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I’m not a very educated Artist and can hardly judge if a painting is of good quality or the work of an hopeless amateur. My rule is simple. When the painting is in a museum is must be art and somehow good. Or when you are in a church and you see some very beautiful ceiling paintings, I get always a feeling of holiness and artistic sophistication. The paintings must be masterpieces.

When I saw the painting in the photo above, I had the same feeling. Even after years looking at the photo, it still looks like a masterpiece to me. But is it not from Michelangelo nor is it in a museum or church. Can you guess where you can find this beautiful ceiling painting?

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The photo today is something complete different that I usually post. It is one of my first strobist street shots and was the result of a small photo shot, that was more an experimental session. I was during this time (and still) deeply impressed by the photos of Dustin Diaz (Link) and try to do something similar with my equipment (He is using a 5000$ lense). The photo is back lit by a street light and the main light is small softbox up right to the camera with SB 600 with 1/16. camera settings: 50mm, f1.8, 1/30, ISO 800. Almost no post-processing.

Hope you like it.

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Although I knew New York already for awhile, I’m still thinking it is one of the most exciting cities in the world. All these building, people, cars and lights are great. This picture here is made from one of the best spots in the town. Pretty likely everyone who comes to New York has visit the Empire State Building. The view is always unbelievable and I’m blown away from the perspective.

If you have pictures from the same spot please share them in the comments or on facebook with me.

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It is sometimes amazing how much you can add to a picture, if you take something away. I really start to appreciate this in black & white photography. Although, I seldomly shot especially for Black & white, I sometimes post-process it like this. One thing I learned is, that contrast in black and white serves a different purpose than in color pictures. A picture that might look too contrasty and too extreme in color, might be right on spot in B&W.

One example for this is the picture below of the Boston College. I decided to make a B&W out of it, because the color version looked too artificial and is also the distracting construction zone is not so visible. I think you can see the effect if you compare the pictures fullscreen use the following link [View with PicLens]

B&W also serves the purpose to emphasize a particular mood. I made the photo below from a beautiful mansion in New Port. It was spring and the trees didn’t have already leaves. So I decided to make a B&W out of the shoot. I like the resulting atmosphere, looks a bit vintage.

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People who know me better, know that I’m fascinated by graveyards and I really enjoy to make a Sunday walk within them (during the day). I really like the engraves in the stones and imagine how the life of theses people must have been. Especially Roman Catholic graveyards are great, because some people spend there a decent amount of money for their small private mausoleum (more about this later). Beside this, there exist also the small graves for the people, who don’t have so much money. In southern countries you find them side by side on a wall. Not much space to remember.

This picture was done in Porto in Portugal in a huge impressive graveyard. I liked the nice flowers that paid a little respect to the beloved ones. In total, the picture was pretty gray; therefore I play around with texture effects. The blur is produced by the lens.

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Some longer time ago I posted a picture of the Boston skyline with Charles River in front (http://www.flickr.com/photos/werkunz/3666599549/in/set-72157615371572780). I used this picture just for an experiment and try to make my first attempt in photoshop to produce a mirror effect. I was not so happy with my results, but many people on flickr loved it. I thought it was to faked. Moreover, the charles river is never so calm to produce such a reflection.

Well, last winter on one evening, i was proven wrong. It was such a nice and calm evening, that the complete charles river served as a perfect mirror. I made two shot, where I’m still not decided which one is the better. Let me know what you think?

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Sometimes you think you have found a perfect very unique spot to make a photo. You set up your shot. I usually do bracket to have more flexibility later. It looks good on the LCD screen. But when you go home and try to post-process, you can not make anything special out of it. It looks somehow dull and uninspiring.

Exactly this happened with me with this photo. Sometimes you need to fail to get something new. I first try to do a typical HDR of this. But I was not very satisfied with my resulting colors. I liked my composition, but the colors looked too artificial. So, I decided to try something new. I desaturated my HDR significantly and added a blur vignette. I think it gives the photo a bit of a pinhole feeling. By the way, the photo is done from the Belaggio towards the Paris Paris Casino in Las Vegas. So we are not in France ;-)

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After almost a break of half a year it is time to revive this blog. I always loved it and want to make it more professional. But the attempt to make it more professional suck up more time than I could afford. What lead to the weird situation, that I did not post anymore, although I still like to talk about photos.

I decided take it more easy. I continue to post elaborate blog posts here. But I will also post from time to time just simple photos that I like. Because that is also what this blog is about: Just photos

The photo above was done last summer in Maastricht. I liked the nice holiday feeling on this sunday afternoon.

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Today, I post two older Boston pictures from me that I personally really like as photos. But, I was never really happy with my former post-processing. Over the time, I think I became a little bit better in my decision-process for post-processing tools. Therefore, I took the time to revise my work in this two shots.

I hope you like the results as I do.

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One major reason why you wanna buy a professional full-frame DSLR camera (e.g. Nikon D3) is the fantastic ISO capabilities of theses cameras. ISO settings of 1600 ISO and beyond is not a big problem. But with affordable consumer cameras (e.g. Nikon D90) you discover in dark scenes already significant flaws.

But there is a way to improve the noise capabilities of your camera without loosing any picture details. This technique was a real surprise for me when I first heard about this trick from RC Conception. The only problem was to find a reasonable application area.

The idea is simple. Picture Noise is random. If you do multiple exposures of the same scene you can filter out the noise. The only problem that is left, that pictures with high noise reduction usually lose a lot of its color brilliance. Therefore, I combine this technique with my HDR techniques. The photo above was done in a very dark church in Porto. I didn’t had a tripod with me, so this shot was usually impossible to do without pushing the ISO setting to its limits. The shot was done with ISO 5000 handhold. Below you see a picture comparison between my final picture and the original ISO 5000 shot (you can click on the picture to look closer).

 What do you think? Fascinating! You see especially the improvement of the picture quality, if you look on the small angel on the upper right side of Jesus. I think it is impossible to see in the original shot. So, how to do this?

1. Find the right position for your picture and bump up your ISO so high that you can make sure to have an unblured shot (here ISO 5000, 1/20, f4.2, 30mm)
2. Make a series of HDR shots (e.g. 3 exposure +2EV, 0, -2EV) Here my method link
3. Just repeat step 2 at least 5 times (without moving the camera !!!) . I ended up with 5 times a series of 3 exposures, in total 15 shots.
4. Load the 5 pictures of the same exposure settings into different layers of one photoshop document
5. Auto-align the different layers with photoshop (Make sure that the alignment is perfect link
6. Merge the layers together to a smart object and change the stack mode to mean
7. Do 4-6 for all your exposure settings. In my case I end up with three photos (+2EV,0,-2EV) with perfect noise characteristics at ISO 5000
8. Then I used the three exposure to great a HDR with my usual procedure

Below you see again a comparison of the picture qualities. The first picture is the original photo with ISO 5000. The second shows the unprocessed HDR. The third is the processed and sharpened HDR. Can you see the difference !?

There is a last remark. This complete technique makes only sense, if you don’t have a tripod with you. With a tripod you can just use a long exposure and ISO 100 and get similar image quality (maybe slightly better). But the situation that you can not use a tripod is not seldom (e.g. not allowed, on a trip with your wife, no space in the bag, no time to set it up

Let me know what you think about the technique?

All the best

Werner