Back in December I talked about how the best camera is the one you always have with you and showed you several photos I have done with my iPhone. Most of them were taken with Hipstamatic or Instagram since I really love the vintage feel they give a photo. I still love those apps and the look - but for Christmas, I actually take the plunge: I got an analogue camera - yes, really, with a roll of film in the back and everything. I had been playing with the thought for a while now but never took the plunge.
However, when i visited a little store in Frankfurt in December, they were selling some of the cameras by the Lomography Society - which is basically trying to bring back analogue and is reengineering a lot of old camera bodies and also selling the films for them. They are relatively cheap, too (compared to a modern digital that is) and some even come with interchangable lenses!

So for Christmas, I got this beauty, the Diana F+:


If you are thinking: that looks like plastic - that is because it is plastic. This beauty is as mechanic as you can probably get and weighs next to nothing. It doesn’t even need a battery (well, the flash does). It takes 120 film rolls, which can mostly only be found in photography stores, since it’s a format that isn’t widespread anymore and the resulting pictures are squares. It comes with a 75mm lens but you also get a 55mm one as well as a 110mm zoom lens and a closeup lens. Even a fisheye is available. With a camera like that you never know what you results will look like...



At the moment this is still the challenge for me, since you can only set the Aperture (based on a system of weather conditions) and the focus distance. I get the settings wrong way more often than I get it right but that is part of the charm, you never know, what your photos are going to look like and it’s a way more conscious photographing than with a digital - at least for me. You only have so many shots and you want to do the scene you see justice - which can be hard to do when playing with a new toy. But sometimes you succeed with stunning results!



By now the bug has totally infiltrated me, I also now own a Diana Mini (Special Valentines Edition), which takes 35mm film (the one you probably think of when thinking film) and can shoot half-frames, which is half the format of a regular 35mm film photo, which can give interesting results since you can set contrasting images up in one frame (once I get the hang of how much to wind my film). This camera also has taken up permanent residency in my purse....



But part of the fun is also sharing the photos and articles on lomography.com where you can even get points you can use in their online shop to buy new goodies and films (you can register here and get 10 points, which is equal to 10 off in your currency). My next purchase will be the Sprocket Rocket, once I have enough points, which shoots panoramic images on 35mm film and also exposes the sprocket holes on the edges of the film, which I think is a very interesting look.

Tags: Lomography, Lomo, Analogue, Photo

Yesterday the results for the „Best of 2010“ Blog Project were published by Jim and I thought I’d share them here with you, too, like I did last year. Enjoy!

You can find them after the jump Reade More...

Tags: Photo, Project, Best of 2010, Links

Another year has come and gone and it’s time to for another look back at the photos I have taken in the last year. Like last year Jim is doing a Blog Project called „Best of 2010“ in which I want to participate again (My entry last year).

As last year I could not decide on one best photo - especially since I took so many photographs, both at home and during my Roadtrip last summer (for which I still have not wirtten a blog post...). So like last year, I will have several categories in which I will show you my best photos. My favorite for each categorie is larger than the rest - you can see larger versions of all of them by clicking on an image.

Macro

Macro photography has been one of my favorite topics for years now but this year I did not have much time to go to a botanical garden or to spend time shooting in our own garden but still I got some new images I really liked. The thing for me with Macro shots is that I have become very, very picky in my images, since photos can be very similar some times - I’m looking more and more for the unusual than for simple depictions of the flowers.

Insects

Years ago, I wrote a blog post about how hard it is to get a good shot of an insect - it still is but I am getting better and got lots of practice this year with three visits to butterfly gardens.

Animals

I only visited two zoos in 2010, which is almost nothing for me but I got some pretty pictures (I think) - as with the flower Macros I was looking a bit more for the unusual than in the last years.

HDR

Okay, I’ll admit it, I was obsessed with HDRs this year - this was heightened even more with the new versions of Photomatix and HDR Efex Pro, which gives my HDR shots a lot more different looks. I used HDR mainly when I was on vacation, so the photos in this category were taken in the USA (Atlanta, New Orleans, Columbus, MS, Natchez, MS, Vicksburg, MS) and in Germany (Meersburg, Konstanz, Dreieich, Frankfurt). And yes, this is a best of and not all pictures I did take - I just had a hard time deciding, since a lot of memories are connected to these images.

