Back on the street

It gets dark early here in Stuttgart in mid-December, but that can't stop me from hitting the streets after work. My eye just has to look a bit harder for light. Yesterday I discovered the treats waiting for me in the street-level shops and restaurants downtown.

Technical stuff (you may skip):

After I watched Jay Maisel and Scott Kelby walk around Manhattan with 70-300mm lenses on their (full-format) cameras, I bought a Sigma 50-200, which is about the same thing. It's OK, but now I've picked up a Sigma 70-300 and it rocks on the street! With my Sony A700, a 300mm lens puts me at the equivalent of 450mm, which is where your super zoom bridge cameras put you when they are totally maxed out. 

What that means is that you can get super close to people across the street from you or on the next corner. It also means you have to hold the camera very steady. The 50-200 has an optical stabilizer built into it, which Sony Alphas don't necessarily need (because they've got the Super Steady Shot built into the body), so you turn off either the OS on the lens or the SSS on your Sony.

On the way to work that morning, I just had to test out the new lens. What crossed my aperture but the perfect frame for "man and his car" scene. Judging from the other cars in this picture, you may not think it snowed much, but I had just finished scraping the ice and snow off our car and can tell you the middle car was, like ours, out all night. In any case, I think the "No parking" signs add a nice frame to this winter work-out.

Two Santas

If you haven't been to Stuttgart's Christmas market, you should go just for the smells! The food never tastes as good as your ol' olfactory makes you think it will. With frozen feet standing at a chest-high wooden table with a smoker, a blabber, a tweeter and a Glühwein drunker, your food will be cold before you get half of it down. But go and smell. If you are lucky, there will be some good brass players like my friend Christof playing delightful arrangements of Christmas carols. This is a good place to go with some colleagues or friends after work. It probably isn't the best place to go after a hard afternoon's shopping because where are you going to put all the bags? Come back when you have some time on your hands!
Now when it gets cold, homeless people obviously have it hard. 

The sellers of "Trottwar", a newspaper written, published and distributed by homeless people, are present at the Christmas market, hoping to catch some people in a cheerful, generous mood. Often, however, they go about their business of looking for cheap presents in the well-stocked bargain stores.

And then there are the people who come into town to be amongst the masses in order to forget their loneliness. You can read it on their faces and in their body language. Wouldn't it be great if the two men here felt free enough to talk to one another? It would take a great leap in the rules of German etiquette for that to happen.

The young people always have someone to talk to - or chat or skype with or text or tweet. This member of the multi-tasking generation was doing it while his hair was being dried. There were a lot of young people getting their hair done yesterday evening.

Wishing you all a cheery Advent!

Outtakes

You've all seen the outtake reels as the credits roll after a movie or on DVDs in the "Extras" section. They include the scenes that were cut because they weren't as strong as the rest - or because the film would have been too long otherwise.
And you may remember the scene from Amadeus in which the emperor told the young Wolfgang that he thought the piece of music was "wonderful except that there are too many notes."
"Well," Mozart asked, "which ones should I take out, Your Majesty?
As a writer - and particularly as an editor - I am constantly confronted with this question. What part of the text can we do without? Where will a cut make a piece stronger?
During the process of putting together my photo exhibition this past year, I had to make some difficult decisions, too. The selection was, on the one hand, made a bit easier by the fact that the exhibition had a theme: Halloween and autumn. Furthermore, my photographs were to complement Tiffany's illustrations and, I reasoned, should therefore have something magical or mystical about them. And yet there were also other restrictions. For example, we were using borrowed frames and matts, several of which housed pairs of pictures. And we had only a certain amount of frames and hanging space. So the decision process began.

This picture was taken in the early fall and the punk with the spikey hair looks like he is dressed for Halloween, but the picture - despite the nice late afternoon lighting - hardly makes you think of autumn. Rejected!

This photo was in the final selection, but the picture of Lilith, the witch, showed a very different side of Halloween, a more playful and exuberant one, so this calm and cozy scene was rejected and banned to the outtakes. The picture accompanying Lilith showed her and her friends trick-or-treating at a neighbor's house.

I had thought about hanging pairs of pictures to show a certain scene in two different seasons, but this idea did not quite fit our main idea, being autumn, nor did I feel it would have been a good use of the wall space. Rejected!

The same goes for the pictures below, in which the automatic white balance went crazy when I first pointed the camera into the woods. The warm orange color of the leaves overwhelmed the camera's computer, causing it to compensate and turn the gray trees cool blue.

A click of the white balance adjustment button resolved the problem. This is what the woods really looked like.

The harvest of the grapes all around my part of town is a big part of fall for many people. The new wine and the colorful vineyards delight the senses in November. This picture, however, is missing something (besides grapes!).

Perhaps it is the composition. The eye is not led left-to-right through the picture as we westerners are used to. So we can flop the negative:

And we get a much more pleasing composition, but still nothing I'd necessarily want to look at for more than two seconds, which is, according to some experts, the sign of a good photograph. Rejected!

