Anne's Weblog

The workshop isn’t tomorrow They changed the date to the 10th of September. So I have to wait some more time until I can shoot my first bride. Anyway, I am sure it will be cool then as well. Only two more weeks!

Today started my aerobic course. It was a good time. I had a lot of fun and I was dead afterwards, very good combination. I definitely will keep going. On Thursday will be my second sport course called Latin Moves. I am sure, it will be as good, if not better.

On another note, on Thursday will take place the wedding photography workshop as well. I am sure, it will be cool. Although I am not sure yet, if it’s going to happen, because they haven’t sent me any information except from “we got your reservation”. I tried to contact them, but none of them have answered so far. We will see.

On Friday and Saturday our annual business party-trip will take place. This year it’s going to be a knight festival. We all will be knights and learn to fight with a sword. I hope there’ll be horses as well… We’ll stay one night in a hotel (with a pool!) and the next day is a boat trip and a city tour of Cochem, a small city at the Mosel. I am sure it will be very cool!

Next week on Monday my Photoshop course will start. I hope I’ll learn a lot of stuff there and show some cool tricks. Today I found a tutorial about how to make storyboards, something I always wanted to learn. Now I am able to! My first storyboard looked nice. If you want to learn it as well, click here.

On Wednesday my portuguese course will start. As I loved Brazil so much on my journey at the beginning of this year that I definitely want to go back. So I thought it would be a good idea to learn some basics in Portuguese. Hope this will kick ass.

On a completely different note: My friends were in Canada the last two weeks and today we got a call that they got robbed. My friend lost all of his belongings, including my backpack which I lent him for the trip. And the worst: his flight was scheduled tonight, but he doesn’t have his passport anymore. He needs to visit the embassy, but maybe he won’t get papers that fast. What baffles me most is that I was for six months in Latin America, which isn’t a save haven at all and nothing happened. But they are in save Canada and get robbed. Strange.

Today was the hottest day of the year in Germany. I went to work early to be able to leave early, but it was so hot that I wasn’t at all productive. I am sure this was my worst working performance of the year. Granted, I wasn’t there the first four months of the year.I just couldn’t focus on work and decided to leave even earlier and to “cash in” some extra hours. Afterwards I went to the library. That was a very bad idea, because the rooms were so hot that my legs beneath my skirt was completely wet from sweat. It was awful!

When I went back to my appartment I took a cold shower and lied down on the bed. Luckily it’s not very warm inside my rooms, quite the opposite. I am covering my legs with a blanket right now. I am watching the track and field championships right now. There’s a big controversary going on about that girl from South Africa, who is tested right now, because people don’t believe her to be a woman. Read more about this on Briannas blog, an athlete who will compete in the long jump tomorrow!! Good luck, girl!

Right now they are playing the German anthem for the second German athlete who got a medal in Berlin.

Yesterday I was in the park for the green open air cinema. We lied on a blanket in the grass and watched Wall-E. I didn’t like the movie at all, but my sister convinced me to spend a nice evening with her. And what shall I say? In this beautiful surrounding the movie wasn’t as bad as in a cinema. The green party organized the movie night and they also handed out free popcorn. You have my vote

It’s only 10 days till the elections for having a new major in my city. Let’s see who will win. We have a conservative major now, who is a nice person although I don’t share his political views. Well, I think he’ll made a second term. The trend says 48% will vote for him and 32% for the second best. Let’s see what will happen. I am not sure, who I will vote, but I will vote for sure. It’s so important, especially nowadays with a shift to the right.

I think I’ll buy me some ice cream now. It’s the right thing to do on the hottest day of the year.

Today Scott Kelby posted the winners of his World Wide Photo Walk that took place back in July. Strangely he didn’t pick me But he’s chosen some good photos! Excellent shots!

To check the 10 finalists and 1 grand prize winner out, visit his blog.

Congrats to all the fabulous photographers who won the prizes. Great work!

To Scott Kelby: Thank you for putting together such a fun idea. It was great. I will be there next year again.

To all my fellow photographers: It was a good time that day in Bonn. Hope to see you next year.

P.S.: This is the photo I sent in.

The last day of the workshop was full of using the computer again. He showed us how to use layers and layer masks. I knew all of this, so it wasn’t too useful for me. But then we talked about printing your pictures either at home or at stores. That was the best part for me. He explained the different possibilities, the different stores and what’s the best to get good results. He showed us different papers that can be selected at fine art printing studios and so on.

That part I really enjoyed, because I always asked myself, where I can get good prints of my pictures without paying a fortune. He recoomended www.saal-digital.de, which works with an ICC-profile and guarantees repeatable results.

Conclusion: The workshop showed me some new points and some new methods. But it would have been better when there was a beginners course and a course for more experienced people, because I could have learned much more in this four days than the things we learned. Some parts, especially the waiting parts, were wasted time. I think I could have learned as much in a one day intensive workshop.

