Saul Leiter Retrospective in Hamburg

No, I’m not dead and this blog is not dead either. It’s just that I’ve not had anything worth reporting that is photography-related to in the last … year.

OK, I was on a very exciting two-week trip to Myanmar in December and January, but I haven’t even sorted out the image yet. Otherwise I’ve been so busy with photogether (getting the webpage up and running, organizing and describing trips, working out presentations for the technical courses) that I haven’t had a chance to go out and photograph. I’ve barely made about 50 images of my son during the last 12 months and that’s it!

(c) Saul Leiter

However today I did something worth writing about: I went to see Saul Leiter’s “Retrospective” in the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. I was quite curious about this exhibit since my appreciation of Saul’s images has not been very pronounced in the past. I own two of his color books, but I was not familiar with his black-and-white work, and there ware many black-and-white images on display there. I also attended the first public screening of the documentary on Saul Leiter about a month ago, so I knew a good bit about the photographer before I attended the exhibit.

Well, what can I say? I am still not a big fan of Saul’s work… His images are complex, multi-layered, thought-provoking, (mostly) subtly colorful, all of which sounds very exciting, but I was not able to develop a relationship to his images.

On the other hand I did find 5 to 10 images that I’d like to own and look at, and the one below is a personal favorite. Maybe because it is not very typical for Saul…

(c) Saul Leiter

OT: Pardon my Language

When I started this blog I never gave it much thought as to which language I should use.  I like writing in English and didn’t mind having some international readers, so I went with English.

But I live in Hamburg, and occasionally I’d like to address the local audience directly.  So if you see a post here or there which you cannot read,  it’s probably in German.  Not to despair!  It won’t happen very often, and if I think that the content is relevant to everyone, I’ll repost it in English too.

Elbjazz 2010

Hamburg is one of the truly exciting cities in the world!  Or which other city organizes a two-day (and night) jazz festival with 80 concerts on 15 stages located on and around the docks of its industrial port?  Not many, I bet — but what a cool idea!

Anyhow, I’m just back home from the second day of Elbjazz — it’s 3 in the morning, and I had such a thrill of listening, grooving and (casually) shooting, that I can’t go to bed quite yet.  So I’m looking through the images and reliving the concerts once more.

Since several concerts were running simultaneously, I only managed to see about ten bands, so here are my impressions from “my” Elbjazz 2010.  Enjoy!  (Click on the images for larger versions)

The first concert I saw was Anke Helfrich and her trio.  Here are Henning Sieverts (bass) and Dejan Terzic (drums) doing their thing…

Autofocus!

The AF of a Canon 40D Leaves Much to be Desired

Call me lazy or call me clumsy if you want, but auto focus has become extremely important for me. I have to concentrate on so many things when I photograph, that I don’t want to have to worry about AF too. But dang it, I’m tired of things like these:

1 Year NoArt-Blog

It’s been lots of fun going out and photographing, watching my images improve and writing the blog, so I guess it was all worth it.

Well then, happy birthday to… me!

Click on the Images

A friend of mine remarked that (1) the images on this blog are too small to see well and (2) when there are multiple images in one post, it’s difficult to concentrate on just one image.

Well, I’m using a fixed-width layout for this blog, and it is not possible to display anything wider than 500 pixels, so inline I’m already showing the largest possible images. But starting with this post if you click on any image, you will see just that image against a white background. And if the photograph is one that I’m particularly happy with, I’ll make the target image larger than the inline one.

Hopefully these changes will make viewing the blog more enjoyable.

Why are There no Comments on this Blog?

There seems to be a technical problem with leaving comments on WordPress.com (the host of this blog) — since about 6 weeks you cannot post any comments on this blog. If you want to leave a comment, please e-mail it to me and I’ll append it to the appropriate posting.

For the technically inclined: WordPress.com uses a spam-detection service called Akismet, which cannot be deactivated. If everything worked OK, each comment would be checked by Akismet and get classified as “spam” or “no spam.” The “no spam” comments from first-time posters get held for moderation indefinitely, comments from posters with at least one approved comment are immediately visible. The “spam” comments go to the spam queue, and I have to either delete them or mark them as “not spam.” If I take no action within 15 days, the “spam” comments get deleted indefinitely.

The problem is that in the last 6 weeks Akismet has marked all comments (90 in total) as “spam,” but the spam queue has only shown 6 comments. The other 84 are gone, and surely not all of these were spam. In fact, from the 6 comments that I did see, 2 were good ones.

Welcome!

I love photography and I’ve been photographing seriously since 1997. I can take a well focused photograph with a clear theme and with proper exposure any time, but my images rarely create an emotional responce in the viewer. If you ask me to show you my greatest photos, I’d be able to show about 10, maybe 15 — but that’s it, from over 20 GB of images on my hard drive.

The problem is definitely not lack of equipment or lack of understanding of the technical concepts. I know all about aperture, shutter-speed, depth-of-field, metadata, color spaces, profiles, shooting RAW, exposing to the right and so on. I have an excellent DSLR, a couple of high-quality zooms, a few primes, flash, tripod — the whole lot. So I guess I am the weakest link in the chain — as a photographer composing the image in the viewfinder and as a photographer using Photoshop.

Maybe I’m setting my goals too high, but I don’t think so.

So come along, follow me in my quest to improve my images and if you can, help me become an artist.

Yours truly
06 July, 2007
Hamburg, Germany