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.

6x6 in Black & White

Everyone who is interested in photography and has the slightest bit of nostalgia within oneself will probably agree that black & white photography has great appeal. Somehow it is quite funny that black & white pictures and films have that much charm, character and sex appeal, since humans are usually seeing the world in colour for the last few thousands of years. So maybe it is the fact that things appear more intriguing if the distractions of colour are taken away ... Now that I think about it, we actually do see the world in black & white sometimes and that is at night time. However, not all black & white images have a connotation with night or darkness, but possibly there is something unconscious going on?

In any case I do love black & white and, yes, film too! My recent ventures into black & white have, however, turned out to be quite challenging, as I think it's really hard to take great black & white pictures which underline the very charm of not being in colour.

There is one guy who, in my opinion, is an absolute genius of black & white and on top of that, he shoots medium format! Here's one of my favourites:

Photo by Maxim Chelak, Mai 2009.

His Flickr name is just great too: Maxim Chelak. I haven't worked out yet whether this is made up or his real name, he is Russian after all. No offense, but for my ears both sounds reasonable.

Here is another one which is really fantastic (and an absolutely beautiful model, lucky blizzard!):

Photo by Maxim Chelak, November 2009, Model: Natalia Vlasova.

If you find these pictures inspiring too, here are some more links to his photos and his website:

Website

Photograph

Edina Tokodi (her website)

Light Directions

This is a composition I had in mind for a long time. Thanks Tatjana for your patience when I took dozens of pictures while moving the lights all around you! I think I managed to keep her happy, since she still smiled on pictures taken later during the portrait session. If you are interested, you can find a set of photos here.

I used one D-Lite strobe from different directions in order to obtain a number of pictures which I then put together to get this one:

Photo by Me (large on Flickr), 2010.

I was interested in how it would look like when pictures of the same face, lit from different angles, were put together in one image. The pictures are ordered according to the angle of the light in the respective photograph. The one in the middle is the starting point where the light comes from the direction of the camera. To the left and right the horizontal angle is then increased/ decreased in 45° steps. The same applies to the vertical axis. The single pictures on the right, at the top and at the bottom are lit from behind, from the top and from the bottom.

The whole set of pictures could be kind of wrapped around to form a sphere around the model. Hope that doesn't sound too complicated!?

Anyways, I think it looks quite funky and it is interesting to see how such a simple thing like the position of one single light source can change the character of a face in a portrait entirely. From now on I will have a nice example at the ready, when I have to give another flash or studio light workshop ;-).

Meet the Eggs!

Happy belated Easter everyone!

After lots of eating and lots of chilling out over the Easter weekend, I finally managed to post the family portrait of the Eggs. These guys are our relatives from a distant place, who came for a visit to York over Easter. Funny coincidence, now that I read their family name ...

Anyways, if you want to meet them, please visit the gallery on Flickr. Wally, the youngest of the lot, was keen to get his picture taken for my blog. Hence, here he is whishing a nice Easter and inviting you to meet his lot:

Photo by Martin A. Trefzer, April 2009.

And in case you want to do something a bit different (caution: addictive!) for Easter breakfast, check these Eggs Benedict out!

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.

Great Portrait of Christy Turlington

What makes a great portrait and how can I shoot one? Well, the most common approach these days is to buy a digital camera, go to a party, pop the little built-in flash up and be surprised that all of our friends appear to be Zombies (unless you happen to be invited to a party where Christy sips a drink too), but that's not what I want to moan about (again).

I wonder what makes us pausing for a moment when surfing the web reading articles and looking at photographs? Why, for instance, do I find this portrait so great?

Photo by Patrick Demarchelier for Harper's Bazaar (July 1999)

Well, for starters, the photographer used a very basic - yet effective - lighting setup. There are just two light sources: a large, softbox (or umbrella) high camera left (45°), and a beauty dish (a small light source that reflects in the model's eyes) above the photographer. The backdrop is just a plain (I guess) whiteish wall/paper.

The one thing that makes this picture different and interesting is the little mouse on the model's shoulder. Maybe that's because when I think of mice, I imagine small, furry, quickly moving animals that are barely seen sitting somewhere. However, it's sitting there and seems to ask for attention. It also draws attention, because it is the brightest object in the picture, and the tones range from white mouse smoothly to black hair. Awesome idea, well done Patrick!

I'm absolutely convinced the quality of the portrait has absolutely nothing to do with supersymmetricüberbeautyperfectbodybigeyes Christy Turlington! It's all the mouse! Trust me!