2012-06-05


Five Pictures - four hours 

or:
how to achieve this beautiful Thorsten Overgaard / Ming Thein look without Leica Cameras or Lightroom
or:
Wolfgang did his work - I did mine


 It is just three days ago that Ming Thein posted his highly recommended review of the Olympus OM-D EM-5
Some of the pictures he has posted were so breathtaking and incredible good in terms of natureness, that I began to think about taking part to the discussion that Wolfgang Lonien has with Bill Bebee  and Ming Thein and me since many weeks via eMail and weblog messages in a deeper way. Bill has questioned Wolfang, how to achiefe those deep blacks in the black and white postproduction. Wolfgang started his in Terms of deepnss of black 100 % succesfull experiments just two days ago (target reached yesterday).
But I, I thought about the colours, mostley the colours that as an example Thorsten Overgaard reached in his shooting of the royal danish family, or -as another example- the genious Ming Thein reached in his review of the famous little Leica X 2.

I did ask myself: How did he done this?

Well I have no adobe Lightroom stuff, and I am even not a Leica owner, but I want to have those colours nontheless.
As you might know, I like to shoot all of my pictures I am able to shoot in RAW -in RAW (Olympus ORF -files). I also have special reasons to put the Colour space to "adobeRGB". 
What can I hope to receive as an result (if I spend some time in postproducion) in terms of deeper blacks AND perfect colours?

So, take a look, Wolfgang, this is what I ´ve got:

I shot the first four pics during a walk before noon within just 21 minutes


Running Businesman   Bodrum, Turkey, 2012-04-25   8.39 Universal Standard Time (UTC)     focal length 18 mm    f 1: 5.6       1/ 1600 s


Laundry      Bodrum, Turkey, 2012-04-25   8.52 UTC   focal length 29 mm f 1_5.6   1/1250 s

Bright colors  (Anzac Day!)    Bodrum 2012-04-25   8.58 UTC      focal length 14 mm f 1: 5.6      1/1600 s

Electricians   Bodrum 2012-04-25   9.00 UTC   focal length 18 mm   f 1: 5.6      1/2000s


This shot was taken some 29 minutes later


   Blue Minaret      2012-04-25   9.29 UTC   focal length 14 mm   f 1: 7.1   1/1000s



Thank you for viewing!









4 comments:

  1. These are really nice colours Thorsten - and the sky is perfect! Chapeau (and thanks for the nice comments as well)!

    I'll post some more probably this evening - took some this morning at work, but here I can't do too much obviously...

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  2. Thank you, Wolfgang! And I I got a comment from Ming Thein for my pictures of Bodrum -Turkey in the Comments of the full Olympus OM-D E-M5 review! He wrote: "The colors look pretty good to me – natural, saturated, and not shifted with any obvious casts. Well done!"
    So I´m tiered AND flattered... ;-)

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  3. :-) A true master knows how and when to cheer up his peers :-) I'm glad he wrote that!

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  4. Dear Thorsten W,
    All digital cameras have WB, which is something 'everybody knows' but few uses. The reason if that many have not understood what it actually is, and mostly camera producers and photo stores will advertise that "you shoot raw, so you can fix everything in the computer". But why would you fix images in the computer when you can get them right from the start :-)
    So the way to do it is to set White Balance to Manual and then shoot a piece of white paper or a neutral grey card as the WhiBal® card (not the grey card one uses for exposure and most photo stores will pull out and sell when you ask for a WB greycard). The camera simply reads the light colors off of the card, adjust them to white, and that is how you get natural daylight colors (which is how the human eye sees the world).
    Second-best is to download a trial version of Lightroom Adobe and use the WB picker and point it at the white in peoples eyes, a white wall or some other neutral white/grey area in the photo and see which area give the best overall colors.
    In most your shots you have sun and shadow which is slightly different. Not so much in Turkey as in say Germany; but generally sun is yellow and shadow is blue. So if you use an area in the shadow, the overall image will turn warmer than if you use a sunny spot which will turn the sunshine areas daylight and the shadows colder.
    The main aim for WB adjustment is to get the colors right, and mainly the skin tones. It is VERY easy when done with White Balance adjustment, and VERY difficult to 'adjust in the computer' manually.
    http://www.overgaard.dk/WhiteBal_greycard_manual_white_balance.html

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