Some kind of mushroom in the Müggelberge. 90mm Macro (for sale: Leica User Forum).
Weed in a field in the Hans-Baluschek-Park, near Priesterweg Bahnhof, a tip from a friend. Half of the park is a flat, nothing with concrete and worse use of the space than letting it grow wild, but then there are plants like this. The other half is very interesting, a nature preserve, as well as an artists' area and old train bits and pieces.
This is from a while back, but I almost missed it. Just caught it today. Sometimes you get lucky. I was actually taking a photo of the sky, believe it or not. I wanted the two in the foreground in the image, but didn't even see the three in the background until I got home. I just kinda pressed the shutter at the right time, feeling instinctively that something was happening.
This was a shot where I just couldn't get Lightroom to give me the right white-balance. I tried and tried, but even at 2000K it had a distinct yellow cast. So I switched to B&W, but here it had little charm. In the end I played with the colour channel saturation sliders, and got a nice grain in it, so I kept it, but Adobe really needs to revisit the range of some of their tuning parameters. Btw, the grain looks nicer in the full-size image. Something about the rescaling doesn't preserve the look.
Playing with B&W. Somehow I got some grain into this photo, although it was taken at ISO 160, the cleanest setting on the M8. I turned most of the colour channels to 0% or 100%, to exaggerate the contrast, and then this noise showed up.
Recently, it seems as if I don't manage to take a photo a day, and don't manage to go through my recent shots any more often than about once a week. I will change that this week, but I do feel the difficulty of keeping it up, mostly due to taking the same route to and from work each day, and not taking any time before or after to look for something interesting. I think that having a proper project would focus me, but I haven't found one yet. I will think about this in the time coming up.
This was rather a fun group photo at night, on the walls of a fortress outside of Ulm on a small mountain. Given the change in smoking laws in Germany, it is becoming more and more common to see a crowd of smokers gathering outside restaurants and bars, and the feeling of defiance makes these crowds very lively, as if they are somehow successfully beating the system. In my experience, it will dwindle to near-nothing within a few months, but anyway, this was a neat time in near pitch-blackness.
This monument to Sophie Scholl, a brave woman who died in defiance of the nazis in the Second World War, was apparently just erected. A curious man was trying to keep track of me, but I gained the upper hand. I don't know that he will ever know that I got him right at the decisive moment.
Sorry for the absence; I was in Ulm in south Germany for a conference, and apparently forgot to warn you. Here is a shot taken in Hackescher Markt Bahnhof just before I left. I was struck by the intense lighting which the Leica did a good job of preserving the feel of, one of the strengths of this camera.
This is by far the weirdest cinema ceiling I have ever seen. I actually don't even think there is another contender. I took Jana to see "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix", and the only place within reach which had the movie playing at a sensible time was this cinema, a neat old place with weird deco. The cinema was made to look like we were sitting underwater, which it failed at, but it did lend a special, displaced feeling to the room.
I went to a photo exhibition today, and on the way back, I spotted these steps. The colour and shape were perfectly captured by the 90 Macro. I didn't crop even a single pixel away, something rather unusual these days, with the somewhat loose interpretation of reality which the M8's frames give.
The exhibition I saw was a Cindy Sherman retrospective at the Martin Gropius Bau. I could not say that I am a fan of her work, but I do find it interesting, and was looking forward to it. I found the show slightly disappointing, with a higher proportion of those segments of her work I don't find so great (Masks, Puppets, Sex, War, Clowns) than I had expected, and less of the good stuff (movie scenarios, bus stop, murder story, ...). There were a few really good images, but really, Cindy Sherman is more about the fantasy than the imagery, in a sense, and there is probably nothing I would have bought and hung on my wall.
There was also an exhibition of work by Dirk Reinartz and his students, some of which I found much more to my taste. There was one shot in particular, of a black horse in a street at night, which I would love to have on my wall. Patricia liked it less, finding it too dark, but that was part of what I liked so much about it.
