (I rarely do that since a while):

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Zuleikha, August 2014. Olympus E-PL5 with Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4 at f/1.4, manually focused through the VF-2 viewfinder.

It’s fun to leave the automatics behind, and it makes you stop and think a little bit more before pressing that shutter.

Thanks for reading.

Selamat Hari Raya

So – Ramadan is over, and if you’re interested you can read about it in Bahasa Melayu, Bahasa Indonesia, Arab, or in English or even in German.

We’ll take some family photos for Mitchie to send home today, and to test my lighting setup I took a photo of some blueberry muffins which she and Zuleikha made yesterday:

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Blueberry muffins. Olympus E-PL5 with Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4 lens at f/9. Flashes with beauty dish (main) and softbox (fill). Cropped 5:4 in post.

Thanks for viewing.

Early Sunday morning portrait

Zuleikha got up while I was still fumbling around with my cameras and other gear, so of course I also took her photo:

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Zuleikha, July 2014. Olympus E-520 with 40-150mm lens at 58mm. Simock E300 studio strobe bounced over wall & ceiling.

Thanks for viewing.

Two photos *not* taken by me

Got a free haircut today from Mitchie (thanks!), and shortly after that she also took my picture in front of my storm grey, and lit by my beauty dish:

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Wolfgang, June 2014

After that it was Zuleikha’s turn, who until then had helped with holding a reflector on the shadowy side (and I took her part here):

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Zuleikha, June 2014

Then Zuleikha took a picture of her Mama which I cannot show here, tho it’s one of the best portraits of Mitchie that we have. It’s always the interaction between photographer and model, and that shows…

Anyway, thanks for viewing.

Going to school…

Today is a public holiday here in Germany, and so we took the chance to try the way to Zuleikha’s new school, which she’ll have to go each day starting from September. It’s two stations with a train, and some additional with a bus or by bicycle.

On our way back from that other city, I took a photo of Zuleikha during our train ride:

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Zuleikha, June 2014

Thanks for viewing.