Mera Luna 2008

The M'era Luna was quite a nice opportunity to take a lot of photos of a lot of different folks. Unfortunately press often only looks at the most appealing and most dramatic individuals of the scene, so I decided to shoot the whole diversity of people listening to all these strange kinds of music presented at this festival.
As I arrived with some quite special group (btw: thanks for everything!!!) I was one of the first visitors and had the opportunity to get a glimpse of the Airport area in Hildesheim before, during and after the festival took place. Hence, I did some funny documentation shots in the beginning, hopefully documenting more than the mere content of the images. Everything begins with replacing your normal shoes with heavy boots...whereas for some people the party already started the night before... :)



In the festival area I began with shooting people (*harhar*) all around on Saturday, but very soon I recognized that I do not like all these shops in the background, other people looking at the camera, dixie toilets in every corner, and all this nasty stuff. Yes, I do know: This is festival atmosphere. But do you know what? Reality sucks. This kind of festival atmosphere is just not beautiful. After shooting at the sky (and compensating shutter times appropriately) for a while I found a white tent which I spontaneously used as a cheap studio background. The nice thing about this tent was that it was standing right in the middle of quite a huge market where people where shopping all around. I also started to use the on-camera flash with manual settings, making sure that the tent is homogeneously white in the background. So I relaxed, leaned back and just picked the most interesting folks from the crowd, asking them for a small mini-shooting. Be affirmed: This was fun.

My Very First Couple Shooting :)

I recently had a nice shooting with two models, Epi and Renée who had asked me to take some nice gothic photos of them. Of course I could not withstand and we squeezed a shooting into my calendar at the most famous Rheinhafen in Karslruhe. It turned out to be a great idea. I tried to take both nice and "coooool" pictures of them; the latter are rather standard-type gothic photos I have been told. However: Mimicking the standard helps to learn a lot :)
We went to a nice location with a lot of broken concrete walls, adding some kind of "everything is lost"-atmosphere. Unfortunately, I had absolutely no idea which pictures to take - not even a starting point. So we were very spontaneuos - and shot what happened. This is not exactly what I like, because I'd rather prefer to have some kind of concept or topic, so next time (I hope) I will be more careful in creating some concept as I did it with Carmen in the water-shooting.
Technically, I used the two umbrellas mixed up with the ever-changing late afternoon daylight. This wasn't so easy as one of the main problems was that the wind constantly tried to pull over the umbrella stands. We had to invent some heavy construction made from debris in order to stabilize them, but then it was very difficult to move the stands around. Here, I definitely need at least one assistant, helping me out with that kind of truly annoying details. Furthermore, I think about a water-fillable weight construction to stabilize the stands. We'll see. Just not to speak about readjusting the flashes all the time during sunset.
For the postprocessing I played around a lot and I have already been criticized to overdo my job here. I am unsure whether I agree. In detail, I did two things: Firstly, I used this "glow"-effect in which I duplicated the image, blurred the new version and multiplicated it with the first one. This is quite nice but easy to overdo. I think I still like this effect, at least for this shooting. Secondly, I modified levels or contrast and brightness locally in many regions, especially at highlights and in the face. This is very difficult not to overdo and I always tried to keep the whole of the image in mind. The results look in my opinion quite nice - after readjusting a lot of adjustment layers with some days of temporal distance.
In the end there is this dirty old discussion whether one should modify photos at all. Here, I have a clear opinion: reality sucks. I do not at all care whether the image looks realistic in the end. For me, the highest priority lies in the atmosphere and the aesthetics of the result. I think the adjectives I would like to give this shooting are: a bit romantic, slightly melancholic, pictorial, slightly erotic and slightly cheesy. I like the results very much :) Thanks to the models, once again!

My Very First Model Shooting: Carmen

Hey, I am a bloody beginner - as I already stated below - but it was quite a lot of fun to do this shooting with Carmen. On a Saturday we checked out the location and semi-accidentally found this beautiful canal around the Rheinhafen in Karlsruhe. The most intriguing reasons to shoot there were twofold: Firstly, there is a dark underground with a very nice atmosphere and there is this kind of ...err... riverweed that forms beautiful green strings in the water. The following Monday we spontaneously decided to do the shooting. I took tripod and flash umbrellas but it turned out to be useless. The tripod in this kind of shooting makes no sense at all as I was walking and jumping to and fro all the time. The umbrella stands did not make sense in most images due to the water surface which would reflect quite much of the light. On the other hand the polarizer did a really great job to filter out nasty reflections on the water. Unfortunately this place was quite dark and the lens was a 17-85mm EF IS something thing with apertures ranging from 4.0 to 5.6 which was quite slow for these images. In the end I had go up as high as 1600 ISO with the 20D which introduces quite some noise. However. So, technically this was a truly low-level-shooting but therefore quite challenging. Luckily, Carmen is a pro swimmer and she did not complain about her almost pink-blue lips for almost two hours (while I felt perfectly comfortable out of the water :D). What I like about the resulting photos is that they are quite diverse and that I had the luck to capture some really beautiful expressions of the model. I think this kind of shooting was perfect for a beginner, because there wasn't much hardware involved. I just concentrated on the images which we had planned very roughly before I sent her into the water. The post processing was mainly global. I played around with colours, saturations, contrast and stuff, but in most images I did not locally add adjustment layers or something. In a few images I clone-brushed away some annoying grass, but that's it. So even from this side, this was a beginner's task. Personally, I already received quite some good critics, I really hope you enjoy it, too!

My Very First Band Shooting

Recently, I was asked to take photos of a band named Gates of Dawn (Website and Myspace-Profile). I never did something like that before. I did not even try to shoot some semi-professional portraits nor did I have much knowledge about flashes and group photography. Hey, I like their music! So I told them, I would like to do it. And in fact, this really was a lot of fun!
The day before the shooting I received some Strobist stuff I ordered from Midwest Foto Exchange which turned out to be extremely useful: I bought a silver and a white umbrella with umbrella stands the these flash triggers from Gadget Infinity. Great stuff - quite cheap (I paid around €180 including shipping and customs) and very effective.
We drove to a castle near Darmstadt and firstly walked around to see which locations might be cool. In my opinion it is absolutely necessary to first visit the location without models (or with the models but without the intention to shoot anything) - it gives you a lot more time to decide which photos to take and it also gives you a hint on how much time you will need for everything.
We started out with some portraits, then continued with some group shots and then went back again to do some more portraits. I think this also is quite a good idea due to the inherent tradeoff between boredom and action for the grup members. Anyway, I have to say that the band consists of some really cool folks - we had a lot of fun, everything was extremely relaxed and nobody started to argue about what I did and asked them to do. (So, here I have to put a big THANK YOU!)
At night we went out for some really nice dinner and I learned a bit more about the band and hey - they invited me and even insisted to at least cover the costs I had for batteries, driving and stuff. Very nice. Another big THANK YOU :)
At home I started off editing the photos immediately. I played around with different styles starting from black and white to quite desaturated and even orange or antique-brown images. I was quite surprised on what you can get out of well-exposed RAW-images; I am used to these ISO1600-and-still-too-dark-Culteum-Photos, so this was yet another important thing to learn: Never ever shoot in JPG again!
In the end, I took one of the group photos and replaced the background with some dramatic cloudy sky. I guess this is a quite classical way to push the coolness of the band beyond limits...so I am still unsure whether this is an adequate method or just one of these prankster image mods - however, I still like it most :D
The results you can see in the gallery by clicking on the photo above - comments appreciated!