Morning photos

I love those moments when good photos just turn up and say "Hei, look here!" And you just have to grab your camera and take those shots. I was visiting my girlfriend in Budapest this summer and we spent some night at our friends place. So I woke up one morning, opened my eyes and there they were - three little bit abstract motifs (only two here) that grabbed my attention. I asked my gf to pass the camera and without getting up or anything framed, pressed the shutter and my day could happily begin.


Chimney and door

It was somewhat dim inside so I was little afraid of getting blurry images (ISO 100 Kodak EktaChrome) but because I was down on my back I could use myself as a steady base. 50mm, pretty wide open, lamp photo has Auto Levels applied in Photoshop so it turned out much more contrasty than the original scan was.


Paperlamp in Budapest

Bone crushing bass drum

Stage manager of Rammstein told press photographers to pay attention during the second song (we were allowed to snap during the first three songs) and keep couple of steps away from the stage. He said there was probably no danger of getting burned but then patted at his bald head and laughed. We knew there was going to be fireworks but I was still knocked blind by the first flame balls. Which is bad when you're trying to get good photos.

But that was only after bass drum tried to crush bones within our bodies. When we were taken out between the stage and crowd I noticed bass woofers lining the stage. Right about up to my chin. Bass during the intro made your lungs vibrate and I thought "wow". But when the first chord hit and sonic wave forced me to take a step back - as if someone physically forced you away. I don't know much about speakers and woofers and their power but it couldn't have been only in my mind, it was physical stuff.

Konica Minolta Dynax 7 Digital (Maxxum 7 Digital in USA) performed really nice. I turned ISO up to 800 and occasionally to 1600, shot mainly with Minolta kit lens 24-105 F3.5-4.5(that I received with the camera) and some shots with my Minolta 50mm F1.4. As one can expect there wasn't that much light, band members were trashing around so getting sharp shots was more than problematic. D7D wonderful AntiShake helped to use low speeds but that only meant sharp stage but not for example their frontman because he was not willing to stay put for even 1/10th of a second.

This is the only shot I grabbed of the crowd, it's kind of not so perfect but I like the cut heads of the front row, hands emerging from darkness and faces you can feel being there, more than anything else. And the lonely spotlight. You can see more photos I made here.

Technical information: ISO800, 1/80, F3.5, 36mm, no flash. Levels, and desaturation with Channel Mixer in Photoshop.


Crowd at Rammstein show

Rammstein and Dynax 7 Digital

Rammstein is in town. And I got Konica Minolta Dynax 7 Digital this afternoon for short testing. It just so happens that I have accreditation to Rammstein show this evening. Couldn't imagine a better place to give a camera a testrun. I've been shooting some pretty big names (Rammstein is big in Europe) before - Brian Adams, Roxette, Eros Ramazzotti (ok, not so big any more) but for last couple of years I didn't pay any attention to musicians and bands. So when Rammstein and REM were announced to hit our stages I got in contact and now prepare to turn up in the front row expecting to have my hair burned.

Dynax 7D feels really well in hand (I own Dynax 7 that it's based on), has many buttons and knowbs... I'll probably have something more to say about it tomorrow after I've spent a little more time with it. Expect some fiery and moody photos from the concert. Sorry, no photos, had to sign a paper that allows me to use those photos only in my employers website. Maybe some photos of the crowd.

Why Firefox is a bad name for browser

OK, this one is not going to be about pictures, sorry.

Have to get it off my chest - Firefox is a bad name for a web broswer (as is Thunderbird for a e-mail client). Why? Because the name is in English and it's hard to pronounce in many other languages. In this sense Phoenix was much better because legend of the Phoenix bird has been around for ages and thus the name is also widely known and has it's local pronounciations. Firefox is a good toungetwister in languages that tend to pronounce words the same way they are written. Thunderbird is of course even worse because of "th".

What could have been done better? A generic word that is easy to pronounce and probably contains lots of vowels. Google, Yahoo, Opera...

