So these are the moments, when you see your picture on Flickr’s explore. I liked the perspective and took the shot. More than a month later I met the RAW on my hard drive.
Some Color and Silver Efex later it looked like it is was posted. Interestingly it was also mistaken for a HDR. Must be that people are not used to black and white with tonal contrasts any more…
I recently bought a manual lens on ebay. I saw some pictures taken with a manual lens on flickr and got curious. Some minutes and EUR 88,- later (USD 125,-) I was the owner of a Revuenon 55mm f1.4, an adapter for the M42 screw mount to EF and a lens hood.
The first impression was heavy. This glass is built like a tank. Metal everywhere. Great! And the aperture is 1.4 so it is fast. The DOF is shallow. So the first tests were on how the glass reacts to bad lighting and how to operate the little gem.
So the first thing I learned: Take your time.
In some light conditions it is fairly easy to focus with the view finder, but especially if you are close to the object it is better to us the liveview. The DOF is so shallow that it can be the trickiest part of the whole procedure to focus.
Once I knew the signature of my glass I took it for a walk. And I had fun!
Feet of steel will show you, that the DOF is shallow! Recognize the small strip of sharpness on the ground. Small details like this can be useful when focusing by hand. Continue Reading →
Still trying to master the 1.4 with manual focusing on my 60D. It seems bad to focus with the liveview. I have seen some good shots and some bad ones but it still hits me like a hammer how shallow DOF can be. The focus lies on the second row of dots on the black die and does not really reach the green one. This is a wonderful and mean piece of old glass 
50 pictures, ein Album auf Flickr.
I just ran across this Album on flickr. Some algorithm thinks these are my 50 best. I would take others. The funny thing is that I see so many pictures with vanishing points.
Is it that people like pictures with vanishing points or do I take many of them or both? Do you have an opinion or an explanation?
A picture consisting of contradictions can be especially nice to look at. But still there is room for improvement. The strange thing is, that the red rule nearly always gives you nice results. If you see something red, pull the trigger.
Sometimes the outcome will be especially nice. I was lucky
Have you ever asked yourself: Who decides which exposure is the right one for my picture? If you are in green rectangle mode your camera decides. Sometimes this makes things easier, but even when you switch to P, Av, Tv the camera decides what is good for you.
It takes another small step to get to M. The place where you decide how your picture should look like. I played around and wanted to take a picture with a lot of light (often called high key lighting). The focus could be a little bit better but I like it.
I finally made my proof of concept: By using Blender I made a time lapse video and applied some virtual dolly movement. Meaning, that the camera is moving across the picture. This is possible due to the bigger than full HD video source made from the single picture recorded with the Canon Powershot S95. A zoom would have been also possible but was not implemented due to calculation time reasons.
Lean back and enjoy
As one doesn’t have theoption to do digital crossprocessing I thought, why not develop a RAW in color and monochrome? I blended the two pictures and the result was quite crossprocessed.
I wrote earlier on about my contact with CHDK and how I tried to do some time lapses. I was fascinated how easy this technique is and how powerful the visualizations are. I had my first failures and I did some of them again. I will return to this point at the end.
Motion detection is one of the features most cameras lack. There is some kind of trigger for taking group pictures by waving. But that’s it.
If you own a Canon point and shoot and have already installed the CHDK, you will easily find a script on the CHDK page. I wanted to give it a try, did not change any parameters and started the script on my Canon Powershot S95. I kept the camera on the roof of my car so I could easily blend the layers. After some exposures I finally had three snapshots of lightnings I blended to get this picture:
There were also some frames which had no lightning in them, but as you can see I am on a parking near the highway and the camera sometimes interpreted the traffic as a lightning. Nothing is easier on a digital camera than deleting these. I will definitely try this with the 60D and the magic lantern.
