taller by three heads than normal, but despite that these two actors were cheerful and seemed to feel good, when i met them on my way to the toilet in a huge mall in hamburg-altona. their positive mood might have been down to the fact, that their duty was over and they were looking forward to undress the costumes.
working next to the river
one has to work like a horse, the other one is looking forward to his immediately starting harbour tour. usual scene from everyday life, also and especially here in hamburg.
home through a window
she's going home, but we don't (want to) leave hamburg, not yet.
channel romance
every now and then everyone should test new approaches: although i'm usually not one for hdr post-processing, in the course of a functional test of the nik software package installation on my new ultrabook the sample above of a channel in hamburg's new town turned out that well, that i wanted to keep and show it here on the blog as well.
horrorween
my recipe for decent halloween party pics:
- dress ostentatious and in this particular case you won't attract any attention,
- don't pre-announce your presence, which makes all the guys act naturally and (almost) artless,
- take your widest option, use the lens wide open at largest aperture,
- always bounce the flash to the ceiling, work in shutter priority or manual mode (despite the short focal length you should try to keep the shutter speed faster than 1/60th of a second for indoor party pics),
- select mid-balanced exposure metering mode, exposure compensation -0.3 to -0.7ev,
- deactivate the autofocus and set the focal distance to minimum,
- tilt the screen for a pov from far above; always use this angle for a special, scary look,
- focus and shoot the most interesting guys just by varying the distance to the subject,
- show the subjects the (first) results on the camera screen,
- whet the appetite for the final results by shortly (!!!) describing the possibilities of an appropriate pp,
- don't forget to share the contact information... for your amusement in 2014!
btw: absolutely great costumes, folks! we had a lot of fun last night! cu all in 2014!
hafencity
hafencity is a completely newly constructed quarter in the heart of hamburg, located directly next to the riverside and hosting a lot of futuristic workplaces and modern homes. since i've missed its erection during the last years, an extensive walk across the flagship of the contemporary hamburg was mandatory for me.
you might have already heard of the elbe philharmonic hall, which is the lighthouse within the whole, basically very expensive and critically reviewed urban development project.
hamburg hipster
german hipsters usually socialise in berlin, but apparently every now and then one of them becomes lost and strands in a trendy bar in hamburg...
peak-to-peak
in the meantime the buildings, that surround hamburg's new, "dancing towers", are completed, too. although the geometries do not coincide to a perfect symmetry, the reflections invited me to extend my image section and get a wider angle of view here.
light survey
so here we are now again, back in our former and highly likely future home town, hamburg. we are going to have some days of city exploration and want to use the time to get used to the current influences, too. first of all hamburg's people are in the center of my attention: how have they changed since the last couple of years and did they change at all? today i had optimal conditions for an undetected observation of this type - hurricane christian was approaching and distracted the already busy humans with its wind speeds up to 160 km/h, even 193 km/h were measured by the seaside. i thought about different appropriate possibilities to document the various kinds of citizens, while tina was extensively looking for new books in a huge store in the heart of the city shortly before closing time. in the end i decided to take an approach with respect to the privacy of each of them, photographing the people in front of an illuminated shop window of a decadent hamburgish brand. the backlight and proper exposure should make for graphic outlines here, i wanted to get calm surfaces and keep the persons' anonymity.
besides that i wanted to lead the attention exclusively to the actors, so that I chose an equal point of view for each of the shots, photographing from the hip with a tilted screen. i set the camera to f5.6, ISO1600 and 1/500th of a second (except for the photos with blurred motion, which were shot with f11 and 1/8th of a second) and froze the exposure to obtain exactly similar looking results. so i stood there leaning at a cycle stand for round about one hour and fired and fired.
i think the results are pretty interesting: although i wasn't able to capture all the scenes i initially had in my mind, i got a decent, significant assortment of characters on their way to wherever. the four film strips below include the expressions and gestures of various kinds of humans, that all have passed my line of view within one hour at this particular, stormy evening. well, i have to admit, that the assortment is not significant in terms of quantity: i took exactly 300 pictures, and at least the half of the people i photographed were smoking or fiddling with their mobile devices...
btw: the new automatic upright function of lightroom 5 made the post-processing of this many samples a lot easier for me. good feature, adobe! click on the images below for a better view and let me know, what you think about my fast attempt to portrait hamburg's people.
analogue impressions
today i can quote myself and show you two primitive collage-like scans of some funny festival shots from my diana mini with iso 400 up to 3200 films:
i finally got my prints of rockamring and rocknheim photos! i'm so happy, documentation of damn good moments :) pic.twitter.com/fPPd48hWn6
— t.r.s.h.p.t.r (@trashpater) October 16, 2013
last sunday i visited an exhibition about steve mccurry, title "overwhelmed from life": he's a well-known american photojournalist; his most famous photograph, which is moreover the most recognised photograph in the history of national geographic magazine at all, is afghan girl. mccurry's works focus on his exceptional ability to reproduce the consequences of war, not only showing what war impresses on the environment, but rather on the human face. i have to admit, that i have rarely seen such great photos yet!
i strongly recommend anyone who stops by an exhibition venue to invest some hours to go into the displayed material. trust me, it'll be a great inspiration for your photographic mind.