It's probably not that hard for younger people who have knowledge in English to start using those names but for older people. I certainly know that my mom will never be able to adopt it properly. And so it is much easier for her to just say "IE".

When you want to get people from all walks of life to start using your web browser then easy to spell and pronounce international name will make a big difference. Especially when half or more people are even not aware that they are using something called web browser and that it comes in different flavours. Wouldn't it be easier if mouth to mouth marketing worked because everyone say "Oh, I've got this new cool thing to surf, check it out"?

Human tripod and a tall building

I promised another photo from our morning shoot with Rivo. This one is made in the very center. That's one of our new "skyscrapers" called Cityplaza. It is really pretty boring house except those interesting "grills" that you can see in this picture as well. To get this shot I had to lie on my back as setting up tripod for such steep angle would have been a major fuss and just looking up I couldn't get sharp enough image as lightlevels were low. Fortunately I had my old cloth on so it was just a matter of overcoming my natural shyness, but there weren't that many people around anyway.

I shot it on colour slide but because it was monochrome anyway (concrete is pretty grey most of the times) I turned it totally black and white in Photoshop using Channel Mixer. I know that there are supposedly better tools for converting coloured images into black and white but haven't taken the trouble to learn them so far.


Cityplaza in Tallinn, Estonia

Shallow depth of field

Earlier this Autumn I got up one at 7am on a nice overcast Sunday morning to wander around the city and shoot some empty streets. Light was not very spectacular - we were counting on a nice sunrise but the clouds never disappeared so grey skies it was. But it's fun to be up so early, not many people or cars and the pace of everything is much slower. I'll post a photo that I made lying on my back a bit later but for now an example of very shallow depth of field.

This photo is made in a district called Kalamaja (fishhouse). This is an old part of town with two-three storied wooden houses, quiet streets and old trees. A lovely place, I'm currently searching a nice apartment there to move to.

I suddenly spotted this lonely fallen leave on the fence and knew that I had to shoot it. I usually don't try too many different angles and because I mainly shoot film I only get one or two frames of everything. This time I only took one frame and I think it was my last picture this morning. I had my 24mm wide-angle Minolta lens, set the aperture to F2.8, framed and fired away. Maximum aperture is also the cause why only so small part of the picture is sharp. Strong diagonal line of the fence leads your eye into the picture and nicely out of focus areas further help to focus on the fallen leave. And I love the muted colors.



Single leaf on a fence.

Hard to catch

Panning is a shooting technique where you follow the movement of a car or bycycle or runner (or any other moving object) and at the same time press the shutter. When you manage to keep your camera and moving object in sync the result should be a photo where everything else except the car is blurred. This shot was made in the middle of the night and I think I managed to get the car as sharp as possible under those conditions. Citylights contributed to colorful and stripy background. I used Casio Z3 3 megapixel digicam. Had some days to play around with it. Delightful little camera with extra large screen. Picture quality might have been somewhat better as underexposure was a slight problem but it handled great and was small enough to carry around everywhere.


Speeding car

Blue skies and reflections

I receintly got Pentax Optio S5i for testing (will publish a short review in local newspaper and more thorough review in foto.diip.ee) so I was walking around with it in my pocket. Actually really nice camera, very small (think credit card size), stylish and plenty of shooting modes. Maybe a bit noisy at ISO 400 and tad slow when focusing in dark conditions but overall not bad at all. I've shot this building before but this time blue sky and reflection of the clouds really put all things together. This is a straight shot out of the camera, I'd prefer some levels tweaking in Photoshop but wanted to show image quality as it is. Mind that it's been uploaded with Hello (www.hello.com) that does not do very good job at jpg compression, thus the somewhat low quality. I'll manually resize the next images.

Tallinn Hotel in the center of Tallinn, Estonia

The usual "hello world!" message

So there, I'm going to give it a try in English. Mainly to see what are the possibilities of attracting readers with photos and background stories about certain photos. Not just "made it there" but rather how, with what, what post-production etc. Just simple stuff. Good luck.