Light Geometry

Yesterday and today I had to take part at a conference where not much was going on, so during a moment of utter boredom I took out my little camera and took some shots of the ceiling lamps.  There are only two different lamp designs, but after looking from all possible sides and angles, I came up with several different shots.

These kinds of images are my most favorite ones — strong abstract compositions consisting of only a few dominant lines.

The quality of the images is not that great, but that’s the best that the little Ixus could deliver at its 105 mm tele setting.  And in this case I acutally care much more about the composition…

Photographing the Photographer

Recently my photo-friend Bettina asked me to take a few portraits of her.  She’s been toying with the idea of starting up a small commercial portrait studio, and she finally took the first steps.  Now she needs a bit of advertising, hence the need of a few nice photos of her.

To be honest, I was a bit intimidated at first because I don’t think of myself as a portrait photographer, not even after all the portraits I took in India.  The trick is, all those are taken as documentaries: no special backgrounds, no studio lighting and no directing of the subjects.  With Bettina I had the freedom to influence all of those, and it seemed overwhelming at first.  But there were a few things given, so I started from there.  Bettina wanted me to photograph her in her garden and she wanted to hold her camera in her hands, so that one immediately understands that the person being photographed is a photographer.

It was an hour before sunset, so some beautiful light was coming through the trees.  I put an 85/1.8 onto my 40D, set f/2 in Av mode and the flash to 1EV underexposure.  I simply needed a bit of light fill into the eyes and to light up the black camera.  The first images were not good at all, but I slowly found my rhythm.  I began by concentrating on the exposure and placing the focus on the eyes.  I then began to pay attention to the background, the placement of the camera, and of course to Bettina’s facial expression.  Since I was using my favorite auto-focus setting, I was able to take a well-focused image at any moment without having to frame-for-AF-then-reframe-for-composition.  I think this saved the day.

While talking to Bettina and getting her to smile, I managed a few decent shots.  I showed her these on the back of the camera and we both relaxed, since we knew, we’ve gotten the job done.  But we had time and the light was still good, so I suggested that we shoot further.  And guess what?  That’s when the best images happened.  We knew we have nothing to lose, so we tried different positions, with smiling, without, camera in focus, eyes in focus, all the possibilities.

I wanted that the camera is present in the image, but without drawing too much attention to itself.  We played with horizontal and vertical crops and with the camera hanging loose or being carefully supported by the hand.  In the end I took nearly 80 images, and we inspected them quickly in Bridge.  Focus and exposure were spot on, and there were quite a few nice onces, so I left Bettina with the task to short out the good one from the bad ones.

The images that you are seeing here are among the best ones, and the first two are my absolute favorites.  I think they compliment each-other quite well and could be used in a flier — the first image on the front page and the second one on the back.  But I also like the last three images.

What do you think?

More Bicycles in the Snow

I find this image much better than the previous two. I read somewhere that if you cannot explain why something is good, you cannot repeat it, and as a “head person” I tend to agree. So let me try and critique this image and see if I can put into words why I like it.

Even though this image is somewhat abstract, it’s very clear that it is showing us two bicycles covered with snow.  So without giving it much thought, I called the image “Bicycles in Snow.”   But the main subject are clearly the three red lights.  Like in real life their strong color causes them to immediately stand out  and draw attention to themselves.  Here however they appear as cheerful spots of color and not in their typical warning function.  If you are so inclined, you could even interpret them as signs of life within an otherwise cold and colorless image.

(So we already have a literal and an abstract interpretation and then the juxtaposition of warning and cheerful.  That’s enough for me to call the image a keeper and give it three stars.)

Looking a bit longer I notice the interesting texture of the snow and the nice contrast to the black frame of the bicycles.  Also the strong lines leading upwards and to the right, thus strengthening the notion of cheerfulness and optimism.  But there is also an ellipse that starts with the bicycle frame of the right side, follows the handle bars to the left, and then continues down along the mud guard of the left bike.  And there, while traveling along the ellipse, our eyes meet the three red spots of color again — very nice!

I approached this scene with my wide-angle zoom attached to the camera.  I knew immediately that the angle-of-view is too wide, but my fingers were too frozen to change lenses, so I got in closer and took a few shots.  That caused too much exaggeration in the lower-left corner, so frozen fingers or not, I mounted my 50/1.8 and took one last shot.  While evaluating the images at home I was immediately drawn by the tight framing of last image.  That image has the further advantage of being shot with a prime lens of normal focal length, so it has tons of detail throughout.

(Which accounts for the forth and final star.  But I won’t give a fifth one because the image lacks strong impact and memorability.)

In terms of editing I didn’t do anything special.  Other than a very slight crop from the right, I cloned a piece of trash in the upper left, I strengthened the saturation of the red lights and desaturated the yellows completely (there was a yellow sticker of the left bike’s mud guard that was visible despite the snow).  All of this took about a minute in ACR.  I then opened the image in Photoshop and run two actions: one produced the preview above and the other the large image that appears after clicking on the preview.

Now tell me please, do I file this image under “places / Hamburg” or “transportation / bicycle” or “seasons / winter”? 

Photographing People

I’ve been photographing seriously for about 13 years now and until March of 2008 I would have said that I’m absolutely not a person photographer. I used to take extra care to avoid people in my photographs or I edited them out in Photoshop.

So when I visited India in March of 2008, I’d planned to photograph Taj Mahal, the spices and the colors, but not the people. But — surprise, surprise — when I came back, 80% of my photos were of people, many of those portraits. And then — surprise again — just as an experiment I turned the portraits into black-and-white, and they looked even stronger. This wasn’t planned, it just happened — the people begged to be photographed and the images begged to be shown in monochrome.

Nothing has been quite the same since. Although I still haven’t gone as far as asking strangers if I can take their picture or asking friends or models to pose for me, I’ve started to allow people to wonder into my photographs and I’ve shot a few abstracts with people in them.

I’ve also been looking at lots of photo books lately, and these surely have an effect on me. How could it be otherwise, with such strong images by Steve McCurry, Sebastião Salgado, Herb Ritts, Robert Mapplethorpe, Isabel Muñoz, etc.?

100 Years Henri Cartier-Bresson

I was on a business trip in Ludwigshafen and Mannheim this week, and I noticed a poster for a an exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s early work in the Kunsthalle Mannheim. I was leaving today, so I canceled my last meeting and went to see the exhibit instead.

It is dedicated to the 100^th anniversary of the birth of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 — 2004), and it shows 79 prints from the early 1930’s. Wow, talk about getting back to the roots of photography — one camera, one lens, black-and-white film and absolutely no cropping of the negatives! What a contrast to today’s fancy bodies, fast zoom lenses and super pumped-up colors in Photoshop… (Which of course is symptomatic of weak images needing a digital trick in order to grab attention.)

If you have some interest in photography, you’ve probably already seen some of the images that I saw today, but I saw original prints with size 30 x 45 cm and not small reproductions in books or on the Internet. Of course not all images were equally strong (my favorites are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8), but HCB was indeed a master of composition and already at the age of 24 had a great feel for “the decisive moment.”

But he accomplished yet another feat — what he saw in the viewfinder was the final image — his prints always show 100% of the negative. To me this sounds utterly incredible, as I always shoot with some extra space around the desired image and I crop my images to many different aspect ratios, whatever fits the subject best.

Anyhow, the exhibit is very inspiring and definitely worth seeing. If you are in the area any time until June 8, go for it!

© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

PS: It was this image that inspired HCB to take his camera and go out in the streets.

PPS: Maybe HCB had two lenses. A small number of images (for example, the one above) appear to have been taken with a wide-angle lens.