Part of the trick of making your pictures look good, of course, is the presentation. This picture did make it into my exhibition catalog, but the rule of thirds was blatantly ignored here and the grapes appear to want to fall right out of the picture. I should have taken more care in framing the bunch of grapes when I took the original picture. Rejected!

Another one of my favorite photographs (OK, I can do without the heavy vignetting in the corners now) didn't make it into the frame on the wall. It was certainly a finalist as a candidate to hang with the following shot, which I took the same day:

But again, I had to make a decision and after post-processing both of these (admittedly a bit too much), I chose not to use them. Rejected! By the way, the picture of the bird in the tree shown here is not edited to death but fairly much as it looked straight out of the camera.

The gas tank near the Neckar River is another one of my favorite photographic subjects, being so omnipresent in my field of vision. This picture, taken out of my bedroom window at dusk, shows it in all its glory. But does it look like fall? Is there anything magical about it? Rejected! 
 

This picture, also taken from my bedroom window, shows the risen moon over Rotenberg. Certainly a nice shot, but compositionally not as strong as the one of the rising moon that was included in the show. Rejected!

Sycamore alley in the Schloßpark was a beautiful sight in early November 2009. But the picture of the old man walking his dog in the deep leaves suited the feeling of the season better, I felt. The athletic activity going on here reminds me more of a time for rejuvenation than hibernation. Rejected!

Finally, we come to the pictures of fowl in ponds. Beautiful light and nice compositions made them strong candidates, but the contents are a bit trite. 

Haven't you also taken pictures just like these? Rejected! 

So when you are making your final selection for your portfolio, a photo book or and exhibition, remember these rules:
1. The picture should turn you on. You should thrill when you look at it - even a year later. Create your PC wallpaper with it and look at it every day for a month or two if you aren't sure.
2. The pictures should serve the purpose intended by the project. If your topic is leaves, ask yourself if you really need a picture of the tree, too. (You may say yes; that's your decision!)
3. Choose pictures with strong compositions. If you haven't developed your artistic eye yet, you can stubbornly use the rule of thirds or, if you are lucky, you can ask someone else for critique.
4. Avoid trite pictures or clichés. This is a tough rule because we are fed trite images every day: the resolute politician, the airbrushed model, show-covered trees, the smiling baby, etc. There are certainly times when you will want to capture a cliché; for instance, when you want to measure yourself against other photographers. But is that the essence of creativity, the best you can do?

Christmas in Stuttgart

An angel overlooks the Weihnachtsmarkt

Tomorrow is Nikolaus, the day that the (good) children get candy and presents put in their shoes. The Christmas market in Stuttgart opened on Nov. 24 and is enjoying the normal surge of visitors. It has been nice to walk through with friends and drink a Glühwein and smell and see the goodies.

Looking in the jeweler's on Calwer Strasse

Christmas is the time for giving big presents, too. No doubt this young woman and her mother don't want to leave anything to chance concerning her engagement ring.

A gallery full of religious icons opened down the street from where I work. I'll bet Christmas is the owner's big time of year. I've never seen any customers in there.

We've had a few dumpings of snow over the past two weeks. It's been sunny and clear a few of those days.

Pigeons across the street from my work. An insurance company's headquarters is on the left, a church on the right.

Steps leading down to the Feuersee near work.

Wishful thinking

When I walk the kids to school, we pass by these little gardens, each one with its own personality. In the winter the look so peaceful. The power plant in the background keeps our homes warm.

Cotton candy

Take an eight year-old and put her within 100 yards of cotton candy. This is what happens.

Child sees sign for cotton candy.

Child begs money from parents, then passes it along the economic food chain.

Mouth begins to water as stick begins to fill.

Body begins to assume the position for receiving the treat.

Child's mind sends signal to universe: "Mission accomplished!"

Child enjoys first bite of cotton candy. It tastes like what she had in mind.

The second bite tastes like cotton candy and not like cotton candy should.

Child eyes potential recipients for remainder of "treat".

Child eats one last bite to show brother how good it tastes.

Child flies 15 rounds in a helicopter. Father is amazed by the fortitude of daughter's stomach.

Daughter gets ride home from Aunt Tanja after complaints of a stomach ache.

 

Autumn in the park

If you take enough pictures, some of them will turn out well. I guess it really doesn't hurt to have a beautiful day with trees bleeding fall colors on every branch to serve as your background. The fact that the kids had forgotten that I was there - or at least had other things on their minds - adds the sense of spontaneity to this shot that makes it special. 

This year the autumn stretched into the beginning of November, as it did last year, before the rains beat the leaves from the trees. After taking so many fall pictures last year, I found myself this year not at all interested in photographing the fall foliage as a motif an sich. But there have been many opportunities to capture these colors in the uniquely warm light this past month. My subjects were often my children.

But of course, they like turning the camera on me sometimes, too.

Sometimes I try to put my subject in a context.

Other times the action - or some other element - of the picture is all the context it needs to make it an eye-catcher.

This last one reminds me of the type of picture seen in magazines in the 1970s. Maybe it is that nostalgic aspect that I like about it.