New Year's Eve Fireworks?

It just came to my attention that the year is over. Does anybody know a good location to photograph New Year's Eve fireworks in New York City?

Dinner Spectator

The 341 West Lurker and "all that image noise"

Hello visitor, I hope you had some nice holidays.

The 341 West Lurker was taken last October, shortly after I started using the Canon 50D. The picture was taken with ISO 800, and was slightly underexposed. I corrected the exposure in Lightroom and applied noise reduction. After using the 20D for years, and now the 50D since a couple of months, I got to say that I have problems getting used to all that image noise the 50D produces.
Often photography enthusiasts who invest in a high resolution camera have in mind that it gives the freedom to crop images and still end up with a decent resolution. One should keep also in mind that this is only fun if the image was taken with lower ISO settings. Otherwise you will not only bring up interesting details in your pictures, it will show all that image noise in great detail as well.

Prison Chess #10

Prison Chess #9

Window Shopping

Subway Tunnel

It's snowing outside and everybody seems to be getting into this Christmas/end-of-year mood these days. I would like to post a picture that fits the theme, but nothing of my 300 GB archive comes to my mind. So here is a picture of a subway tunnel :-)

Kebab Stand

jazz at lincoln center

Prison Chess #8

Standing Aside

Share the Road

Reminded me a bit of Alexey Titarenko. Titarenko has some amazing photographs of crowds in his portfolio.

Prison Chess Closeup

View from Brooklyn

Little Girl on Hydrant

Chess Player and Officer

Radio City Hall

Left4Dead

Times Square People

Times Square Rush

Round and Round

The ice skating rink in Central Park last Saturday. I only had a drained battery with me and no idea how long it would last. I took a couple more pictures later on Times Square and that was it.
There are at least two more of those skating rinks in the city: one at the Rockefeller Center and one in Bryant Park, maybe I'll photograph them, too - hopefully with a charged battery.

Dark Prison Chess Picture

This is pretty much how it came out of the camera. He was hit by this funny light from above...

This could make a good series

OK, after some experimenting I think I've found the way to go with those chess pictures. I have a series of portraits that I think are interesting together as long as they are processed in the same way. Instead of defacing chess players with wannabe-draganzing experiments, I'll go for candid black and white images. There is still a lot of adjustments involved, but I think I'm able to do this. Here is a first try.

Another Prison Chess Portrait

Chess Player Portrait

Prison Chess Match

So what's the prison story? Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to witness and photograph a chess match between students and prison inmates - six students versus about 60 prisoners in simultaneous chess. The event attracted journalists and a TV team, at this point I don't need to explain any further and just show you the video (my images will come later).

Back from Prison

This morning I spent inside the maximum-security section of New Jersey State Prison where I documented a curious and rare event. I'll write more about it once I find the time to go through my pictures. For now: It's about Princeton students, prison inmates, and their battle on the chessboard.

Spheres

Taken in Princeton on election night.

Modulo

This little piece of art is called "Modulo". It's not a photo, but I found it pretty, so why not sharing?
Images that represent basic mathematical operations, isn't that some kind of a contemporary art cliché? The modulo operation computes the remainder of a division. In this case I divide each pixel's X and Y coordinate by a fixed value and encode the remainder in the same pixel's red and green value respectively. The fixed divisor determines the size of these squares and the modulo the color gradient. The more appealing way of debugging programming code. However, sometimes you just don't know if it's your eyes or your code that needs to be corrected...

Hot Chicks!

I'm running out of headlines. Plus, it's fun to watch visitor statistics going up when using words like these.
At this point: greetings to all new visitors! :-)

Curvy Lady

Probably more curvy than lady...

Yet another campus picture

I'm sorry...

...but this little fright fest is not over yet.
I'm also sorry for his neck.

Shop is up to date now

Just finished entering all images to the shop section.
Now that I started this I might try other companies as well and see if one sells better than the other.

The Fox

This was the first time I directed a halloweener to do something, or shoud I say "to do nothing". I picked him out of the a crowd of people and let him stay by himself, doing nothing. In my humble opinion, this guy is more scary than any blood covered zombie.

Umbrella Girl

Suicidal Mexican

This might be a cartoon character...does anybody know who this is?

What the Joker and Sarah Palin have in common

I strongly believe that these two were the number one Halloween characters this year, at least I had the impression there were Jokers and Sarah Palins all over the place :-)

Sweeney Todd

The first of some more new Halloween pictures from New York.
The lighting setup at the parade was worse than in the previous years, but my current gear is by far better than what I had before, so I was still on the winning side. Not speaking of the creative people who are simply astonishing year after year. I guess my processing workflow improved a little, too.

