Visit Sabine Richter

Just came back from an Exhibition of Sabine Richter's photography work at the Kunst Galerie Fürth. Very nice work that borders on the abstract and/or painterly. Sabine Richter does the trick primarily by carefully selecting the subject (mostly architecture), the perspective and the frame. Very inspiring! You can see here work for another week until August 5th, or visit here Web-page www.richter-sabine.de.

Ah, finally!

I cannot say that I'm constantly on the outlook for abstract images, but this afternoon something caught my eye at the wall in our staircase: The sun was shining through a window above and painted some light on the wall. A simple tryptich with just a faint hint of spectral colors. Got my cam, framed the shot and went back to the computer immediately as it was clear that without some amount of post-processing there would be no relevant image.
Boy was I right after some tweaking!
See for yourself what turned up in Lightroom after some judicious adjustments:



Hope you like it!

Post #100

Well, just found out that this would be my 100th post on my blog dedicated to the abstract in photography.
So let's put away with lens-testing or with a little out-of-focus play and celebrate this with a suitably abstract image, aptly named

Transfiguration:



Now with me being a lens-tester and all everybody expects me to shoot brick-walls, hehe! But there are much more interesting targets: Siemens-stars for lens-testing and reflectively tiled walls for self-portraits. Yes, believe it or not, this is a "selfy" :)
Had to do some tweaking of the contrast with curves and remove some distracting blotches. But other than that it's almost straight out of the camera.

Shadow of a Tree

Today the low winter sun was just in the right position to project the image of a tree onto a white wall. An interesting transformation of the living, growing tree into a flat two-toned abstract structure. Well, isn't photography all about making things flat and two-dimensional? Yes! And I could have drained the colors out of the image, too? Yes! But it would still be a sharp rendering of a tree in b&w (or any two-tonedness that you can do in post-processing). Further blurring could be applied etc., etc.
Personally I like and look for abstracts sooc (straight out of [the] camera), well perhaps not straight because with many abstracts out of the camera the need to do something regarding contrast and colors is often higher than with realistic images. So let's say I like "abstracts out of [the] camera" (aooc) ;-)
It challenges you to find or produce them in the field and not play around with too many tools in the post-processing software of your choice. Tools for me at least pose sooo many options that I can hardly decide which transformations are leading towards an interesting or even good image, and which are just leading to random deformations without any sense.

Shadow of a lonely Tree:

Interestingly, despite the transformation of the tree being quite stark (3D->2D, colors->two tones, sharp->blurred, full image->crop) it is still easy to recognize it for a tree. This is on one side testament to the capabilities of our brains and on the other hand is proof of the unique form of trees.

Sled dogs

Now that winter combines icy temperatures and bright sunshine, I'm thinking back to the sled dog race in January. Those dogs where so eager to "pull it off" that even after a few kilometers pulling us around the track they still strain against their harnesses to race another round.
Below is one of the teams waiting for the next lap.


Not much in this image qualifies it for a blog about "the abstract" in photography apart from the limited dof the f2.8 aperture produced. Which develops quite nicely along the figures standing in the background and shrouds them (and their distracting details) in a cloud of oof-smoothness. Focus on the sled dogs.

Lens testing, lens testing, lens testing - again!

If you wonder, why it's (again) a little slow on my blog:
I've been testing the new Nikon AF-S DX Micro-Nikkor 40mm f/2.8G lens, the Nikon AF-S DX Micro-Nikkor 85mm f/3.5G ED VR, and the Nikon AF-S Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED VR for Camera Labs. Plus finally drawing up a big comparison of those results.
Pretty interesting stuff for myself as it is the first time ever that I used a DIY test-target captured on 24x36 mm ISO 50 black&white negative film Ilford Pan F plus for testing the lenses at magnifications of 1:2.6
You can easily jump to all my lens reviews and comparisons through this page.

And now that Nikon has announced the new AF-S 85/1.8G lens I'll sure be doing some further lens-testing soon...

Striped Foliage

Looking through whatever is in front of your subject may create interesting effects. The following image was caught looking out of a barn.



If you look at the large original (just click through the image and choose the action "View all sizes") you can see that the image is overlayed with a white fibre structure. That may give you a hint as to what the "filter" for shooting the foliage was...