May 2010

Friends and family. The picture above shows the family of my friend Josef ( far left and last picture ) gathering together to celebrate his birthday. Beside my job and the preparation for the Grossglockner my time was extremely limited. There was almost no social life for me in May but there were two exeptions: a greek evening ( an open air concert were the almost constant rain in May just paused for 2 hours ) and the birthday celebration for Josef ( were we also sat outside because you guessed it: the rain paused for a couple of hours ).

The image above shows the whole family. They asked me to take some group shots because of course they do not have to many family shots that contain all members. So while the image is nothing special it´s special for my friends. From a technical point of view it´s not very complicated to take: just make sure that the exposure time is as short as possible and the the depth of field is big enough so that all "models" are in focus. On that day the lightlevel was rather low. I would liked to shoot at f4 or f5.6 to gain depth of field but I also wanted an exposure time of at least 1/125s and because of everybody is small in the frame I didn´t want to go past 400ASA to avoid high ISO noise. But these are minor issues. The hardest thing is to get the expressions of the faces right.

One hundred years ago people are used to sit in front of a camera without moving for a couple of minutes. A photograph and being photographed did cost a fortune and therefore was a very serious thing. It definitely wasn´t fun. And it shows. While all people in these early pictures are looking straight into the camera their expression is far from being relaxed. Mostly the people in these early photographs look very grim. I guess it was a result of the difficult task to not move during the exposure. With early flash photography that changed: Now they people did no longer look grim - now they looked frightened. They looked frightened because in the early days the flash was a small explosion that sometimes killed the phorographer and injured the rest. Only in the early 60s flash photography became save with the invention of the flashbulb by Agfa. When I was a kid my parents had such a compact camera that took single lightbulbs! ( a Kodak Instamatic ). They also had a newer model that took flashcubes which contain 4 flashbulbs.

Today these problems are history but now the biggest issue is to get the attention of all people for a couple of seconds. Nobody is willing or even able to sit or stand still for a couple of minutes. So you have to be fast and shoot as many frames as possible. To get one frame where everybody is looking into the camera with open eyes! and wears a smile is almost impossible. The image above is the best out of 19 frames But I think this is the magic of these images. Even with all the technology we do have today we can not overcome these problems. Of course you exchange heads in photoshop without a problem but you would kill this magic and natural look. In the image above Valentin is doing the magic. And because he is the only who wears s red shirt he pops out of the image.

The last image shows Josef and me toasting. It was just before the soccer world championships and the beerbottles in Austria showed the flages of the nation. He holds up the flag of Nordkorea but he is not a communist ( I write this just in case if he wants to fly to the US some day ). Now I have to end and check whether I´m allowed to visit the States or if I need a visa.

settings main shot: A-Mode: 1/160@f2.8, 400ASA