October 2009

Strange subject? Looks like a kind of mentalist ( as seen on TV lately ) but in fact it is my friend Josef playing Bela Lugosi. You have no idea who Bela Lugosi is? Well - google him!

After spending 2 weeks in Canada it was not easy to come back and shoot images of the landscape in the area were I live. Don´t get me wrong. I live just outside of Vienna and the landscape is very nice but it´s not the Canadian Rockies nor is it the Pacific coast. And the weather was hmm just not like it was during our trip. It was mostly the usual cold and wet autumn days. Till the end of October it looked like my picture of the month would contain a self portrait shot with my Canon 500D plus kit lens at 1600ASA at the mirror of my Hotel room in Visegrad / Hungary. Luckily that changed after a long weekend with our friends. I took the opportunity and shot some portraits using one of my favourtie lenses the 135L.

The one above is my favourite showing "my dear friend" playing Bela. He is a big fan and have seen a lot of his films. Me? Well I like his Dracula and also Plan 9 From Outer Space or The Bride Of The Monster but I don´t consider myself a real fan. I also love Tim Burton´s Ed Wood where Martin Landau was rewarded with a Golden Globe for playing Bela Lugosi. If you have seen none of the movies mentioned before I recommend to start with Ed Wood and I´m sure that you will be end up watching them all. The other images were shoot on the same day in the afternoon when we met our friends in Vienna.

The 135L on my 5D is simply wonderful. It get´s the job done and it never let me down. It´s seems that with this lens in front of the camera it´s not possible to end up with poor shots. I think that even on these websize images you can get an idea what I´m talking about. Razorthin DOF plus an unbelieveable sharpness of the parts that are infocus is what makes the difference every single time I use this lens.

Shooting indoors it also gives the big advantage that you can shoot without a flash if there is reasonable daylight from windows without cranking the ISO to 6400ASA. And this also makes a difference. While the quality of current cameras at higher ISOs is impressive it is still a compromise for anything shot above 800ASA. Something that´s not necesarry if you have a fast lens. F2.0 gives you 2 full stops over f4 and 3 stops over f5.6. So instead of shooting a slow zoom lens using a fast prime gives you the chance to use 800ASA like in the image above instead of 6.400ASA on the slow end of a zoom.

My message in short. Get a fast prime for indoor shots. The second advantage of the fast f-stop is that it nicely blurrs the background because as long as you don´t live in Windsor castle there is a chance that some walls with distracting elements are never far behind your subject. In my case it is a wall with my CDs. But because of the shallow DOF it is not distracting at all. The hand held out in Lugosi style is almost too much blurred but you can still see what it looks like. If not: google Lugosi!

settings main shot: A-Mode: 1/400@f2.0, 800ASA, BW conversion in Lightroom

other images: the same except the first one which is taken at f2.2 and 400ASA