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

One of my favorite bloggers, Brian Auer, is doing another Photo Project. He asked users to send him photos they would be willing to share for another "Edit my Photo" contest. I wanted to participate in this part of the project - but of course, I forgot about it... But I did remember to vote on which photo should be used for the editing part of the project (You can find all entries here).


The winning entry by John Huson

I really liked the photo that got chosen, because I was drawn to the structure in the wall. I really wanted to focus on the wall for my entry for the project because I think it has a higher draw to it than the person pictured. Brian supplied me with the RAW version of the photo so I had a whole range of options at my disposal to play with the photo.

I started out by opening the photo in Photoshop CS3 and the Camera RAW editior. Next I tried the different outputs for changing the white balance. I decided to go with the results from the tungsten light, which gave the whole photo a nice blue tint.


The photo with white balance set to tungsten light

Next I decided to use a Lomo action for Photoshop I had downloaded some time ago and had gotten really great results from in the past (You can find this photoshop action here).


The photo with the Lomo action applied

I really liked the direction this was going and also how that yellow thingy on the ground was standing out of the photo but the guy in the photo had become too dark and the texture in the wall did not jump out at you, either. Due to this, I decided to keep playing with the photo.
My next idea was to make a new layer with the original photo on top of the lomo-rized version and try different blending modes. The one I decided on was "overlay"

The guy in the photo is looking even worse but the wall had gotten a really nice texture. Now that I liked the wall, I decided to see what I could do to bring the guy in the picture back to a look where you can see his face. For this I made two additional layers on top with the original photo. In the lower one I used the masking tool and only left his face visible and used the blending mode "Lighten", which brought back the details in his face but he still did not have enough contrast in comparison to the rest of the photo, so I selected the whole of him in the next layer and masked this and used Overlay again. This increase the contrasts in his clothes and his skin a lot. Lastly, I decided to use a curves adjustment layer and played around with it until I was satisfied. The result of this I liked to much, that I decided to enter it as my entry into the project:

My final edit

If you want to partcipate in the project, you can do so until October 16th

Tags: Photo, Photoshop, Project, Entry

As you might know, I really like to work with HDR files from time to time and I always prefer to keep them pretty close to natural looking (just with a higher dynamic range). Some time ago I spent a day playing tourist guide to friends in Frankfurt, which was kinda fun since you never look at cities you consider your home the same way as tourists would (in fact, this was the first time I had my camera with me in Frankfurt). During that photo shoot, I took almost exclusively three RAW files of every file to be able to make HDRs since the sky was super blue and I didn’t have an ND filter with me.

One subject was especially suited to HDR: a dark gate under an overhanging on which the sun was shining.

This is how it would have looked as a normal photo (totally unprocessed)


It’s really not too bad but the gate does not really pop and you can’t really see all the details in the structure. Therefore I took three shots with the AEB automation with exposure of +/- 2 to get extreme differences in exposure.


As I said, I had taken a lot of shots for HDR processing that day, so I decided to do a batch processing in Photomatix, which is pretty great, even though I can’t do much more with my Mac while this is running. I always let it do three versions of the photo (the two options you find under tonemapping and the fusion option with automatic lighting). The best version was this one:

As you can see, it is pretty close to the originall, just the gate itself is a lot lighter and the reflections in the glass are more pronounced. There is also more contrast in the stones. But I wasn’t totally satisfied with it, so I tried a few more ideas:
The first was a version for which I made the HDR in Photoshop CS3 and then used the tonemapping plugin of Photomatix in Photoshop. The result can be seen below and while I liked this version, the details in the gate do not come out at all, in fact, I have a lot of artifacts in the darker areas (remember, click any photo to see a large version).


Then I decided to try Hydra, a HDR app for Macs (I am still using the first version, though), which has pretty good results sometimes, too. This was the result from Hydra:

I didn’t really like this result because it did none of the things I wanted to accomplish, so I decided to fire up Photomatix once again and do a manual processing with it of the photo. I also decided to play a bit more with the levers in Photomatix than I usually do to get a bit more extreme results than usually. This is the version I finally decided on:


As you can see, its a much more moody picture than any of the other versions and the details look like they are supposed to look! It’s really amazing how different you can process an HDR and how different the results can look.

