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!

Flashes, Angels and Photoshop

Today I spent the whole day reading the Strobist blog having quite a lot of fun and important insights into how I am going to use my nice 580EX-II correctly. As a result I spent quite a lot of money (about 150 Euros) at some US Shop by ordering some remote triggers for the flash, umbrella stands, umbrellas, color gels, etc. pp. I hope they will arrive soon!
In the meanwhile I had a look at two quite intriguing images. The first one contains some kind of zombie with a lot of cracked skin. I was wondering how the photographer created this nice effect. The second image is just beautiful. I like this sometimes cheesy angel-type of photoshopped women. This one is not cheesy at all, is it? I looked for stock photos of nice wings for quite a while on the web but did not find anything useful. (I guess I still have to improve on this type of search - I just stumbled over TinEye which seems to be a good way to go in future...)
Today I also wanted to try out to use two flashes, triggered by the Canon infrared method. A colleague lent me his Sigma 430EX-something flash which turned out to be perfectly compatible with the Canon 580EX-II.

Thus, the idea was clear: I wanted to create an angel with some severe skin problems and some interesting lighting achieved by the two flashes. On the left you can see the result. I still think I can do better - especially the wings are hand-drawn with different sizes of half-transparent black brushes. If I only had a tablet, I could make this much nicer. Perhaps I will buy one as soon as I have more money.
Ups, sorry. First things first. How did I take the photo? Firstly, I created some space in the living room. I put some diffusor on the camera-mounted 580EX and laid the 430-whatever-Sigma-thing onto the couch, directed upwards with a focal length of 17mm. I did some test shots to make sure there is enough light everywhere, then I invited my model (which will remain anonymous for now ;P - and which unfortunately was a guy) and asked him to pose as you can see in the image. The harsh light from the bottom left gives some dark atmosphere to the image even though it was shot on a white background (I still don't know how to conveniently(!) create a large and smooth enough black background).
The setup was kind of simple, I think. Well, I switched the camera to fully manual and did not use E-TTL-II and such, so I had to adjust all the stuff a little. I figured that the best way to see if things went right is to take the histogram into account - the more intensities I used, the smoother the postprocessing becomes.
Okay, the postprocessing wasn't that hard either. After extracting the subject, I drew the wings. (I still need some practice in extracting the subject from the background...) Then, I google-imaged some very large files containing "dry soil", found some nice images and removed the most interesting parts. The next step was surprisingly simple: I turned the texture to gray and used the Transform tool to roughly rotate and scale the soil to align to the right arm of the model. In the next step I used the Warping function of the Transform tool (right click) and tried to simulate the vaulting of the arm. After I was done, I used the Eraser tool to create some smooth transition between real skin and defect skin. Set the layer mode to multiply. Done. The same I did with the crack in the breast of the guy.
Of course I could not withstand the temptation to add some glow to the angel's eyes in order to make it look more dangerous and surreal.
I think, my next steps will be to more firstly use umbrellas and stands and remote controls for the flashes to more easily adjust the lighting situation. Then I need to focus on object extration by utilizing all the nice tools - people also say that a tablet might help a lot here, too. After this is done, I urgently need to find out how to get more "requisites" from stock photos.
Man, that's a lot of fun!

Once Upon A Time...

Hello World. This is not my first blog entry. I usually show off with the fact that I started a home page in 1997 which I called „online diary“, which is, of course, the first weblog ever. So I am the inventor of Web 2.0 and actually I should earn all the money.

Okay. Next step. I am too lazy (no, of course I am not too incompetent) to program my own new weblog based on php and such stuff. I was really amazed how much things changed since 1997 – it took me just five minutes to set up this blog! Nice.

So why blog? It is kind of strange to write stories which everybody can view and hardly anybody reads. Why do people write blogs? Today I got this impulse and I still can't make much sense of it. So let's try to find a reason on the fly.

People tend to say that they want to share their thoughts, creativity, experiences and stuff. Unfortunately, most people do not have so much to share which can be put down in words in a blog. Me neither. I am just a quite normal guy who could actually do nicer things than writing this nonsense.

Okay, but let's stick to the sharing-type of thing. What does sharing mean? Whenever I share anything I give something to somebody. Hm. Sharing is quite equivalent to giving. I can give things to you people. Do you want it? Probably not. It looks as if I am willing to give something you actually don't want to you guys. Hence, I do not seem to be interested in the fact whether you want what I have to give. Obviously, I am not at all interested in you. Does, therefore, a weblog make any sense?

Of course it makes sense. What do you think?

Firstly, when writing down thoughts, they become much clearer to me. This is an advantage I would also have by not giving anything to „the public“.

So I give something to you. May I expect to get something in return? I guess, I do. People created this „Comments“-Button under each post that hardly anybody ever uses. So? I expect comments. What does feedback do?

Feedback can motivate me. It can demotivate me. Feedback hurts. Feedback helps. Feedback, consumed appropriately, puts me back to reality.

I really have to be sure that the things I would like to share are such that I really want to have feedback on them. And I have to be sure that I use this feedback appropriately.

So, I will share thoughts, creativity, experiences. But only those of which I think they are worth feedback. Yet, there is another problem. Concerning some topics, everybody seems to be an expert. This yields a tremendous variance in the quality of comments and it becomes very difficult to discern which comments make sense and which don't. Such topics especially are social relations, friends, ethics, religion, sex...and photography.

Thus, this blog is dedicated to photography ;P

Here we go (again)...