clashing horns

April 06, 2013 in 50, action, agriculture, animal, b+w, bermatingen, bokeh, candid, contrast, countryside, eyes, face, germany, grain, hair, light, nature, nex 7, old photo, portrait, sel, shadow, sony

a few weeks ago i stumbled upon google's nik collection discount: only 149$ for six pretty useful lightroom plug-in applications, srp actually round about 500$, that sounded too good. go for it!

today i'd like to show a first result, that was processed with the newer version of silver efex pro - i had used the predecessor for a while, too - and explain, with which workflow the shown sample, that was photographed today a few minutes on foot away from our home, was edited by me: firstly the import in lightroom, application of lens correction, convertion to tiff and transfer to sharpener pro 3 (part 1) for raw pre sharpening, in between buffering in lightroom, transfer to silver efex pro 2 and main editing, again fransfer to sharpener pro (part 2) for final output sharpening and finally export the image from lightroom to jpg. pooh, and all that with my good old laptop... i'm going to familiarise myself with the new software during the coming weeks and i will surely publish more samples.

cornet hopper

April 04, 2013 in 35, b+w, bar, bokeh, candid, contrast, face, germany, grain, indoors, light, night, nex 7, old photo, people, portrait, restaurant, sel, shadow, sony

time has come: winter has finally gone here at lake constance, spring is bypassed and we'll fluently proceed to summer, hopefully. such being the case we indulged in the first ice cream today, although almost zero degrees made it harder for us to enjoy the refreshment.

dark corner

March 12, 2013 in 50, architecture, b+w, building, corridor, darkness, facility, grain, mood, nex 7, night, old photo, ruin, sel, shadow, sony, street, townscape, trip, urban, wall, window, portugal, lisbon

at the moment i prepare for my trip to berlin next week. needless to say that besides the actual planning of the main - the day - activities, what is, of course, the most important and time-consuming issue of preparation this week, i already long for the dark side of berlin in my spare time.

let's see how many of the daily 24 hours will be left for wandering about the townscape. till then i delight in a so far not shown street shot from the dark suburbs of lisbon.

kitchen nook

March 12, 2013 in 8, action, architecture, atmosphere, colour, darkness, dinner, fisheye, germany, home, indoors, kitchen, light, nex 7, old photo, orange, people, personal, portrait, sony, vintage, walimex samyang rokinon, wash, vegetables

this is the functional part of our kitchen. the room per se is very large, but most of the time the action takes place in the shown corner. to make matters worse, there is a guy who - instead of helping the chef - runs around with his camera all the time... well, who might that be?

swiss traveller

March 10, 2013 in 35, atmosphere, b+w, candid, contrast, darkness, germany, grain, nex 7, night, old photo, people, portrait, sel, sepia, shadow, sony, street, townscape, trip, urban, railstation, friedrichshafen

sometimes travelling people show unusual modes of behaviours. the man in the centre of my today's image carried a very heavy case, which, to his sorrow, had to be hefted upstairs on the platform to reach the trains.

after tina had drawn my attention to his troublesome ascent, i asked him if i can help... he answered with a swiss accent and without even looking at me that it's no problem for him to carry his case by himself. ok, whatever. although i won't go as far as tina, who presumed with a bit of black humour, that he probably carried any parts of dead bodies in his case - hopefully not! - i think, that his autarky has to do with either his attitude towards germany / germans or lived independence in old age.

however that be, i took to him.

fun ride

March 09, 2013 in 50, action, car, facility, fun, germany, nature, nex 7, old photo, people, sel, sepia, sony, street, urban, vintage, water, brown, colour, mtb, bicycle, mud, markdorf, wash

although today's story isn't about a separate business - like the title may suggest - we had to make use of one at the end of two hours of unresisted bathing in deep mud. at this season it is a common procedure that all the local (mountain) bikers wash their bicycles in the car wash in markdorf. this being the case, we didn't attract any attention yesterday, even though our heavily speckled appearance should have been extraordinary enough...

frizzled

March 07, 2013 in 35, architecture, art, b+w, building, facility, germany, grain, monument, nature, nex 7, old photo, pattern, sel, sepia, shadow, sony, tree, window, salem, branch, wall

the castle garden of salem is a jewel in southern baden's cultural landscape. ancient architecture comes upon aged nature. in the scene above i especially liked the repetitive frizzles of the branches and the decoratively painted window frames.

approach for feeding

March 05, 2013 in 50, art, atmosphere, b+w, backlight, candid, contrast, germany, grain, hair, lake, lake constance, light, minimalistic, nature, nex 7, old photo, people, portrait, sel, shadow, sony, street, sun, hagnau, seagull

finally it's possible to work with backlight again. frontlighting is currently one of my favorite stylistic devices when it comes to composing candid street photographs. there are two, main reasons why very strong and bright backlight seems to be useful for a street photographer: firstly the subjects are often dazzled with the (sun-)light and thereby the people have their own issues to deal with. secondly the backlight makes for very hard contrasts, that support a clear graphical structure in your frame, only if the composition is suitable, of course.

driving all night

March 02, 2013 in 35, b+w, candid, car, contrast, corridor, darkness, deeper meaning, germany, grain, light, nex 7, night, old photo, sel, shadow, snow, sony, street, winter, truck, blur, action, movement

have you ever thought about the peculiarities of an engagement as a long-distance truck driver? considering the unfavourable boundary conditions i have great respect for this profession. it's not just that the family men are mostly not at home to wake the children in the morning or to put the kids to bed in the evening (like pilots, mariners, soldiers and probably a good many other professionals, too), in return they bring in only very little money. due to the schengen agreement the average wages for truck drivers still decrease since the east european drivers do the same job with less grumble for less money.

cuteness overload

March 01, 2013 in 35, b+w, candid, face, germany, fun, grain, home, nex 7, portrait, sel, sony, indoors, cat, kitty, pet, animal, whiskers, vintage, old photo, eyes

as long as the weather will stay that grey and misty, our sweet kitty nila won't leave the flat very often. as a consequence we have to look after and play with her more often than usual. even so we are easily able to tap into her cuteness.