lutz

On 1/4/2013 at 7:17 PM, BK1664882259 said:

Very nice - atmospheric, muted, sort of desolate. 

Thank you! I thought I owed you a reply - after 10 years. Sorry, but I have been off the forum for decades... :-)

 

Thank you, Iuliana! :-) I'd be hard pressed to say myself why I like it. It's a bit of everything, the color, the gesture, the dynamic composition and the motion, maybe...

FYI, I'm just quoting from my technical details as stored above:"I experimented a bit to get the most out of intentional motion blur with that little camera... I set it to 50 ISO so it would automatically expose for roughly a 1/8th to 1/4th at the lens' maximum aperture of 2.8 (for the 35mm equivalent). In this particular shot I moved AROUND the subject. (BTW, the BIG advantage of a digital camera in these situations is that you can instantly check if you have achieved the desired effect, learn your lesson and correct your settings accordingly...!)"

Mumbai, 2008

Thanks for your comment.

Hmm, I guess what I'm instinctively reacting to (or looking for) in stills is storytelling (condensing a situation in one frame), drama (capturing tension, conflict between the elements in a picture) and mystery.

Thanks for challenging me to reflect on this... :-)

BTW, how is your B&W printing doing? Did you set up a darkroom, ultimately?

Thanks, Mike, you've nailed the backstory to the photo! If you like to know better about her actual performance, you're welcome to have a look at my (still unedited) album of snaps I took earlier this year.

Cheers,Lutz

 

Thanks Alex, I'm happy that you can relate to the picture. I've stopped rating photos alltogether. Cheers, Lutz.

Great shot, Tony. Just correct the spelling... ;-) I lived in Munich right opposite the Oktoberfest site from 1978 to 1984, BTW. Cheers!

Hi Mike,

 

On your PN profile page you write:

 

"My goal is to some day make a photograph that matters."

 

Well, I guess you have reached your goal. This sleeping beauty matters, IMHO. :-)

 

Just treat her well, crop her a bit and print her with all the tones that you can reach out for. And if you do your own silver gelatine printing let me know.

 

Have a very good New Year!

 

Lutz

Switzerland, yup, that's correct. I could fire up my Epson 2200 and produce a couple of 10"x13.5"s on archival matte for you if that format suits you. I could easily pick, say, three of yours I would like to see hanging on my walls. Cheers.

Great stuff here, congrats! And thanks for your nice comment. Fancy a print swap?

Each time the low tide approaches the isle of Amrum in Germany, the

Northern Sea generously adds a mile-wide stretch of "Watt" to the

island's beach, inviting tourists and islanders alike to explore the

sea-bottom fauna.

Peter, if my sketchy Digital Diary snap provoked some thoughts in you, I'm more than happy. Art is a very heavy category to cast on what I collect along my ways, IMHO. I'm after visuals that would stop me --and you-- and make us look twice for a mix of both, beauty and truth. You may call that art. I'd just call it a subjective mirror of what strikes my attention, curiosity, visual sensitivity.

Thanks for stopping by and taking your time to share your thoughts!

Feel free to download my recent desktop version:

Hi, this is the first Leica M pinhole photo I took with the 28mm

Leicagoodies' SPIN. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Thanks for your critique.

Great one, Clay. Do you sell prints?

Great shot, Beau. I already asked you if you were willing to sell a print of it a couple of years ago, maybe you overlooked that. But if so, please get back to me offline. Cheers.

Wow, thanks, I wasn't expecting this! Well, I was happy to have "seen" this shot (I actually had to get in the middle of the car lane to get it and hold my breath, shutterspeedwise, to squeeze the most DOF out of the 50mm lens...) and quite pleased with the outcome but the scan has remained a sleeper on my HD for almost a year.

It's only due to a recent theme ("Your Country, Today") brought up by Travis on the Leica Forum that I considered creating a folder including this shot. I have chosen the moody gaussian veil and duotone look to create a more metaphoric detachment from everyday scenes and views. I'm happy if it works for you.

Thanks, Jorge. I was tempted to call her Spiderwoman...;-)

Thanks, Andrew, and yes - some five vertical shots, exposed in pano mode (i.e. with exposure lock), stitched with the PS Elements 2.0 Photomerge plug-in, imported to PS 7 and tweaked (one layer for the sky, one for the landscape and a soft eraser to make these blend along the horizon).

It takes some practice and patience in both, exposure and postproduction and the depth of data (8Mb) isn't close to the roughly 30Mb+ which can easily be squeezed out of an XPan slide, but landscape panos CAN be done with that minuscule P&S which is always with me.

Hmm, Marek - a joke? If you can find one let me laugh along. As the title of my folder suggests, this is purely "Technical Stuff". I uploaded a Focomat manual for fellow photographers, properly named as such. Anyway, keep enjoying yourself...! ;-)

Thanks for considering my picture for your initiative. I didn't know about you and have learned quite a bit now by examining "your profile"... ;-) I love constructive criticism and like to add mine whenever time allows for it. I basically hang around the Leica Forum, though. I know, that's a bit restrictive as far as quality pics goes ;-), but we have a community there, well, sort of - so, there's a chance that criticism is well received and digested.

As far as the "Puddle" is concerned, let me add a few hints. There's little I could have done (nor wanted to do) as far as details in the highlights are concerned - neither as far as the "moon" nor as the "stars" go. The picture should actually have qualified for a "Day For Night" theme: what you are looking at is the sun and its reflections as caused by pebbles and the structure of the tarmac around the puddle. I think the exposure is pretty spot on, mostly by relying on the built in meter and sensing that it would "fail" well enough...;-)

As far as composition is concerned, I can in a way see your point. We are so much used to reading pictures as we do books, i.e. from left to right, that the frame seems to be cutting off the first "letter" of the sentence, so to speak. Well, this is due to the fact that I decided that turning the picture by 180 degrees would give a better effect ("opening the sky" by inverting the perspective). The way it was originally composed in shooting would have left the usual space to the left. BTW, since this is just a quick and dirty scan on a Kodak Photo CD from a framed slide, there's a good chance that I might find some more space on the original film.

All in all, this picture is the product of the playful approach to photography which I pursued at age 17. Sometimes I wish I could get it back somehow. I find digital P&S an interesting tool to regain that sort of naivety necessary.

Have fun!

Thanks a lot everybody for your enthusiastic response! I'm happy that you could relate so well to my vision.

Hi Arthur,

 

Thanks for your comments. By the time I scanned the 'chromes and the Noblex pics I used a Canoscan 2700F slide scanner. I always scan directly from film.

 

Cheers.

Thanks, Jorge. Yes, FP4 has a wonderfully rich tonality and fine detail, especially when developed in T-Max - it's a shame that we don't know yet what is going to happen to this fine emulsion, once Ilford totally stops production... :?(

As for the pic - that's a lucky shot for both, exposure and composition. I wasn't even planning on including the lady at first. I had just taken a ride upstairs and been attracted by the geometry of lines. So I went back down and prepared for the shot, hoping for a completely empty frame without a person. I let the lady pass and waited a bit longer, than got on the stairs myself just when I thought I might be lucky enough not to have anybody coming down in the next couple of seconds. But just before the lady got off at the top end herself, I realized that I needed to include her in the pic and pulled the prefocussed camera to my eye. Click. A much better photo than the one I preconceived... ;-)