Miscellaneous

These photos did not fit into any one of the categories - either because they are single exposure photos or because I was experimenting at night.



So here they are, my best pictures of 2010. Besides the ones shown, I took a lot of iPhone photos this year (some of which I highlighted in my last post) and started taking photos with a film camera (I got it for christmas, so not much to show yet). So next year there will probably be an even wider range of photo subjects.

Tags: Best of 2010, Photo

... is the one that is always with you. Until recently, that always ment for me that I didn’t take a lot of photos because I did not have my camera with me - because I did not want to always carry my DSLR, especially when I was at college or at work. But now the smartphone cameras are finally becoming serious contenders for great photos. Recent months have seen a spike in iPhone apps which allow you to alter your photos and share them more easily with others (I know that there are some for Android and WinMo, too, but I have an iPhone, so I know most about those ).



This change has led to a change in how most of us are taking photos - because finally, you do have the opportunity to take a photo when something catches your eye, because sometimes the small details or a stunning sunset come totally unexpected and give you a different creative outlet for your photos (I find it pretty interesting, how different the style of some of my favorite photographers is with their phones than with their „big“ cameras).



Besides taking different photos, most of us are sharing those photos differently, too. I’m sure most of you have heard of Instagram by now, an iPhone app that allows you to capture and edit photos on the go with an included network for sharing those photos. I like the app, but really hate the fact that they do not have a way to view photos of your contacts on the web, because I’m not opening the iPhone app regularly. Thankfully, some photographers are sharing their snaps on the web as well, some on Flickr and some on Tumbler blogs. Some examples are Jim’s iPhone (by Jim Goldstein) and MalsoMalso (by Martin Gommel).

I decided to share mine on Tumbler as well, because most often I don’t find them good enough to share them on Flickr but want to share them with you anyways. You can find them at pfenya.tumblr.com or you can add me on instagram under the nick „pfenya“, as always



While I use instagram and some of the apps that let you apply filters to your photos, my absolute favorite is Hipstamatic, which is a digital version of a toy camera with lots of different lenses and film types. The great thing is that you have to decide on your lens and film before you take the photo - which makes it really fun, since you have to be very deliberate in composing your shot and finding out what you want to do with it, which makes for a really great challenge when you love photography.

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I took the photo above over 3 years ago - but only published this version on Flickr a few days ago. Why the long wait you ask? Because I decided to re-process it recently. The photo has been one of those that has shown up on my Screen Savers from time to time and I always thought that I need to open it up again and do a different processing, because I never quite liked the original version I did:



It’s one of those photos were you see the potential but when you’ve been editing photos for a while, you also know that it could be way better and jaw-dropping. But with so many new photos taking up my time (I’m still processing those from my summer holiday...), I never went back to this photo. But it was always in the back of my mind, nagging me. So this weekend I decided to search my archive for it and see what I could do with it - it’s not just the fact that my tastes have changed but also that my processing knowledge has grown, as well as the apps I use (at the time I didn’t even know Photomatix existed!).

Like I said, it had been nagging me, so I knew a fair bit about how the final result was supposed to look like (kind of like when sculptures tell you the stone speaks to them or that they have to free that beaver from within that wooden block). I wanted it to be a bit ominous and for both the stone church and the clouds to have more structure to them. For this I knew that an HDR would probably be a great idea - of course I only had the single image but that’s okay, too, at least as long as you have a RAW file (you could do it from a jpg but I wouldn’t advise you to try). For this I fired up HDR Efex Pro, since I also knew that tonemapping was probably not going to be the final touch for the image (though it gave me some great results, too).
In the end I decided on this very dramatic version with some cross-processing applied and a very strong vignette applied, too, so that the clouds would be very dark and oppressing while still being very interesting (to me at least). But it also focusses the attention towards the church, which has a wonderful structured look and seems to almost glow in comparison to the sky.

The learning here is that it pays to go back to your favorite images from a few years ago (I know, you probably won’t like most of them and will cringe while looking at them). Because oftentimes they are worth a second look and a second try at becoming great and one of your all-time favorites!

How about you? Ever went back to an old image and made it something different?