What do you think, did I decide on the right version?

Tags: HDR, Photo, Processing

Sorry for being so quiet for so long - but somehow I am fresh out of ideas on what to write currently. But I was out taking photos several times in the last few weeks and I added a link to the photo galleries with those photos in my photo album overview.

The galleries include:
Two galleries of visits to the Atlanta Botanical Garden. One with a normal Macro lens and one with my Lensbaby.
One gallery with photos from a visit to the Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta.
One gallery with photos from a special rose exhibit in the Palmengarten in Frankfurt.
One gallery with photos from a trip to the Opelzoo near Frankfurt.

Enjoy!

Tags: Photo

No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you, I am talking about my christmas present, which I tried out last week for the first time (don’t even ask....). For Christmas I got a Lensbaby Muse. If you don’t know what a Lensbaby is, it is a special lens that you can use with an SLR camera that has a special optics in it, so that you can take photos in a way that only part of the photo are in sharp focus. An example would be a focussed middle section with everything blurred out towards the edges. The great thing with this lens is that you can have the sharp part anywhere in the frame that you want to have it, you just have to tilt the lens in that direction.

I first wanted to get a Lensbaby Composer, which is the newest version of the Lensbaby lenses and allows you to lock the lens once you have decided on a sweet spot and has a regular ring for shifting focus. But the problem was that the Composer is a lot more expensive (even though Lensbaby lenses are far less expensive than your regular DSLR lenses) and that no shop in Germany had them in stock and I needed to get it before I went back to the US the week after Christmas. So I went for the Muse, which is the classic version of their lens and a lot of fun to work with. The hardest parts are that you need to shift your sweet spot with your hands and by doing so you also focus the lens. As you can imagine, I am getting a lot of out of focus photos at the moment
The Lensbaby lenses are very much manual - its not just that you have to focus the lens, but you also have to use the lens in manual mode or Aperture Priority mode, since you have to set the Aperture into the lens with your hand. You get 5 or 6 different aperture rings with the lens and can buy additional ones that you can cut to your liking (for example using a star shape instead of a circle). Depending on the aperture you will get a different level of blurring from the sides.
In addition I also got the Macro kit for it, which is a fancy way of saying that I got two close-up filters They are specifically made for the lensbaby and get screwed onto the top of the lensbaby, like they would on a normal lens. With my obsession with flowers I had to have them


Now, my first try with the lens... I decided to take the lens with me for a trip to the Botanical Garden here in Atlanta. It was very different and strange at first because I hadn’t tried the lens much before this but I soon got into it and found out how to take photos I liked. Even though I had a „What now?“ moment in there, as well: Somehow I thought I couldn’t find a focussed sweet spot with the lens, so I thought that the wheel for adjusting for your eyesight had been somehow gotten changed, which happens to me from time to time. So I started changing the wheel - until I thought about it and realized I did not have any Autofocus-able lens with me... What to do? I tied to take photos that I thought were sharp and then checked them at a zoom level on my display till I felt that the sharpness was okay in the photos. Took me a while....

Overall, I really, really liked my first experience with my new lensbaby and have, in fact, already gone out again for a second try with it - to the Georgia Aquarium. I think, I am getting addicted to it....

Tags: Hardware, Lens, Lensbaby, Photo

Another blog project: This time the project initiator, Phil Price, asks participants to edit his photo, which you see pictured here, and to submit their results to him. In this post you’ll find most of my edited versions of this photo, including what I did and what I liked and disliked about each one. Of course, at the end of the post you’ll also find the photo I am submitting to his project Lesen Sie mehr...

Tags: Photo, Photoshop, Processing, Project

A lot of people are playing with their photos and textures to give their photos a slightly different feel. I always wanted to try this but for whatever reasons, I never did. After downloading a few textures last week, I decided to finally try it on one of my photos from last year.

