Church Abstract

Yesterday I was invited to a wedding — as a friend, not as a photographer — but of course I could not resist and had my camera with me. The wedding was in a local church which at a first glance appears relatively plain and ordinary, but if one looks around a bit, there are some very compelling lines and shapes to be discovered. I was probably still under the influence of Roman Loranc since I managed a few interesting compositions in the short time before the wedding ceremony began.

As I was prepared for shooting people and not architecture, I had a flash with me rather than a tripod, but after bracing myself a bit and turning the ISO one stop higher, I was able to come up with this shot. I quite like the doubled lines, the tension between the straight and the curved lines and between the blue and yellow color nuances, and the balance between the strong blue curve to the right and the numerous yellow curves to the left. The three compositional plains — the pews in the foreground, the bluish arch in the middle-ground and the yellow wall and arch in the background — seem to round up the composition nicely.

I like this image a lot and would be very happy to read some critiques or suggestions for improvement.

And here is a different crop, this one with an even stronger emphasis on the double lines.

Roman Loranc

I’ve just discovered another great modern-age black-and-white photographer — Roman Loranc. His locations and his subjects are totally unspectacular and his compositions are so simple, yet his images are so exquisite!

Take for example the image “Edge“. It is perfectly composed, with an incredible balance between foreground, middle-ground and background. The light is great and the fact that we see the silhouettes of the trees but not the trees themselves makes the image very interesting. The color tone contributes greatly towards the early-morning dreamy mood of the image.

Although I find this image totally fascinating, I am quite sure that the negative taken by the camera is relatively boring. I can imagine that Roman spent hours dodging and burning various portions of the image, darkening the corners, playing with the contrast and the dynamic range of the scene. In fact (and I am totally speculating here) I think of Loran more as a painter than as a photographer. He seems to use the negative simply as a starting point for all the creative work that comes afterwards.

Other images that I like a lot are: “Kneeling Figure“, “Heavy Silence“, “Shadow Play, Study 2“, “Shadow, Lightning Rod“, “Cottonwood Lace“, “December Morning“, “Prayer Room“, “Clouds through Deergrass“, “Winter Bridge“, “Two-hearted Oak“.

Missed the Queen Mary 2

I just saw on the news that the world’s largest passenger ship, the Queen Mary 2, is in Hamburg today. Apparently she docked at 5:00 and will head out for New York tonight at 23:30. Hamburg is a great maritime city and its folks are very fond of big ships. Each time one docks at the port, there are parties at the cruise-terminal and thousands of people line up along the river bank, waiting for the ship to pass by, waving, smiling, taking photos. The party extends even on the water where small ships escort the big one on her way to the North Sea.

So my first thought after hearing the news was: “perfect — I’ll just pack my tripod and head out to the Elbe.” But it’s raining outside, I’m feeling kind of lazy, and at 23:30 it will already be very dark, so no interesting sky in the background. Don’t get me wrong — if this were the first or the last visit of “the Queen,” I’d be out there no matter what, but this extraordinary ship has already been in Hamburg several times and her next visit is in less than a month (August 23, 2007).

Here is a photo from one of the earlier visits in Hamburg, a snapshot that I made without a tripod and from a less-than-perfect position.

Monitor Calibration

I am quite aware of the necessity to properly adjust one’s monitor, and I’ve tried out several alternatives in the past. I’ve known all along that Gretag MacBeth’s Eye-One Display 2 is the right product for me, but at 280 € it is quite expensive, so at first I looked into cheaper solutions. What a waste of time and money!

I started out with Adobe Gamma, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not get my monitor at home and my monitor at work to display the same image the same way. This meant that one or even both monitors were still not properly adjusted. So I moved onto QuickGamma, which was better, but I was still unsure.

Next I bought the ColorPlus product from ColorVision, installed the software and let it “do its thing,” but prints from several different labs were still coming back too dark. So I started digging up on the Internet…

There I learned that monitor adjustment is a three-step process. First you decide what color temperature, brightness and gamma your monitor should have. Here 6500K, 120 cd/m², and 2.2 seem to be most common. Then you calibrate your monitor by setting those values using the control buttons on the monitor’s front or side panel. Finally you use the spyder to profile the monitor. The resulting profile (the .icc file) describes how the calibrated monitor is different from the values which you chose in step 1. Of course, the closer you get to the desired values in step 2, the smaller the deviations in step 3 will be.

Armed with this knowledge I realized that ColorPlus only profiles, but does not let you choose any target values, does not tell you what values it uses, and does not assist you in the calibration. After all, how are you supposed to set your monitor to 120 cd/m², when the brightness control shows only a percentage of the maximum brightness that the monitor is capable of? And can you really trust the color temperature settings of your monitor?

Gretag MacBeth’s Eye-One Display 2 is much better in this respect. In advanced mode the software lets you choose from a variety of target values, explains every step of the calibration and profiling process, and works together with the hardware spyder to measure the brightness and color temperature of your monitor. All you need to do is push the buttons on the monitor until the measured values coincide with the target values. The profiling step completes automatically and the newly created profile is automatically set as default.

After I did all this at home, my background image became much darker and the colors changed somewhat, but what’s more important, the images that I’ve been sending out for printing now look just as dark as the prints that the labs have been sending me back.

So I guess my monitor is now properly set up, and I can edit my images with confidence. Finally!!!

Boat and Clouds

In reference to Managing Images, I thought I’d show a typical *** image as a reference for what I for mean by “some artistic value”. This image is simple, to the point, the composition is well balanced, the light is good, the clouds are interesting, and there is lots of fine detail in the large image.

But now I’m having trouble coming up with a good title, so apparently the image content does not speak for itself. Maybe the image should only get **. No, no, *** is good. But you see what I mean, it’s hard to give an absolut and final rating.