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Last year I fell in love with Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro and tried out the Complete Collection of their apps and decided to buy all of them as a Christmas gift to myself. I’ve been using them a lot since then and got really excited when I heard that they were working on an HDR plug-in. Of course, the big question that I asked myself, as I am sure countless others did as well, was: how was it going to compare to Photomatix?
I got an early peek at HDR Efex Pro when Nik offered a webinar showcasing the beta version of the app during the summer. I really liked what I saw, especially since it offers you a huge number of visual presets with a lot more options than Photomatix does. Photomatix is the app you process your HDR in and then go into Photoshop or some other collection of filters to get your final results. This got so out of hand for me in the last few months that I, literally, spent hours perfecting a single photo. Granted, the photo was worth it but when you get home with several hundred photos you like from a summer vacation, there is just no time to spent hours on each individual photo.
Another thing I really got to appreciate is the U Point Technology, which is a faster way for changing settings for just an area in a photo without changing the overall look (similar to masking in Photoshop) - this is especially helpful with an HDR where you are almost bound to have some areas you would like to change a bit (e.g. the clouds).



Something they did not show in the webinar, was their Ghosting Technology and I was therefore really looking forward to seeing what they had done in that area, since I am tired of having to go into Photoshop to somehow rescue people strolling through my images. In the new Photomatix you simply highlight the area you have ghosting to reduce or eliminate it, with HDR Efex you get several options for Ghosting (youtube link) and I was really amazed at the results so far, people really were in one piece and they had a subtle HDR effect applied to them - something you lose with masking in from the original image.


I also enjoy the interface with the presets on the left and all your options on the right. Besides the strength of the tone mapping you also get a drop down with several options for the tonemapping, like sharper details or extra halo reduction, which gives you countless options for the look of your HDR. It also gives you the ability to do some advanced editing like adding a cross-processed look to the photo or going B&W in the app. You can even add a vignette in there (which I think is super handy).



I processed several photos these last few days with the new app, simply to get a feel for the options and I really, really enjoy using it. It’s very different from Photomatix but I like the added options and the ease of use of HDR Efex. I’m suddenly plowing through edits again after spending hours to get a similar result before, which is really great for the number of photos I tend to take.


If you want to try it yourself, there is a 15 day trial available for Aperture, Photoshop CS 5 and Lightroom.

(As always, click any photo to see a larger version)

Tags: Photo, HDR Efex Pro, HDR, Processing

Tweet As many of you are probably aware, yesterday night the Perseiden Meteor Shower was visible. Of course I had to go out and try to catch a meteor on a photo. Unfortunately, I didn’t but still I got several beautiful images of the night sky above our house and wanted to share some different images taken with different shutter speeds to show how much the shutter speed changes the lighting in a longtime exposure shot (and the ISO, too).

First of, the different in ISO on the lighting of the sky (please view the large versions to get a real impression of the differences). The first photo was taken at ISO 400, the second at 250 and the third one at ISO 100, as you can see the higher the Iso the more details and light you have in the photo (the 250 is a bit misleading because the camera was positioned slightly more to the right were there are street lamps). But with increasing the ISO you also increase the noise in the image, something that you will have even at a low ISo when you are taking long time exposure photos). Because of that I decided to try the bulb mode on my camera and do even longer exposures.


Bulb mode is the name for photos you want to take at even longer exposures than 30 seconds. With my camera, the Canon 7D, there is an entry for it on the mode dial like there is for shutter priority and aperture priority. When you choose that you simply decide on the aperture, which I set at f4 and then you simply hold down the shutter button for as long as you like. This is best done if you have a remote shutter release, which will usually have the option to secure it so you don’t have to hold down the button the whole time.
With that mode the following four photos were made. The ISO was set at 320 because I felt that gave me a good middle ground between noise and light sensitivity and the shutter speed fluctuated due to my holding down the shutter longer or shorter, since I didn’t time myself, I simply went by feeling. The first photo has a shutter time of 64 seconds, the second is 51 seconds, the third 77 seconds and the fourth 19 seconds.
As you can see, the difference in light and especially ambient light, something I cannot get rid of living in a small city and relatively close to the big airport in Frankfurt (half of our sky is almost invisible to the east due to the light pollution from the airport). I think the 60 seconds is a pretty good middle ground for my area, since the sky is still relatively dark and bluish (all of the shots here haven’t been processed or edited) but you see lots of stars and even a whole lot of small stars you cannot see with your eye from the ground.