Wednesday, 12th, was the third day of the workshop and my birthday. Now I am 28 years old. It is definitely time to live my dream.

We worked at the computer again. The next method we used was to seperate channels to tweak the red, blue and green channel individually. It was good to see what you can do to highlight some parts and get rid of others. It was very interesting to see all the changes.

Then we worked with curves and the channel mixer. Even though I knew how to use them before, I’d never known how specific you can use them. It was amazing to see what you can do to get the best out of the SOOC-shot. He also gave us a list with the factors to simulate old black and white film in the channel mixer. Now I can make my pictures look like an Ilford film or a Kodak film, just as I want.

After the workshop I went to my family to eat cake and celebrate my birthday. My mom gave me a copy of Lightroom as a present. I also got a book about photography and other literature. Later that evening we drove to an arabian retaurant which we LOVE! We usually only eat starters. They have 30 little bowls with different dips and salads which you can eat with bread. After finishing it you are full. And the desert is amazing! It’s like heaven in your mouth. So good. A friend of mine met us there after work and it was a good feeling to have my best friend joining us. Good times.

The second day we spent on the street to get some pictures to process later on. We went to different spots in the city center and the teacher explained how to best take the photographs. He gave tipps when someone had questions, showed techniques and was a good source of knowledge. I took yesterdays picture in that time.

The second half of the day we started with the computer course. The program we used was Paint Shop Pro X2, but we also could use Photoshop if we wanted. I used both. I wanted to be able to use the tipps at home in Photoshop as well. The first tool we used was the black and white film tool in Paint Shop Pro. It’s almost the same as the black and white adjustment tool in Photoshop (CS 3 and higher). It’s quite easy to use and you are able to produce some good pictures.

Unfortunately the levels of knowledge of the participiants were very different. Some had a broad knowledge, some had just even a rudimentary knowledge of computers. It was very difficult to get a good balance. I know that. But I wished the levels were more equal. I was bored at some times, because I finished the task and had to wait until all the others succeeded too. Sometimes it took an hour until everyone finished the first step. It was a little bit annoying. I hope it will be better the next day.

I was on vacation this week, because I wanted to attend a workshop. It was called digital black and white photography. The aim was to produce good quality photos like the ones in the old times when you’d stand in the darkroom trying to get the best result. You’d develop, enlarge, expose and whatever, used different chemicals and paper to produce amazing photos.

In the digital era the camera has a funtion to take black and white pictures, but it is just standard. It may work for some photos, but not for others. Most pics look flat and like a rainy autumn day instead of having a good contrast.

The workshop wanted to change this, to show ways to make pictures as good as they once were.

The first day was all about theory. The workshop leader talked about the world of colors, about additive mixture of colors and subtractive, mixing with black and white. Then he proceeded to  talk about JPEG and RAW, about the sensors and all the possibilites that digital cameras have. He explained, why to use JPEG and why to use RAW, which is best for which situation, and the differences between 8bit and 16bit.

It was a good start. I think it is important to know the basics before you really start to learn new things, because otherwise you might have problems later on. I knew all of this before but it was good to have a kind of refreshing of some basics.

The second half of the day he talked about range of contrast and the difference between analog and digital in regards to the range of contrast. Film was much more forgiving than digital media is. If you couldn’t get the exposure right, you always could hope that you are within the range of two aperture stops and then the pic could be saved. The dynamic range within a modern camera is about 10 aperture stops, which means you are getting to the limits if you might photograph a scenery with harsh sunlight and deep shadows or a wedding with the white gown and the black tux. He talked about the right exposure, that it is more important to expose for the light parts, so they don’t get clipped. Our eyes can always see some kind (even minimal) variation in a white area, but it is used to the fact that there are areas with pure black without any differentiation. At the end of the day he explained about depth of field and how you can use it for composition.

I think it was a good start, but I hope I will learn more about new things the next three days.

I had a hard time convincing friends to do a photo shoot with me. It wasn’t that they said “no” but they weren’t very enthusiastic. Two weeks ago I met my best friend for dinner and I mentioned it to her and she said: We do it! So today we went shooting in Bochum. My friend and her girlfriend. We went to an amazing place. An old industrial area with gorgeous locations in a rustic way. We had a lot of fun.

But I have to say that it was hard work! It’s not as easy to get good photos as it seems to be when you see the perfect pictures of pros. All starts are tough and if it’s not, it’s not worth it, right? But one or two good pictures are between all of those with strange faces or overexposed…

Far from our shooting we had a good time. First we went to an imbiss restaurant and had some fries to wait until the rain was over. Then we went to this place and shoot for two hours. Later we did a kind of city tour and we’ve seen a rainbow! It was a great end for that rainy day. Thanks a lot for your help!