wfrank wrote:
Thanks Jaakko. Good guess too, very close but it's actually "Boende Södermalm" (one of the city islands) and as you said, part of the intricate parking system downtown Sthlm :-)
Ah, that figures.. wouldn't have guessed. I hate driving (let alone trying to park) in large cities - it's hard enough even without the cryptic signage.
Last pre-studies for my Holocaust Memorial Berlin project, titled NEVER HOLOCAUST AGAIN. ANYWHERE!
(THX Carsten!)
2.8/21 ZF2:
And here my explanation about the background of the photo. Unhappily in German. BING translator gives a very rugh idea.
Gestern Abend: Es war einer der magischen Momente in meinem Fotografenleben. Lichttechnisch war es ziemlich anspruchsvoll, das Blitzlicht korrekt und möglichst unauffällig zu setzen und das Umgebungslicht korrekt einzubinden. (Blitzlicht auf einem kleinen Studiostativ - bodennah, etwa 2 m nach links versetzt und schräg nach oben ausgerichtet und ein großer Studio-Reflexschirm.)
Ich hatte gerade alles Equipment aufgebaut und eingestellt, alle Lichtmessungen per Handmessung mit dem Gossen vorgenommen und zwei Probemodels im Bild arrangiert, um die letzten Vorstudien zu meinem Holocaust-Projekt abzuschließen, als ich aus dem Augenwinkel heraus wahrnahm, wie sich dieser charismatische, weise Mann ein Stück weiter auf diesen Block setzte. Ich sofort zu ihm hin und gefragt, ob ich ein Foto von ihm machen dürfe. Leider verstand er kein einziges Wort Deutsch. Aber es ging auch ohne. Er hat mit Sicherheit meine tiefe Zuneigung gespürt und meine gute Absicht mit dem Foto. Und seine Haltung sieht man ja nun in dem Bild!
Und warum nenne ich ihn "Weiser Mann"? Weil er auf mich den Eindruck machte, als habe er alle Fragen des Lebens für sich beantwortet und blicke nun auf ein in Anstand und Würde tätiges Leben und auf eine Schar wohlgeratener Kinder und Kindeskinder, um im Frieden mit sich und der Welt sein Leben zu Ende zu leben. Ein Mann, der mit sich im Reinen ist und der geachtet ist in seinem Lebenskreis. Ein Mann, auf dessen Wort man hört. Ich habe ihn geliebt. Magisch, weil es diese tiefe, direkte Verbindung zwischen uns beiden gab. Ich habe ihn spontan mit dem Herzen verstanden und er hat verstanden, dass ich ihn verstanden habe. Zum Abschied hat er mir die Hand geküsst. Wie gesagt: ein magischer Moment!
And an overview just to give an idea about the whole scenery, taken with PC-E 24:
And to give an explanation about my motivation and my interest in the subject: I am son of a resistance fighter, what influences whole my life and my general thinking up to now.
THX Carsten & Wilhelm. Next week I'll start to work with the groups of models for the single shots of the series.
I'm still looking for a choreography student at our Ernst Busch actor's school to do the arrangements of the models for the pictures. I'm not confident enough about my own abilities to do it myself.
And everything has to work perfectly at the first taking, for I won't have a second chance to do the photos. The 'owners' of the memorial are quite strict and it's not easy to handle the subject. So it's more than advisable to use professional help to keep an eye upon the models.
Coming back to HDR, Carsten. I followed the link of ACHdigital and tried out the SNS software. Very nice surface to work on! Than I pp'd the same NEF trio with Photoshop for comparison and I didn't find the differences strong enough to pay 85 € for SNS-HDR, as I don't do much HDR anyway.
This is a 3-shot HDR, more or less following Samulis recommendations, pp'd with Photoshop:
Yeah, I don't think I'll be paying up for any more HDR software at the moment either. Photomatix Pro is very hard to use and very hard to learn, but if you are willing to twiddle every slider a couple of times, it is possible to get quite good results, so that is what I'll do for now.
Vincent Kluwe wrote:
THX Carsten & Wilhelm. Next week I'll start to work with the groups of models for the single shots of the series.
I'm still looking for a choreography student at our Ernst Busch actor's school to do the arrangements of the models for the pictures. I'm not confident enough about my own abilities to do it myself.
And everything has to work perfectly at the first taking, for I won't have a second chance to do the photos. The 'owners' of the memorial are quite strict and it's not easy to handle the subject. So it's more than advisable to use professional help to keep an eye upon the models....Show more →
Hard to handle models? What are you bringing in here, a couple of adolescent tigers or something?
Thanks both It was a really hard shot to process, for some unknown reason. The softness around the windows is something I was trying to sharpen up, but I just couldn't get it. In the end I settled for this soft mood. Honestly, I don't remember the colours being quite so strong in real life, but I didn't touch the saturation slider, so maybe they were.
I find myself reacting to it differently than to a non HDR photo though. Not in a negative way, just differently. For some reason it feels more like a painting than a photograph to me. Amazing image.
Ausgezeichnet (one of a handful of words I remember from high school german!).
I wish I had a camera which could depict the scene exactly as my eyes saw it. It would be interesting to compare my HDR results to that. What any normal film or digital camera sees is of course very different than what we see. Our eyes/brain can adjust to amazing dynamic range in real-time, as our eyes traverse the scene, and so I saw blue outside those windows, but most of the camera shots had white instead. Apart from the glowy feel around the windows, and perhaps with slightly less saturated colours above the window, I think this rendition is actually very close to what I saw.
Which leads me to this: why do you react differently to shots that look closer to reality? Do you mean that you are conditioned to looking at photographs with their limited dynamic range (compared to ourselves) in mind?
