gesticulation, a very important way to underline your spoken words.
52mm wild goose
indeed, wild life photography with a 52mm full-frame equivalent is challenging: one has to go low, move slowly and act fast. follow these rules and you will get decent results of photographing any animals, even on a cemetery in the middle of a metropolis like hamburg. to make things even more difficult, i neither fed the geese nor cropped the image...
btw: if you are still not sure about the necessity of a well-executed post-processing - which imho is especially necessary in cases of working under hard conditions (shooting wide opened; foggy, dull scenery; both true today) - you might be interested in the look of the result out of camera; the jpg-file straight from raw, processed in lightroom without any tweaks. it's clearly visible, that not only the white balance is far off the reality, although i intentionally exposed the image to the right. in addition, i put another version, a black and white conversion aside, which for my taste turns up a bit too harsh.
cut riverbank
principally there haven't been many - relevant - changes here in hamburg during the last years. everything feels, as if we haven't been away for such a long time; we still feel at home with the urban environment.
under the door frame
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...