The photo is an HDR of a church in the Smoky Mountain National Park and is very moody due to the heavy clouds with the light coming through. It’s a prime example for a photo that pratically begs to be made look like it was taken 100 years ago. There are several ways to achieve this but I decided to go with some dark, grungy texture and giving both the photo and the texture a sepia color overlay. Additionally, I lowered the opacity and the fill of the texture to make it look more natural.

In addition to that I also cropped the photo so that the cars are not visible in the photo since they would not fit with the mood of the photo. After I had done that I felt that something was still missing from the photo, so I decided to add some old-looking frame to it, which makes it feel more natural and lets the texture seem more like a natural part of the photo.

What do you think of my first try at textures? It definitely was easier than I thought it would be - so if you haven’t be sure to try it

Tags: Photo, Photoshop, Textures, Processing

Now that the year is over, it is time to look back at all the photos I have taken in the last year and figure out my favorite ones. As many of you know, this is not easy since there are a lot of really good photos in the time of a year, so I have decided to go with a Top 10 of sorts and some honorable mentions. Additionally, Jim Goldstein is doing a Blog project on his great site JMG-Galleries, in which he is asking his blog readers for their favorite photos of the year and I want to participate in this. I also participated in this project last year with my favorite photo of 2007 (on my old blog).

Some honorable mentions (all of them are linked to Flickr so you can see them in a larger version and leave comments on individual photos if you want to do so):
A church in the Smoky Mountains

Some palm leaves in the Atlanta Botanical Garden

Details of a butterfly in my garden

A close up of a rattle-snake

A sleeping gecko

A snail house in the Desert House in Vienna

A lux licking his paw in the Opelzoo


And now on to my Top 10 for 2008 - since I have a really hard time putting them in a definite order, I’ll post 10 to 2 in an unorganized fashion. Only my favorite photo of the year is distinguished from the rest for the year.
The outside of the Palmhouse in Vienna - my first real try at an HDR

A swimming turtle in the Zoo in Berlin, the lighting was just amazing for this shot that has not been edited at all.

A heavily edited flower in the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Usually I go for less editing but I love the contrasts in this photo.

A Poladroid of a rose in the Atlanta Botanical Garden - so much nicer than the original image

The old carrousel in my home town

I absolutely love to photograph reptiles, they are always striking poses for me. Gotta love it!

A water lily in the botanical garden in Frankfurt - I love the colors and perspectives of this one

This snail house was in the same exhibit as the one in the honorable mentions and I absolutely fell in love with its colors. I was so glad I had my macro lens with me that day

This photo was taken in the zoo in Berlin - the tiger was putting on a real show of showing his strenght and I was able to get some great photos of him in the process.



Last but not least, my favorite photo for the year:

It was taken during a roadtrip over thanksgiving break and I absolutely love the colors and the depth in the photo. It has been my wallpaper ever since I processed the photo (link to my blog post on the processing).

Tags: Photo, Best of 2008

In November I did a one-week road trip starting in Atlanta, going to Gatlinburg, Charlotte, Charleston and Savannah. As you probably can imagine, I took a ton of photos on the trip. The hardest thing for photographing was the weather: pure sunshine with no clouds. This meant that the dynamic range was too much for my sensor, so I decided to use HDRs a lot of times. In the past I have used Hydra for this but sometimes Hydra does not give me the results I would like to have. Since I had a ton of photos on my Mac with three different exposures, I decided to try out Photomatix again. This was mainly because one photo didn’t come out in Hydra like I wanted it to look.
This were the three starting photos:


As you can see the middle exposure is not as popping as it could be (remember to click on an image to see a larger version). So I decided to try Hydra on it. This are the two results I liked best:

The first one is a simple overlay of the images and the second one it tone-mapped - although it is a bit too saturated for my taste. But somehow neither picture really resonated with me (especially since I was looking for the best look for the mountains in the background. So I decided to try Photomatix. If you have ever tried it, Photomatix has a lot more options for customizing the results of your HDR, which is a good thing but also makes it more complicated to use. Because of the many options, among others I got these results:

Neither one is really perfect... I decided to also try Photoshop CS3 but I haven’t saved that one because it didn’t look at all like what I wanted to have for my photo So I decided to try Photomatix again after I had decided to buy Photomatix to have more options for my HDR projects. The final result I came up with:

Just a quick FYI, I added a photo gallery with the best photos from my trip to the botanical garden last week. I hope you like them

Tags: Photo, Gallery

This week I was able to go out and photograph for the first time in over a month. It was an incredible feeling to be „out there“ again and being totally „in the zone“. I went to the Botanical Garden here in Atlanta. As always, i took lots of photos and I’ll publish a slideshow one of the next days but today I want to focus on something I realized once again when I was shooting inside the giant houses of the botanical garden: Flash changes a lot about your picture!
I was shooting handheld (I didn’t take my tripod to Atlanta with me), so I had to use the flash for some shots to get a sharp image. There is always a difference in picture between the two but I had one instance where the difference was truly astounding to me.
Here you have two photos that show exactly the same subject and perspective. The first one without flash, only natural light, and the second one with the flash of my 40D. Notice the difference in details but also in shading. A subtle difference is also the unfocussed part in the background. Notice the ground in the upper left area, it is much more pronounced in the picture with the flash.


I guess, what I am trying to say is that you should always try to be aware of the effects your flash will have on the look of your photo. It can make or break your shot if you aren’t aware of the effects. (Instant review on the display is a great way to ensure that it does not break your shot).

Tags: Flash, Hardware, Photo

Sorry, I haven’t posted in way to long but I have been pretty busy with school But nevertheless, I want to show you my Flickr Favorites from the last three weeks. Most of these pictures are from my contacts on flickr - two especially, whose photos I really love: yappingjak and BigCatLover. Both take very different photos - yappingjak has an incredible distinc stlye for Macro flower pictures and BigCatLover does what his name implies: he takes absolutely stunning pictures of Big Cats.
As always, my short disclaimer: The photos belong to the artists who have posted them on Flickr and if you like one of the pics be so kind and visit their pics on flickr and comment on the pics or even fave them, too.
Enjoy






Following this stunning pictures are my uploads to Flickr in the last few weeks:

Tags: Flickr Favorites, Photo

Summary: Here they are once again: my new favorites from Flickr for this week. A total of 14 new favorites this week and my new shots this week, too.
-----Pictures after the jump----- Lesen Sie mehr...

Tags: Flickr Favorites, Photo

Summary: A post on how I took this picture and made it look a lot better using selective coloring and cropping. Additionally, the picutre exampes will give you a good example of how the composition of a photo will have an impact on the overall impression you get from the picture. Lesen Sie mehr...

Tags: Photo, Processing, Comparison

Summary: I’m back again. So here they are : my new favorites from Flickr for the last two weeks. A total of 14 new favorites and my new shots, too.
-----Pictures after the jump----- Lesen Sie mehr...

Tags: Photo, Flickr Favorites

Summary: It’s Wednesday again. So here they are once again: my new favorites from Flickr for this week. A total of 23 new favorites this week and my new shots this week, too.
-----Pictures after the jump----- Lesen Sie mehr...

Tags: Photo, Flickr Favorites

Summary: It’s Wednesday again. So here they are once again: my new favorites from Flickr for this week. A total of 25 new favorites this week and my new shots this week, too.
-----Pictures after the jump----- Lesen Sie mehr...

Tags: Photo, Flickr Favorites

Link to this image on Flickr
I spent the whole of yesterday evening processing and editing the pictures I had taken during the day. My workflow usually consists of looking at all pictures while the rest is still importing to get a first overview over what pictures I have and about the average quality of the pictures. Afterwards I go thorugh the pictures a second time and give ratings to the pictures I like best - 5 stars to those that are pretty perfect in every regard, 4 for quality pics that are sharp and everything but somehow are missing „something“ and 3 stars for pictures I like but do not love. The rest does not get a rating, indicationg that they are not worth publishing but not so bad as to delete them. This time I decided to do the processing while I was rating the pictures which took me a pretty long time even though I only edited pics that got a rating and only did very basic editing on most of them. But after a few hours I was finished and this morning I decided to split the pictures into two slideshows: one with pictures that got 4 or 5 stars and one with pictures that got a rating (so all with 3, 4, or 5 stars).