One last tip if you go out for such shots: be sure to check your settings and take the lens cap of before you go out into the night.... I went out twice to take photos, the second time I forgot to take the lens cap of for the first shot - had I taken it off, I would have a photo with a meteor in it
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Tags: Photo, Exposure, Adivce

Yesterday I made a small photo excursion to my home town castle ruins because we have some big festivities there at the moment. The weather was faboulos, so i decided to do some HDRs, including some of our old carousel that is being put up for the week. Due to the number of people (and quirks of photomatix) I had to do a lot of work after making the HDR, that I thought might be interesting for beginners in the HDR area.

I started out with these three images (shot handheld):

Like you would expect, the sky is the best in the -2 shot, he people and the ruins in the background look best in the normal exposure photo and the details of the carousel look best in the +2 shot since they are in the shadow due to the roof of the carousel.
Since I had handheld the shots, I decided to use the HDR function of Photoshop 3, which I mainly use for overlaying the images and then used the Photomatix Tone Mapping plugin on the image Photoshop supplied. The result looked like this:

There was A LOT of ghosting since people were moving around and one part of the carousel revolves around itself, so that had been in movement, too - and the noise in the carousel was awful as well, so I decided to do some cleaning of the photo using the lighter two exposures. I added them as layers in Photoshop and aligned them with the tonemapped image so that I could paint in parts of those layers using layer masks. Since I knew I needed several areas of each photo, I decided to keep the original layers untouched and simply duplicate them for the cloning. This has the bonus that you don’t have to mess with your old layer mask when adding a new layer.
As a first step, I decided to get rid of the ghosting of the people in the foreground (all the moving parts etc. are referred to as ghosting) so I duplicated the normal exposure layer and added a black layer mask and used a soft edge brush to reveal the parts of the layer I wanted to use for the people. The result looked like this:

Unfortunately the stone ground lost some of its texture but the people look ley they are supposed to and the foreground looks way less busy, even though there are sill a ton of people. If you look closely, you can see that there were people moving in the carousel as well, so those had to be replaced, too. For this I decided to use the +2 layer, since I wanted the people (and even more the paintings) to be visible. So I duplicated that layer and worked with a layer mask again to paint in the non-moving people, which improves the picture again:

Since you can’t really see it from the zoomed out photo, I did a zoom into the area where most people were standing & moving. This is after cleaning up this part of the image.

As you can see, the people are clearly visible now but the paint job looks like it has been out in the weather for decades because the noise is soo bad. This is mainly due to Photomatix, which introduced a lot of noise into your photo. So you should sometimes clean up very dark or very light areas to get a more even look - and less noise. For this I used the +2 layer, too, since that one had the most details for the paintings.

I think the difference in the zoomed in images speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Here is how it looks like zoomed out:

A lot more details are visible now in the paint job but the trimming on the roof was too dark, so i painted it in from the normal exposure photo to get an even look and, since it is its own layer, I was able to increase the brightness a bit of just that layer to match the overall brightness of the carousel.


As a last step, I cleaned up the lower floor and the horses on it, using the normal exposure photo to get to the final image:
(Links to Flickr where you can find a larger size)

Here is also a look at the different layers I ended up with for the final image): The Cleanup took longer than I usually take the time for my images but I think the results are clearly worth it. I hope this little guide helped you see how some little cleaning up can improve a HDR image. If you have questions - hit the comments!

Tags: Photo, Photoshop, Processing, HDR

Some of you might read the headline/question and immediately think: No way or not with good results. I’m going to try and show you that it is indeed possible and that the results look okay, too.

