Beautiful Portrait

It has been ages since my last entry! 2011 shall bring more great photographic entries for the blog, and more taking photographs myself as well!

What could be better than starting off with this absolutely fantastic portrait:

Photo by Hannes Caspar, 2008.

Great tones and expression. There is more work of the photographer on his website, which is more that worth a visit!

Also on his website I found the quite interesting Facity project. FACITY is an international online photo project. Faces from cities all around the world will be shown on a daily basis. Anyone can participate in FACITY as a photographer or a model. Apparently you just have to get in touch via the website.

Bobbins and Bombshells

... is the name of Karen's blog. It almost goes without saying that I found her blog through a photograph on Flickr ;-):

Photo by Karen, Jazz Lawn Party on Governors Island, June 2009.

I'm not quite sure how I came across this picture, as I certainly did not search for terms like Jazz, Party or even Governors Island on Flickr. However, since I quite like certain flavours of Jazz and am generally interested in dance, the picture must have caught my eye. Karen has go a series of shots on Flickr of the Jazz Lawn Party event. The one above is one of my favourites. The frame is nicely filled with dancing people and a lot of them are actually facing the camera despite the randomness of the captured moment (so I cheekily claim please correct me if you read this and I'm wrong Karen). There is another great picture of a woman with a parasol; check out Karens Flickr site, it's somewhere on there!

Photo by Karen (I think?). Enough of the bantering about jazz garden parties that we unfortunately missed though. Another thing I found interesting on Karen's Flickr Page and her blog were her photographs of vintage dresses. While the photographs are not that great and technically perfect, the shown vintage dresses and accessories are indeed!

One of the dresses I love most is the one in the picture on the left since it reminds me of Raumpatrouille Orion, which is by the way my favourite SciFi TV series. It is in black & white and it is in German, sorry to about 6.7 billion non-German readers ;-). Anyways, the dress is cool and if I got her right, she is designing and sewing them herself, how cool is that?! If you are interested, you can buy the dresses from her online store.

She also writes an entertaining blog about vintage. She's got some old Vogue covers and patterns on there! I just love the 50ies and 60ies style. There is more on Vintage Vogue on an older post of mine, check it out and have fun!

Indian Meets Vintage Meets Photoshop

Recently when I was flicking through Flickr, I came across this entertaining portrait by Miss Lulu & The Teaspoon Shortage. This sounds Dada itself, just like the Native American feather headdress on a white girl's head in front of the read kind of Heritage-ish wallpaper - cool!

Photo by Lucia Holm, 2009.

She's got a few more portraits of this kind on her Flickr page, which is definitely worth a visit. She's also registered as a photographer on Modelmayhem.

When I first saw the photo I hoestly thought she was a Brit, despite the Native American headdress. There was the way she looked ... the wallpaper ... the way the pony of her own hair is cut ... So I was quite surprised to read on her profile that she's from Middletown, NJ (must be some roots somewhere ...).

Anyways, let's cut the drivel and reveal the clou of this picture: the wallpaper in the background is not real! . Yeah it's true, the background is photoshopped. The good news is that you can get the brushes and wallpaper for free from www.obsidiandawn.com and www.pixelsandicecream.com and some of them are even available for various image editing programs (Photoshop 7+, Photoshop Elements 2+, Gimp 2.2.6+). The bad news is you have to patiently replace the background of your original picture ...

Pinhole Photography - What Landscapes?

As promised there is another great pinhole camera shot, which is not a wide-angle landscape! Just like most of the pictures I come across, I found it on Flickr.

Photo by DelioTO, February 2009.
The picture was taken with a 24 minutes exposure (12+12), while the guy was reading his morning newspaper. He says on his Flickr page that the aperture was f/250, which corresponds to a pinhole diameter of about 0.2mm (assuming the focal length was 50mm). This means that the pinhole is almost 45 times smaller than your aperture when shooting with a 50mm lens at f/5.6, which is quite amazing and makes the long exposure times possible! In the case of the pinhole camera the amount of light is further decreased due to the lack of a lens, which collects light and focusses it.

Admittedly, pictures of this kind are bound to be blurred or distorted in some ways. So one has to like this style. However, imagine what you can do with long exposure times like this! For instance, a whole motion sequence could be 'recorded' in one image. People who are watching you taking the picture would be entertained too by your slow motion pantomime play in front of a cardbord box.

Photo by DelioTO, February 2009.

How a pinhole camera looks like!

In case you always asked yourself why the hell a bigger f-number corresponds to a larger aperture, here's how you calculate it: f/5.6 really reads current focal length divided by 5.6 (or whatever the number is). Thus, if you are shooting with a 50mm lens at f/4, your aperture diameter will be 12.5mm. If you are shooting with 100mm at f/4, it will be 25mm. Hence, the amount of light increases if you use a longer focal length, or you decrease your f-number.

Seven Sins - Lust

On a recent Flickr journey I somehow came across the group theSeVen. Despite it is still a small pool with at the moment a few more than 100 photos, there are quite a number of really great ones! I was quite surprised that - compared with other subjects - there were not that many pictures on Flickr dealing with the Seven Deadly Sins.

And most of the ones that are there resolve the inherent problem of depicting feelings like lust, sloth or pride with undressing one of our female fellows. Don't get me wrong, I think undressing as many women as possible and taking potographs is great, but when one thinks of movies (watchit!) like Se7en, it just seems to be a slightly onesided approach.

Although I have to admit that, when thinking about realising a Seven Sins project of my own, I found it quite hard to come up with something really catchy (which will not make me not trying at some point).



Hence, I was amazed when I saw the photos of Urline, actually a guy who managed to create a sinister atmosphere with strong colours in his pictures. Admittedly, this guy has a good deal of postprocessing skills, which helped to create these images. Whatsoever, they are great and my favourites on Flickr so far!

For everyone who cannot recall all of the seven sins (I hope you don't!), here's the link to the omniscient Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.