You can find the shorter slideshow (even that has 140 pic or so) by clicking here.

The long version can be accessed via this link.

I hope you ejoy the pictures and feel free to leave me a comment here in the blog post or via email I will also upload the best pictures to Flickr in the next weeks.

Tags: Photo, Organizational, slideshow

Just a small teaser photo. I spent the day in the botanical garden in Frankfurt and took loads of photos (over 750). I have already gone thorugh them and edited a lot of the and I am left with 345 I want to show off - but I am still debating the best way to do that, so it’ll be a few days till I do post a slideshow (or several).

Tags: Photo, Organizational

On my old site I had a photo album containing pictures already resized for the use as wallpapers on the iPhone that I had created for my personal use and then decided to share with other users. This post on the german photosite photoappar.at reminded me that I wanted to update my selection and also post them on this site, since I will not be updating the old site.
So now you can find some of my favorite photos in portrait orientation in a separate photo gallery, already resized for the use as a background on the iphone. You can download them for free but all rights remain with me - that’s also why I added a little watermark to them but that is very discreet, so it won’t get in the way of viewing the picture. In total there are 58 pictures, so a lot to choose from. I hope you’ll enjoy them.
Additionally, you can download all of them from here.

Tags: Photo, iPhone

Summary: It’s Wednesday again. So here they are once again: my new favorites from Flickr for this week. A total of 58 new favorites this week and my new shots this week, too.
-----Pictures after the jump----- Lesen Sie mehr...

Tags: Photo, Flickr Favorites

Summary: A short exploration into the reasons why sometimes selective coloring will give you better results and also an explanation on how you can use this simple technique. Be sure to check it out to see the full before and after shots. Lesen Sie mehr...

Tags: Photo, Processing, Photoshop

Berlin Cathedral
Flickr link

Summary: Do you know those awesome architectural pictures you have - which would be really awesome if it weren’t for some object taking away from their beauty? Sounds familiar, right? But what to do about them? You can’t just go to the people using the crane and ask them to remove the crane for a minute... (if you DO go out and try it, please tell me about your results ).
I don’t know how you got rid of them during the film days but I do know how you can get rid of them in the digital age. Lesen Sie mehr...

Tags: Photo, Aperture, Processing, Editing, Retouching

Close up of an Orang-Utan
Flickr Link

Summary: In my last post I shortly mentioned that I was in Berlin for a two-day trip last week. One of these two days was pent in the Berlin Zoo, which is has the most types of different animals in the world (according to their website) and is the oldest zoo in Germany. Find out more about my trip and the pictures I took by clicking „Read More“. Lesen Sie mehr...

Tags: Photo, Zoo, Berlin

Colorexplosion
Flickr Link

Summary: Today I just want to do a short post about a picture I uploaded to Flickr in the last week that’s been very popular. Get to know a bit more about what kind of shell it is and where I took it plus pics of two other shells. Enjoy! Lesen Sie mehr...

Tags: Photo

A bug on a rose petal
Link to this photo on Flickr

Summary: For my birthday I got three extension tubes for my camera. Here you’ll find a post on my first experiences with it including some first observations as well as three pictures I took using extension tubes. Feel free to check out the whole article by either clicking on „Read More“ below or the title of the blog entry Lesen Sie mehr...

Tags: ExtensionTubes, Photo, Hardware

HDR of the ruins of Burg Hayn in my hometown
Flickr link

Summary: One of my first real experiences with HDR. I highlight what a HDR is and what app I used to create the photo above. Additionally, the photos I used to create this HDR are shown. So go and check it out Lesen Sie mehr...

Tags: Photo, HDR, Hydra, Comparison