The HDR image I am going to show you in this post actually happened by necessity: I wanted to capture the sunrise over a snow covered field and was sitting in my car with only my iPhone at hand. I knew that the iPhone could never give me the dynamic range needed for such a shot - not by a long shot - but I also knew that I can influence the exposure through the autofocus system they introduced with the iPhone 3GS. With the new iPhone, you tap on anything on the display and it will focus on that spot and also adjust the exposure to be ideal in that part of the image. With that in mind, I decided to do three different shots with the focus on different parts of the picture: 1) the sun, 2) the sky, 3) the snow. In that minute I wasn’t even thinking of an HDR, just to get a good individual photo (I should add that I was standing at a red light while taking the photos, so I had to be quick).
Here are the three individual photos:


As you can see, this is close to being a row of different exposures you would take with the AEB feature (if I had had the time, I would have added an even brighter one). So what’s next you ask? Well, I know that there are „HDR“ apps for the iPhone but I’m very skeptical of these, so I decided to do all the editing on my Mac. I decided to do the HDR with Photomatix but the differences in alignment were to severe to get good results from Photomatix, so I opened up Photoshop and used its HDR feature to align the images, which did it perfectly. Then I used the tonemapping plugin of Photomatix to do the tonemap of the photo. The results really blew me away!



This is the tonemapped image, which I edited a bit further in photoshop, by cleaning up the stripes in the sky with one of the three original images and by reducing the noise in the image (since it really, really brightened up some of the black parts).

So yes, you really can do a real HDR with an iPhone! Crazy, isn’t it?

(Btw, sorry that comments are currently not working, I’ll try to find a solution soon - the old comment system isn’t free anymore)

Tags: Photo, Photoshop, HDR, Processing, iPhone

As most of you know, I’ve been working a lot in HDR these last few months and Trey Ratcliff’s site Stuck in Customs has been a huge source of inspiration for me for over two years now. His photos are all HDRs and are very artistic without going into the extreme HDR area - he even has a paragraph in his HDR tutorial about how „Friends don’t let friends do HDR on drugs“.
A few months ago, he started talking about publishing a book with the best of his pictures - and I was really excited, because I enjoy his photos so much, so when the book was available for pre-order I ordered my copy. I got it in early January and it blew away my expectations! It includes the best of his photos from the past few years with his descriptions of the photos. His descriptions often include a little story about how the photo came to be but also valuable tips & tricks on how to take a great photo and how to process it. To top it of, he has included his HDR tutorial, which shows his whole workflow for a typical HDR as well as some other reviews of useful apps for photographers. It’s really a great book and you should definitely check it out - even though it maybe sold out in your country’s amazon.

Since Trey publishes his photos under a creative commons license, I will show you my favorites by Trey (all links will lead to the photos on Flickr):


A Farewell to India - The Taj Mahal


Swallowing the Ruins


The Magic of Disney


Notre Dame of Lyon

Tags: HDR, stuck in customs, Photo, Book, Review

I just wanted to add a quick post telling you about the results of Jim Goldstein’s „Best of 2009“ Blog project. It got 123 entries, which is a crazy amount - and includes some very great photos (and I’m only at entry 10, really need to get through the list ).

So here is the link to the list at Jim’s blog

Tags: Project, Blog, Best of 2009, Photo

It’s the time of the year again to look back at the photos I have taken this last year and choose the best ones and present them to you again. Like the last two years, Jim Goldstein is making a photo blog project out of it, collecting entries from all over the globe from photographers.

Last year, I made a Top 10 list and added some honorable mentions. This year I’ll give it a different spin and divide the photos by subject: Flowers, Animals & Insects, Architecture, Panoramas, and Miscellaneous things. Since I don’t want to tax your internet connecting with tons of high resolution images, you can click on any image to see a larger version.

Flowers

Like most years I spent a lot of time doing flower macro shots. Since I spent part of the year in Atlanta, GA, and part in Frankfurt, Germany, I have tons of photos both from the Atlanta Botanical Garden and the Palmengarten in Frankfurt. Both are very much worth a visit and beautiful places to forget that you are in a big, metropolitan city. My favorite of the year is the single rose shot, which is a pretty wide shot for my usual macro photography but I absolutely love the bokeh in the background and the processing that makes it look like an old, maybe hand-colored, photo. The slight blur, by the way, is due to the Lensbaby with which I took this photo.

