06/03/2019
Photos from the concert of Lord Bishop and his band at the Leinewebermarkt. Saturday, 1 June 2019 at the 'Klosterplatz' in Bielefeld. Great music, great show!
05/31/2019
These photos were taken at the Zoo in Duisburg. I used a few days vacation in May to drop by again. There are certainly zoos with a larger animal population, but I still find the Duisburg Zoo very beautiful. The various enclosures are mostly beautifully designed and offer photographers good views and locations. The Sony Alpha 7III together with the lens SEL 4.5-5.6 / 100-400 mm OSS GM and a 1.4x teleconverter were used. I also used the new animal eye autofocus and have to say that it works very well together with the tracking AF.
Splashing Dalmation Pelican
Pelican island
Dalmatian Pelican (Pelecanus crispus)
European Wildcat (Felix silverstris)
Red Panda enjoys bamboo
Red Panda in a tree
Curious little Red Panda
The Boss - Male Lion
Siamang #1
Siamang #2
05/26/2019
On 25 June 2019 I visited the Minden harbour and took some photos. It was a very sunny day and the pictures were taken in the late afternoon. Around this time you usually have a good light, which helps to work out structures and gives the photos depth and three-dimensionality. That's why I chose black-and-white photographs here and paid special attention to light and shadow in the postproduction. The pictures were taken with the Sony Alpha 7III together with the SEL 4/ 24-105 mm OSS G and SEL 4/ 12-24 mm G lenses.
Factory building at the harbour (Minden, Germany)
Factory courtyard (Minden, Germany)
Harbour panorama (Minden, Germany)
05/25/2019
Once again photos from the 'Tierpark Olderdissen' (Bielefeld, Germany) from spring 2019. All pictures were taken with the Sony Apha 7III and the lens Sony SEL 4.5-5.6/ 100-400 mm OSS GM.
Bear lady Jule on a morning walk
Jule taking a bath
Young wolf
Brown bear Max
Lynx in a tree #1
Lynx in a tree #2
04/13/2019
The flower portraits were created with a quite simple setup. As background I used colored cardboard, which was placed about 40 centimeters behind the flower. For the illumination I used two to three permanent lights with a standardized color temperature of 5400° Kelvin. This makes it easy to control the lighting. What should be taken into account is the ratio of shutter speed and AC frequency. Here in Germany, the electrical current is fed in at 50 Hertz. Therefore I use shutter speeds of less than 1/50 second for such light sources in order to avoid streaks in the picture. Since you should always use a tripod for tabletop photography anyway, this is not a big problem. The pictures were taken with a Sony Alpha 7III with the SEL 2.8/ 90 mm Macro OSS G lens. Since the depth of field is always quite small with short shooting distances like here, I used the technique of focus stacking to be able to show the whole flower sharply.
Portrait of a tulip
Whitered
Purple peruvian lily (Alstroemeria)
> Nature
04/02/2019
Tulips are certainly among the most popular spring flowers. They are not particularly rare, but they are still very decorative. Whether at home or - like the photo here - outdoors. I photographed the red lady tulip (Tulipa clusiana) in the Botanical Garden of Bielefeld. The second photo was taken after a rain shower.
The first picture was taken in the early morning shortly after sunrise. At this time of day the light is soft and you can avoid too high a contrast. Lights and shadows are easy to control and you still get bright colours. The second photo was taken in the afternoon. I used the Sony SEL 4.5-5.6/100-400 mm OSS GM lens, which can be focused to a shooting distance of less than one meter. It's not yet a real macro lens, but it's very suitable for such pictures, because you can create a very nice background blur. Camera and lens were mounted on a stable tripod. I triggered the camera with a remote shutter release.
Lady tulip (Tulipa clusiana)
Lady tulip in the rain (Tulipa clusiana)
> Nature
04/01/2019
For the two photographs I plundered a bouquet of flowers and took out a eryngo and yellow peruvian lilies, both are tabletop pictures which I illuminated with two continuous lights in front of a dark blue background. Macro shots offer the possibility to show small details, which you would otherwise hardly notice, in a big way. This can be seen particularly clearly in the fine structures of the eryngo.
With macro photos, one very quickly has the problem that the depth of field is too limited to show the entire object in sharp focus. Even if you close the aperture very strongly, in many cases it is not enough and unfortunately one also quickly gets problems with the diffraction blur that reduces the image quality again. A good but somewhat complex solution is a technique called focus stacking. This involves taking a series of pictures in which the focus is slightly shifted from frame to frame until a sharp image is taken of every part of the object. Then the single images have to be combined. I used the software Helicon Focus for this. But it also works with Photo Merge as part of Photoshop, if you don't have to process too many single images. Very helpful is the use of a special focusing rack and also a stable tripod is indispensable.
For both photos I took 60 single shots each. It was important to me that the background remained blurred. This often looks better than when everything is sharp from front to back.
Yellow peruvian lilie (Alstroemeria)
Eryngo (Eryngium)
> Nature
03/31/2019
Spring is slowly arriving in my hometown Bielefeld in Germany. At the end of March there is not much growth, but the hyacinths are already blooming in our botanical garden. The three pictures of the blue hyacinth (it is the same plant) were taken early in the morning in backlight. The sunlight, which falls through the trees in the background, together with the wide open aperture provides the bright blur circles. I worked with the focus stacking technique to get the rather small blossoms sharp in front of the background. A Novoflex CASTEL-MICRO focusing rack was used for the camera movement. Fortunately it was windless, so that only a few attempts were necessary to get good raw material. All three photos are composed of 20 single shots.
Blue hyacinth #1 (Hyacinthus)
Blue hyacinth #2 (Hyacinthus)
Blue hyacinth #3 (Hyacinthus)
> Nature
03/30/2019
In a supermarket nearby I found a flower pot with a yellow calla. It was the last one that was still there and it looked pretty worn out. I bought it anyway. Not that there aren't enough photos with a calla on them already, but I had the idea to make a tone-in-tone composition. The picture was taken in natural daylight in front of a piece of yellow cardboard. Since the blossom was not very big, I worked with the focus stacking technique. The image is composed of 20 individual shots. Thus the calyx is continuously sharp and stands out well from the blurred background. I used a Sony Alpha 7 III with a SEL 2.8/90 mm macro lens and a Novoflex CASTEL-MICRO to move the camera. All mounted on a tripod.
Yellow Calla (Zantedeschia)
> Nature
03/17/2019
In 'Baumheide', a district of the city of Bielefeld, there are wooden sculptures on a footpath. I suppose they simply serve the purpose of landscape and park design. But somehow they also seem archaic to me. As if they were legacies of the old Germanic tribes, which after 2000 years have still not been cleared away. I have photographed the sculptures many times before. This picture was taken at dusk. It is a double exposure with the blurred lights of houses and traffic lights in the background. As lens I used the ZEISS Batis Apo Sonnar 2.8/ 135 mm.
Wooden Idol
