Wolfgang Lonien – Page 142 – Music. Photography. Thoughts.

January 25, 2016

I agree with Downbeat, about Marilyn

At work I’m just listening to Jan Garbarek’s “Rites” CDs again to blend out some background noise with something not as disturbing, so I can keep concentrating.

And as always, I’m most impressed by that music, and by the musicians. The drummer is exceptional – it’s Marilyn Mazur. The Wikipedia page states:

“Down Beat has on six occasions rated her No. 1 Jazz Performer”

– and they’re so right. Wonderful music, wonderful musicians.

The photo of her is © by Hreinn Gudlaugsson, under a CC 4.0 license.

Thanks for reading.

January 24, 2016

Piano practice

I wanted to show you that according to my last howto about mixed light, you can apply this to real photos (instead of taking photos of empty chairs only):

Piano practice. Zuleikha, January 2016

Like described in my previous howto, I did the following:

1. I set my camera to manual exposure. It will default to ISO 200, and to 1/160th of a second.
2. Since this isn’t enough exposure for the ambient light in the evenings and in our flat, I opened the lens fully to f/1.4, and set the time to 1/13th of a second. The camera showed -2EV underexposure with this setting.
3. White balance on Custom White Balance 2, like applied and described in my last post.
4. Now I mounted my Yongnuo compact flash (YN-460-II) directly onto my camera, Roscosun 85 gel in front of it, and pointed it upwards against the ceiling.
5. Lowest power setting on the flash – I only wanted a small “kiss” of light from this one, to get Zuleikha’s face lightened up a bit against the surrounding.
6. Take your shot(s).

In “post production” (you *do* shoot raw, n’est-ce pas?), I corrected that CWB2 to about 200 Kelvin less, with tint setting +1 in the direction of amber (instead of green). In my eyes and on my calibrated monitor that looked more natural than the warmer setting I had before. I also corrected the tonal curve to brighten up the lower midtones a bit.

Like usual, I put in some title and tags using RawTherapee. Done. Upload to Flickr and insert it here to write this article about it.

To learn this and much more, consider reading David Hobby’s Strobist site. Go at least through his 101 course which costs absolutely nothing (not even a subscription or login). Then get some cheap lights (like my 40$/€ Yongnuo), and get going. It’s fun – and like someone once said, if you take a picture, you might as well try to take a good one.

Thanks for reading.

January 22, 2016

Cameramen

It all began when my colleague Arno asked me about a camera. And this time his question was about a real camera, a Sony A6000.

Well, I told him, that one is at least as good as mine – its autofocus should be way faster especially on moving subjects, the sensor is APS-C, so a bit bigger, dynamic range could be better, whatever – you know the drill. No built in image stabilization was the only contra argument I could memorize without comparing actual spec sheets. Oh, and – how many – 20 Megapixels? Anyhow, more than enough of these as well. The fact that it’s not too expensive – in the same ballpark like an E-M10 or -Mark2 – was an additional plus. Everybody’s darling, I told him, and that he should get one if he saw a good offer.

A week went by, then another one, and finally I asked if he bought it, and he said no. He still wanted to make financial plans for this year together with his CFO 😉

In the end I decided to lend him my Olympus E-PL5 together with its kit zoom and the VF-2 electronic viewfinder. That would still leave the E-M10 in my bag, so I could live with that for a while.

Well, it never actually happened. He was about to take the camera – which he put into a bag first – into his car after having a smoke together with me, but he forgot to take his car keys, so we stood outside, smoking, bag with camera in his hand.

“See?”, he asked, adding “I guess I would never take that camera with me, it’s just too big, you cannot put it into a pocket, so it would probably stay at home all of the time”.

Ok I thought, thinking about alternatives. If my camera was out of the game, then so was the A6000 he had asked about, and I recommended a Sony RX-100 instead.

“Ask Basti”, I said, “he has one. First generation, they should be quite affordable by now”. Short internet check when we were up again – yep, slightly above 300€, fits. And Basti offered to bring his camera as well, so Arno could have a look before making a decision.

And that is what happened today. “Perfect”, was Arno’s comment, “that is the camera I want”. And so during our lunch break we took some photos:

Cameraman (my colleague Arno, trying Basti’s – or Nadine’s? – camera on me)

He really seemed to like that thing. While I took one photo of him, he took three of me (and several more):

Don’t directly compare these with the one I took. The Sony pictures are out of camera, while I “developed” mine from the Olympus raw file (.orf). Plus I had the 45mm/1.8 M.Zuiko lens on my camera – the Sony has a very good Zeiss zoom, but it can’t be opened that wide – and it’s of course way shorter to fit the 1″ sensor inside that camera.

Still, pretty good detail as far as I can tell – and these should have detail, 20 Megapixels of them. More than enough, like I told him.

Always glad if I can help. And thanks to Nadine and Basti who helped as well.

Thanks for reading.

January 22, 2016

Cyber attack warning

Lego Mindstorms robots might have a problem if you have their EV3 control computer connected to a network. Original message is from Heise (in German, Google-translated version is here). Seems like Bashlite is attacking these, building some botnet with them.