Animals & Insects

I always love to go to the zoo and photograph animals, their beauty and behavior always fascinate me. Insects can also be very fascinating because you can see much more details with a photo lens than you could with the naked eye but they are a pain to photograph. This year I was only able to fit in thre trips to the zoo, one to the Zoo in Atlanta, one to the Opelzoo near Frankfurt and one to a small zoo specialising in reptiles called Reptilium. Oh, and the jellyfish is from the Georgia Aquarium, of course.
My favorite is the photo of the fly because I think it’s pretty unusual to have the fly looking directly at you while taking a photo - plus the traces of bright yellow pollen.

Architecture

I’ve only really started to get my feet with with architectual photography this year and I am still learning a ton. Most of the time I am drawn to unusual details or unusual perspectives but then I will also have a ton of pure tourist shots. Most of my city photos have been HDRs, I think that a subtle HDR is closer to reality than a single exposure shot of the same scene most of the time.
My favorite of the year has to be this powder tower in Prague. Like the ghosting suggests, it started out as an HDR and then I converted it to a black & white with a lot of contrast. I love how ominous it looks this way - you keep thinking about the evil power of it.

Panoramas

Sometimes you really need a panoramic shot to give a true depiction of the scene before your eyes. I think these panoramas really highlight that. The first shows a small percentage of the graves in the Oakland Cementary in Atlanta and its beautiful old trees. The second is the skyling in Frankfurt during a festival, third is one in Prague and the fourth one is again Frankfurt as seen from one of the skyscrapers (it’s the second skyscraper on the upper panorama - the round one with the antenna on top - the direction of the photo is the same area, too). I love all of them because they are so immersive when you look at them in high resolution. Most were done with 6 or more photos.

Miscellaneous

These photos do not really fit in a category - but I love them nonetheless, especially the photos I took of the fire artists. The light given of by the fire is so super interesting, I think. Those photos are some of which I am most proud of this year, too, since I did not have a tripod or monopod with me, it was the middle of the night and the available light changed suddenly, depending on the tricks they were doing. Two years ago I would have been unable to get any got shots but now I have the knowledge to get photos I like. That’s probably my biggest take-way from photographing this year.

Which one is your favorite? Are you also participating in Jim’s project?

Tags: Project, Photo, Best of 2009

i swear, I'll try to increase my update schedule to more than once a month! I really need to try harder, I've been slacking

Today, I have several small things for you:

Some weeks/months ago I spent a day playing tourist guide to friends in Frankfurt. It was also my first chance to test the Sigma 10-20mm lens I bought two days earlier (yes that trip made me buy sooner). I shared one photo with you but never the whole gallery.

While we are on the topic of Frankfurt, I also spent a day in the local botanical garden in September and took lots of flower macros *yay*. Due to the number of photos, there are two galleries: Flowers and a separate one for Dahlias.

I live in a fairly old town with a real castle ruin and each year we have a fair there, which is always great fun but most years it conflicts with another engagement. But not so this year I got two galleries for you from that: Some photos from the fair using my Lensbaby and at night they had a Keltic Fire Show, which I got some great photos from (if i may say so myself ).

On we go: I spent a long weekend in Prague, Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad) and Marianske Lanske (Marienbad) in September. Truly spectacular cities with tons to see & do and just a dream for photographers. Almost all of the photos in the three galleries I have put online are HDRs from three exposures. I'm in a total HDR phase right now. The galleries are divided by location: Prague, Karlovy Vary, and Marianske Lankse. We spent three days in Prague and then an afternoon in Karlovy Vary and a morning in Mariankse Lankse and i mainly used my new Sigma Wideangle Lens.

Last but not least, I spent a Saturday at a small zoo that specialises in reptiles - you know how much me and my Macro lens love reptiles Here are my best shots in a gallery.

Sorry for dumping so many photos on you - I definitely need to update the blog way more often...

As a last side note (to german readers): Ich "darf" jetzt auch für die Arbeit bloggen und habe nach einer Diskussion über die Qualitätsunterschiede in den Aufnahmen mit einem iPhone und einem Blackberry einen Blogeintrag über das Thema geschrieben auf der Basis der grundlegenden Technik, die solche Unterschiede ausmacht. Für viele Leser hier sicherlich nichts neues, ich wollte es aber trotzdem erwähnen (Die Webseite selbst wird übrigens bald im neuen Design erscheinen).

Tags: Photo, Gallery, Trips, Prague, Frankfurt, Macro, Reptiles