November 2008

Again an extremely busy month. This time especially regarding my job. It´s always the same before christmas. But I still managed to crack the 1000 image mark again. More than 1000 images in a grey and wet month means of course lot´s of indoor portraits but I also shot a lot of images of the birds at my feeder. I tried to shot through the window first but discovered that beside the comfort ( I was wearing my pyjamas ) the image quality suffered too much because of the thick window glases. Taking images of birds in winter still requires to go out and freeze.

But beside trying to get some nice images of the birds beside my house my focus was still on portraiture. With my growing experience It becomes easier to convience my friends to play my models. A single portrait is not easy to take but a groupshot, especially with two kids, is really something special. This picture was one out of a serie of shots. Amanzingly I was able to get another five images that I really like. Something I would change next time? I would try to stop down at least to f8 if the light is better even if it would mean to shoot at 800ASA to get more faces in focus of close to focus. I still prefer to do these portraits with natural light because I like to keep things simple. Setting up flashlights ( I don´t have any ) could scare my "models". With just the camera it is more simple and less disturbing for them.

BTW: For the young lady ( Leonie ) it is the 5th appearance as a picture of the month.

Their mother demanded to be the picture of the month. She said that she really doubts that I was able to shoot a better image in November and she was right.

But there were some other nice shots too. The first one is an image of an amazing sunset in November. Usually it is just foggy and grey so the chance to see such a sunset in November in Austria is really low. It´s also not usual here for the rest of the year. To get a shot like this you need: 1. luck 2. the right location ( I was sitting in the car driving on a highway. I shot trough the opened side window. ) and finally 3. a camera! Since I got the Panasonic FX100 as my main small camera the Fuji F31fd is always in my car. So I´m never without a camera while driving. I also really like the second shot. It shows a very good friend standing on the balcony of his house. I used my favourite lens to get the background out of focus and cropped the shot to a widescreen format. I really like that for portraits. The third image shows our house in very good evening light. The day was grey and cloudy but right before sunset the sun breaks through the clouds. I grabbed the camera, attached the 17-40L and ran outside. I was able to got 3 shots before the sun disappeared behind some clouds again. The perspective correction was done in PS.

setting main shot: A-Mode, 1/160@f4, 400ASA

big sky shot: Fuji F31FD

bw portrait: 5D + 35L

house shot: 5D +17-40L