Bubbles

Recently I was downtown with some fellow photographers in the evening, when we happened upon a couple of men making some money by letting people blow big bubbles in the pedestrian zone. Now, anyone with small children knows that bubbles are an awful lot of fun. Photographers should also know how much fun they can be.

Granted, nighttime is not the greatest time for shooting randomly moving transparent globs, but I found that if you stick with it, you can pull some interesting pictures out of the event. As I've written here before, you can reduce the negative effects of high-ISO noise by converting the pictures to black-and-white. (All but one of these photos were all taken at 3200 ISO.) Yesterday I learned from Vincent Versace at Kelby Training that there is a plethora of ways to turn color pictures into black-and-white. However, these pictures here were desaturated using Lightroom's one-click B/W setting. Then I went back in with the adjustment brush and added selective color here and there to recreate the rainbow effect of the bubble.

Here, too, I used the same tools to recreate the bubble, but this time I framed my friend Renee Cizek in the loop. The background is, after all, nearly as important as the foreground.

Here I wanted the glow from the streetlights to accentuate the bubble. This picture did not see much post-processing.

Although there were some adults enjoying this event, this boy seemed most intent on blowing a huge bubble. This picture seems to tell his story as I saw it.

Sony A77, Minolta f1.7/50mm, f2.5, 1/125 sec, 3200 ISO

Selective color(s) and selective focus help direct our eye to the important part of a photograph. Here I was lucky to get such sharp definition on the bubble.
Thanks again to the men with the bubble juice! Don't forget to leave a tip for such street performers if you enjoy taking pictures of what they are doing.

Sony A77, Minolta f1.7/50mm, f3.2, 1/125 sec., ISO 1600

Cuddly Primates

Most of us don't think of gorillas as being very cuddly animals. But when a bunch of children hug the glass, it's hard to imagine how distantly we are really related. It may be only a few chromosomes, but when is the last time you saw a monkey driving a Mercedes?

"Beauty and the beast" comes to mind when I see this little girl's arm seemingly stroking the gorilla's fur.

This would probably be very easy to mock up in Photoshop, but after getting a few shots with my 90mm lens yesterday, I screwed on the 28-75mm today and waited for the right moment.

Sometimes the dual faces that appear in the reflections are better than one could imagine. This reminds me of the cowardly lion's face from The Wizard of Oz. And what I especially like about such reflections is that you have to look away and re-focus your eyes to see the other face.

Another day at the zoo

Trying to practice what I preach, I went back to the zoo and focused on details, composition and beauty.

An unusual perspective can help the viewers see things they hadn't focused on before.

Matching the foreground and background can result in a pleasant picture. Here the subtle shadows develop unobtrusively from the highlights.

If you wait long enough, you can get some good detailed shots of the fish...

...and some interesting reflections.

Goodbye! Until next time!

New Year's Eve at our tree farm

...and the photographer said, "Let there be light!" And there was light - and it was good. And the weather was great considering it was a winter day in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Due to an unexpected flat tire - aren't they always unexpected? - I didn't get to the party in the hills until around 4 p.m.

But I was still in time to relax and go up to the newly built platform to view the last sunset of 2011 with my sister and her family and friends.

And as we sat around the campfire, telling stories and making good things to eat, I looked up at the towering trees, the majesty of which caused my father to call our cabin and its surroundings "Chartres".

After the sun set, thousands of stars appeared that I hadn't seen in years. The light smog in Stuttgart doesn't allow for such wonderful night skies.

Three of us were playing with our cameras in the dark, so I decided to show the others about painting with light, using the flashlights that are so important to us out there in the dark (if you need to find something or go to the outhouse between 8 pm and 6:30 am). Jane held nice and still, so her facial features - especially her eyes - came out fairly sharp in this 35-second exposure. 

35 sec., f13, ISO 400, 50mm

This next portrait looks strangely Middle Eastern. Kate's hair band looks like a turban and the fact that only her eyes were illuminated by Jane's flashlight makes the rest of her face look strangely secretive as if it were wrapped in a scarf. It's the opposite of the type of lighting you usually want for a portrait, but this image has stuck in my mind. That shows me that rules are made to be toyed with.