So should you have Lego robots with that EV3 computer, it might be a good idea to scan your own network, and/or to block port 23 (telnet). Should your school have these, inform the teachers as well.

January 20, 2016

sifi

Just finished a portrait shooting with a male model who uses the artist name sifi. It was a too short portrait session in the limited space of our living room, so next time we’ll go into a studio where there’s more space, so we can show some of his great tattoos.

Here are two of the portraits we made:

Sifi

Technical: I converted both photos into black & whites and simulated an orange filter in front of my camera. For the first of the two photos I also simulated Kodak Tri-X 400 film. For both I used my Olympus OM-D E-M10 camera with the M.Zuiko 45mm/1.8 lens at f/4.5. The light on the first photo was one of my studio strobes into a big umbrella, the second with the same hard and gridded light I used on myself yesterday.

Thanks for viewing.

January 19, 2016

Hard light

One test setup for a portrait session tomorrow. Hard, gridded single light. Simulated Ilford FP4 Plus 125 b&w film. White table cloth from underneath. Black background. Cropped 5:4.

Self portrait

Thanks for viewing.

January 17, 2016January 17, 2016

Howto: mixed light

Modern cameras have more than one setting for saving a custom white balance – my Olympus E-PL5 has two, and my OM-D E-M10 (first generation and still a marvelous camera) has four. And if you want to mix flash with ambient and warm lighting, you should make use of that.

In my cameras, I have the custom white balance 1 set to my studio strobes, and custom white balance 2 set to my Yongnuo compact flash with a Roscosun 85 (3401) CTO gel. That’s one of the companies who make colour gels for film, and they offer a cheap strobist kit for the rest of us. If you want to mix your flash with surrounding available light, one of these gels will lower the colour temperature of your flash from 5500K to 3200K which gets you into the territory of “warm” lights which are used just about everywhere.

This is how to do it with Olympus cameras:

Set up a grey or white target, and set your camera to custom white balance two (or one if you do it without using that gel). Then put the gel in front of your compact flash, and press the info button on your camera. The camera now asks you to shoot your target, so do it. If you have a small target – I use the Colorchecker Passport which fits in any camera bag – then this is best done with the 45mm/1.8 lens or with a kit zoom at its longest setting of 42mm (for Olympus cameras, yours might be longer). The target does *not* have to be in focus (in fact it’s an advantage if it isn’t), but it should fill the frame. After shooting your target like that, the camera will ask you if you want to save this custom white balance. Say yes. Done.

If you then take another normal test shot, still with the orange gel in front of your flash, your target should look pretty neutral, like this:

Grey target with Roscosun 85 (3401) CTO

Now you can use your flash for mixed lighting, so raise your exposure time to catch some of that as well (aperture controls flash exposure, and time controls the rest). It may look like this:

Mixed flash (CTO) and ambient (LED)

Here the bounced flash with CTO gel in front of it lit the table and chair, and the wall to the right. The background is an LED light in our kitchen, maybe 2 stops underexposed. This still has some green tint as you can see, but it’s lots better than if you used the flash without gel, and with the camera set to daylight or flash or around 5500K. If you really need precision, you can still fine-tune between both light sources, or if you *have to* nail it, then use flash for the background as well, and forget about the gels.

But this is a quick and useful technique if you’re out in the pubs or other environments, and want more or less proper colours not only for your main targets (persons for instance), but also for the background.

You can do lots more with these gels, so try them out. A ‘strobist kit’ isn’t that expensive, and can work wonders for whatever you might have in mind.

Hope that this is useful to someone.

Happy experimenting, and, as always, thanks for reading.

January 15, 2016January 16, 2016

Cat in a box

Thanks for viewing.

P.S.: this photo was just “explored” on Flickr – so thanks for each view, and for each comment and/or click on “favorite” there as well!

January 13, 2016

Trying my 25mm lens for product shots, and for portraits

I’m still thinking about Michael Johnston’s OC/OL/OY project. And my last images like Tuna through the sewing machine, or my self portrait were taken with my 25mm lens which would fit his recommendation of a “fast fifty (equivalent)”. Here are some from yesterday and from today, all using a studio strobe as the main light:

Finder scope

Zuleikha

I was also reading about the life of Vivian Maier, whose real name probably should have been Vivian von Maier. She used a Rolleiflex medium format 6x6cm camera as soon as she could afford one, so two of my three images above are square as well. Found her story via the New York Times Lens Blog, which is required reading, or at least always interesting.

Thanks for reading my blog, as always.

January 11, 2016January 11, 2016

Self portrait

Played around with my camera, had no idea what to “shoot”, so I took a photo of myself:

Self portrait, January 2016

Technical info:

I used my camera on a tripod, and let it focus onto the middle of the chair. Then I set it from “AF” to “MF” so that it wouldn’t change the focus anymore. Set the self timer to 12 seconds and pressed the button, then went around and behind the chair and looked into the camera. Oh, and this was ISO 3200 and 1/8th of a second with the lens fully open at f/1.4 – I was lit (from left to right) by a very dim kitchen light, my computer monitor, and the light you see on the right between the sofas.

Thanks for viewing.