2012-06-01

Awareness of little things
- do it like Wolfgang does!

(or do ask yourself how Lubitsch did it, if your shooting comedy movies)


It was not his beautiful picture of an apple he posted in January 29, 2012 which made me thinking what kind of remarkable man this guy must be, it was the series of 3 pictures (2011, December 18) which shows just a lamp, build by his daughter Zuleikha, that had made a deep impression to me and made me a constant every-day-follower of his weblog (I have found his weblog just a few weeks earlier (Oktober 2011) and passed by from time to time): This man takes care of even the small things in life, which could be seen not from anybody. His style of photography is quite laconic, honest and clean. He sees himself as a learner (like all true masters do!) and therefore he has some "Guru" Qualities: Like John the Baptist he is declaring to the world that he is just a little pillow farter in comparison with that great man he learned from: Kirk Tuck  !
However, Wolfgangs pictures, even those he took more randomly/diarystyle like that from a shopping center parking place at night or a "Hello Kitty" toy, (both posted 2012, March 18) all have a beauty in their own and shows us what photography can be: A window to a miracle called time and a window to eternity. For me he is a sculpter like the man who has made this piece of church art

So I spend during a pentacostel excursion (2012, Monday, Mai 28) some time in thinking: What kind of picture would Wolfgang shoot in exact this situation, right in that moment? Perhaps Wolfgang sometimes has equal thoughts about Kirk Tuck ;-)


So the result was this:




Abandonned shoe at the left border of the river rhine. I shot that shoe right as I have found it. No other shoe was nearby! Good condition. Think I might have taken the shoe with me, sell it at ebay and bought myself a Panasonic 20 mm 1: 1.7 lens.... 


Light bulb. In a row with 50 or 60 other light bulbs. Shoot that at the right border of the river rhine at a funfair in Mondorf / Bonn, Germany

Suntan lotion
I took all these pictures with an Olympus E-PL 1 and it´s remarkeble Kit-Zoom (1 : 3.5 - 1 : 5.6   14-42 mm). The aperture was 1 : 6.3 at all three pictures, which is perhaps the best aperture for nice, tacksharp resolution from edge to edge for this lens. The shoes @ 18 mm. the light bulb @ 35 mm and the Suntan lotion @ 25 mm. I did no real cropping (I don´t like cropping so much, because it kills the authenticity a little bit). Just converted them to 6 x 6 and decided to do something with the centering or not (changing centering seems to me a lack of authenticity also, but I am a photographic beginner since 1974 and this allows me to brake the DOGMA-rules). So the pictures have full resulution in terms of theit heigh: 3000 Pixels.

I took some care in white balance in these three pictures: As an example I set the white balance in the raw converting of the "shoe shot" at 5730 Kelvin. That was exact the Temperature the Camera has used for some pictures I have taken just some Minutes later and which have that "Bang" Charackter where you say: Every kind of post production can just make the file less perfect! The automatic would have created a much colder white balance for the shoe -something like 5300 K or so. Hip Hip hooray for raw converting and its flexibility!!!

Next week: no new pictures, just some thoughts about our goverment in terms of light bulbs and solder and why Anders Breivik was right.

Thank you for watching and reading.


2 comments:

  1. Wow. Thanks for the feature, and for your nice words Thorsten. And btw: I just *love* that shoe shot - and like you, I normally take great care to change nothing of the objects and scenes I photograph. With (almost) full resolution, why don't you make a nice 10" (25cm) square print of that, and sell it for the sum of that Panny 20mm? You have some nice galleries and pubs there in Bonn, just hang it somewhere and wait for offers... :-)

    And that light bulb photo is living history...

    cheers,
    Wolfgang

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  2. Thank you Wolfgang! Thats so flattering!

    ...und wenn ich manchmal dann eben so sehe, was meine Kinder so am Maul kleben haben, wenn ich sie portraitiere, denke ich gelegentlich schon, dass es erlaubt wäre hier einzugreifen und die Wirklichkeit zu gestalten (leider fehlt mir meist ein Tuch oder Waschlappen!!!)...
    frei nach dem Motto: PUTZT EURE KINDER, NICHT EURE FILES (Photoshop)!

    ...Zuleikha und die Nudelreste (remember that file?), das ist nichts gegen meine Blagen!

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