Website Changes

If you look carefully, you will notice a little change on this page. I got rid of the guestbook, which seemed a bit lost and redundant. I simply replaced it with a shop section. I agreed on contracts with Seen.by and CCPrint a couple of weeks ago. CCPrint produces and exhibits in Frankfurt, Germany. Seen.by collaborates with Sander in Cologne. My experience so far is that taking pictures is one thing, but printing is a whole different story. So I'm very happy to have these capable partners now. All the proofs I have seen so far look just brilliant. If you happen to be interested in one of my pictures...it won't get better than this.

A Scary Halloween...

...is what I'm wishing you.
Hopefully more frightening than this picture here.

Youtube Slideshow

After I saw my work on a slideshow on youtube, I had the glorious idea to make one myself :-)
I thought that the colorful cityscape stuff works best when put together to something that has energy. As music I chose a song by Chemical Brothers called "All Rights Reversed". I simply went through some CDs while driving home from work and tried to picture how the images would go with the music. When All Rights Reversed was playing, I already had all kinds of ideas for panning and zooming. Next was the quest for a good software. I tried two or three until I tried a program called Magix Xtreme PhotoStory. The free trial can basically do everything the full version can do.

Towards the end of my editing I did quite some fine tuning, but after uploading the video to Youtube, I noticed that in the first couple of scenes the music is not 100% synchronized. That's bothering me a little, but I'll leave it like that for now.

I believe that if you like my pictures, you will like this video. I recommend you to turn the volume up and set to full screen. By default, Youtube shows a highly down-sampled version, but I noticed that when you go on the Youtube page, there is also a link to a version of higher quality.

They Arrived

Java Corner

La Aldea Irreductible

I've found some of my pictures in a Youtube video that was created by someone who writes what I believe is an art blog. I cannot tell too much about it, since it is written in Spanish. My Spanish roommate did me a favor and translated the original post for me: Turns out that the author of this blog introduces a Swedish singer (Anna Ternheim) to his readers. So this video basically plays one of her songs while the visual part is a slideshow with my images.
The music is beautiful, by the way. About the use of my images: I think it's always nice to see that someone likes what you are doing, and it's a curious thing to see how something else is created with it. Whether the music fits well with the images is another question. I thought the poppy colors would work better with something else, but maybe that's just me.
Here is the link to the original post.

Cagil

The Quest for the Perfect Walk-Around Lens

For a long time I thought a good walk-around lens is a lens with a large focal range in order to be prepared for all kinds of situations. Because I didn't want to sacrifice image quality I started to carry around the super heavy and bulky Canon 24-70 mm 2.8 from Canon. Now I decided I don't want to carry much gear anymore and keep my photography simple. Here are the obvious things I observed:

- As more gear you carry as a bigger deal it becomes taking it with you.
- As bigger the deal becomes as rarer are you bringing it with you.
- As less you have it with you as more opportunities for good photos you miss.

Instead of bringing a backpack full of glass everywhere, I decided to get myself a Sigma 30mm 1.4 lens and leave all the other glass at home, ha! Fact is, if you want to shoot situations, you cannot waste time with zooming anyway. You probably want to frame them in the way you are seeing them right at that moment. 30 mm on a APS-C sized sensor makes 48 cm, so here we go. Thanks to Mr. Beckerman for bringing my attention to this lens.

I also found a nice inconspicuous photo bag which can be worn over the shoulder or as belt-bag. I did a long Google image-search for such a - not necessarily photo - bag and ended up on the B&H website...how funny. It seems that the two main groups concerned about bags are females and photographers. Here is a link to the bag. In there should be enough space for the camera, the 30mm lens, and an ultra-wide-angle, which I mostly use for architecture and HDR stuff. I'm thinking about doing some long-term traveling next year, so this is some kind of preliminary adjustments towards going light and easy.
Back to the lens. I took it for a walk on South Street (in Philly) last Sunday. About the colors: I'm a compulsive image tweaker, thanks for indulging me :-)

Arts Bank

Copyright Disclaimers

Today I made an archaeological finding on my hard disk that I thought would be worth a post. When I started this website I had the idea of having copyright disclaimers in all kinds of languages. Because people at my workplace are so international, I thought I would ask them to write a disclaimer for me in their language and photograph them holding it. I think I followed the idea only two days and then got distracted by other things. Later on when I realized how many of my not-yet-photographed candidates already left Princeton, I got a little discouraged and dropped the idea.

I think this is Catalan:

Italian:

Taiwanese:

Ukrainian:

And here we have an italien helping me out with Swedish - which is a bit weird.

Trees in Winter

I took this in Germany in 2006.

Fun with Skateboards

New York City, March 2008

Somewhere in Las Vegas

In fake cross-processing colors and with real sensor dust.