50 sec., f13, ISO 100, 100mm

Now it is up to you to guess how we made this next picture. Kate's flashlight shadow reminds me of Friedrich Schiller's profile.

Now we've got a very dramatic looking scene. It reminds me very much of a scene from an expressionistic drama. Wanna guess how we made that?

Finally, we did the type of light painting that some of you may have also played with. Kate stood still while her friend traced around her with a flashlight pointed at the camera.

Even in the dark it is possible to take pictures, ones that you can't take during the day!
The first day of the year we walked over our tree farm. Pictures from that hike will follow.

Tips for taking portraits at home

Senior portraits

While I was in Virginia last week, I took some pictures of my beautiful niece Jane for her "senior pictures". That genre had escaped my notice, except for having seen her elder sister's pictures last year. I still don't really know if they are supposed to express something in particular. I just wanted to get some shots of her in her familiar surroundings and since I was staying with my sister that week anyway, we had time for two sessions.

Every experienced photographer will tell you that it's much easier to get pleasing pictures if your model is pretty. Well, that was the case here. The only stumbling blocks we occurred were 1) the cold weather, which pretty much precluded our shooting outdoors for extended periods of time; and 2) my limited equipment. For all the tutorials I've watched on one-light portraits, I still wish I had had a second one and my good Lastolite Trigrip reflector set. My umbrella and flash tripod would also have been helpful, but I was travelling light, so I had to improvise. One light only!


So as you see in the picture above, I wanted to capture her in settings that were important to her. Since practically everyone in our family is an artist - Jane included - we got a shot of her with her great brushes.

The nice mirror on her wall seemed like it would make a good frame for a photograph, so I set up the flash and a piece of poster board to the right of the mirror, the flash pointing into the large white surface to create a soft light and nice big catch lights in her eyes. But the light isn't what I like best about this picture; it's her pose!

Jane learned very quickly about looking into the light, keeping her eyes open and chin down. We were shooting with very little ambient light, so her pupils look large in the pictures.
For the next shot I put the flash behind her. I wanted a dreamy look, so backlighting seemed to be the way to go. The flash had enough power to light her face as well. Again, the natural pose here makes the picture what it is.

For some of the poses, she chose to smile sometimes and close her mouth for others. What a difference that makes! Here I prefer the nice, big smile!

Another big part of Jane's artistic and athletic life is dancing. She will graduate with honors in dance from the Culver Academies in June. So we took some pictures of her as the ballerina she has become. I like this introspective pose.

And here I put a snoot on my flash to create a line of light along her extended leg and her arm. It was also important to get some light on her left arm, too.

These last two pictures and the following one looked better in b/w than in color because you concentrate on the person and composition rather than the surroundings. The following picture shows Jane brimming with confidence, which is what a full-front portrait does.

Finally, here's the picture which Jane has chosen as her facebook profile picture. It's full of confidence, glamour, beauty and kindness. What more could you want in a niece?

Why am I so in love with this image?

Who can tell me why?

R.I.P. Bill Martin (1930-2011)

This is the last picture I have of my father and me. It was taken in Richmond this past summer.

Two years ago, after having shown signs of dementia for a couple of years, he posed for me in a photo studio in Richmond. He had on the same shirt that day, too! He was a real actor at heart. Even though he didn't make a whole lot of sense when he spoke back in 2009, he still had his sense of humor and charisma, as he did nearly to the end.

A few days prior to this session, I read some selections from his "stories". I published these wonderful stories from his childhood as Billy: Stories of my childhood and have done several readings of them in Germany and in the US. Here are a couple of photos from the reading.

My father and I with his second wife, Patti, at Book People, a local book store that helped organize the event.

My father at the reading after signing copies of his book.
The reading took place in the chapel at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, where he worked during the 1980s.

He was still lucid enough to be able to sign his name.

We all enjoyed the dinner afterward.