D 224 - Motherly

When the child is away on vacations...

D 221 - Ping Pong #2

Please, don't mind the door.

D 217 - Wrinkles

Accidental head turn.

D 205 - Farewell to the Day

I never learned what caused this magnificent sunset. Low clouds which let the sun out just before it reached the horizon must have been a factor.

Equipment

E-510 with Helios 44-4

What I learned

Sunset/dawn silhouette photos have quite an "African" feel to them. I never thought that they can be so powerful with only some red sky and majority of the negative space within the frame.

D 203 - Sunset in the garden #2

Equipment

E-510 with Helios 44-4
RAW developed in Lightroom.

D 202 - Sunset in the garden #1

Equipment

E-510 with Helios 44-4
RAW developed in Lightroom.

D 201 - Valkyrie

My wife's niece shortly after a little incident on patio stairs.

Equipment

E-510 with Helios 44-4.

D 190 - Nature vs decoration

A sign from the times past. It was one of only a few furniture shops in a town of almost 1 mln people and it had barely any supplies usually. Hurray for centrally planned economy!

Equipment

E-510 with Helios 44-4.

What I learned

I keep seeing those ridiculous trees rising straight from concrete surface with no other green matter but themselves around.

D 189 - It was you, who did this!?

My son not-posing with sunglasses.

Equipment

E-510 with Helios 44-4.

D 188 - I want to ride my motorbike

Picture nicely composed with a prime lens.

Equipment

E-510 with Helios 44-4.

D 113 - Flowers interwined

A pair of spring flowers.

Equipment

E-510 with Helios 44-4.

What I learned

I gave into the temptation to edit the photo. I took it in JPG but I didn't like a distracting fragment of another flower at the edge. While I was at it, I also improved the tonal curve and noise/sharpness settings.

It feels that after 2 weeks of posting only Straight out of Camera photos I learned to look at my photos critically first and only then when it's necessary edit them in Lightroom. Before I knew I would edit every photo anyway so I didn't really care how the photo looks like before I "develop" it digitally. I only cared to capture as much tonal information on the sensor as possible without clipping.

D 112 - Spider curtains

Equipment

E-510 with Helios 44-4.

What I learned

Apparently back-lit photos must be taken with some positive exposure bias. Without it this one came out to be about one EV stop too dark.

D 90 - Not all that glitters is gold

Macro close-up on a hand sharpened pencil.

I'm trying to make some improvements to the visual side of the blog every once in a while. I think that the dark borders around photos help to frame the compositions within them.

Equipment

E-510, 6-15-27mm extension tubes and Helios 44-4. Flash with a soft-box, aluminum sheet reflector.

What I learned

Not every macro proves to be as fascinating as those of thorny chestnut skin. Perhaps most man-made objects are just a very poor imitation of mother nature.

If you look at natural objects you will find them showing new fascinating textures from naked eye view all the way to atomic structure. At every level there is an organization of elements because the nature "made" them as a bottom-up designs - the characteristics of the smallest particles forces specific arrangements at higher levels.

When man designs and produces an item, he thinks top-down. He knows what he wants in the end and then works out what materials and arrangements to use at smaller scales. And there is no particle in this universe that would naturally form itself into a blender, bicycle or a Zuiko Digital lens. So at some structural level man-made things have to be clumsy, simplified, dull and ugly.

Or so says Zarathustra.

D 88 - Incarnate

Limitations fuel creation. Again.

I was thinking about a nice close-up shot with my palms spread around an eye for a Pan's Labyrinth like effect. But since I had a macro rings with Helios lens on, I decided to keep this magnification factor and work something out within it.

Equipment

E-510 with all three extension tubes (yeah, now I remember - that's the name) and Helios 44-4 on a tripod.

Cropped and changed to greyscale in Lightroom.

What I learned

This is the mode of work I like not only with photography. It is more like a philosophy for me. I try to approach a subject with some idea in mind and then react to the insights I have while working on it, experiment and come up with something different than what I planned but exciting and satisfying.

D 78 - Women's Day

It is Women's Day today. So all the best wishes for you girls. Stay beautiful (chauvinist part) as you all are, on the outside and inside (feminist part). You are the best thing, that we - men - have in this World.

Equipment

E-510 with Helios 44-4, hand held.

What I learned

Wikipedia gave me two surprises about this holiday.

First is that it begun in the USA while now it is mainly popular in the ex-Soviet block.

Second is that the English speaking countries have an abbreviation for it, it's IWD (for International... ).

D 62 - Washed away

This time I went for one of my all time favorites - soft photo with pastel colors.

Equipment

E-510 with Helios 44-4 lens.

What I learned

More like 'what I'd like to learn' this time. I can't catch the conditions required for such pastel-color effect. I know it when I see it but I can't make it happen when I need it.

D 53 - Charming the Spring

Another photo that sort of came out in green-yellow hue. Looks like someone here is looking forward to the snow melting away.

Equipment

E-510 with Helios lens. Longer exposure in place of flash.

What I learned

In body stabilization of Olympus as compared to better high ISO performance of Nikons and Canons is a double-edged thing. It's a pain in the back when you want to catch your kid running around or other scenes with people in motion, because it allows you to shoot at longer exposures but it doesn't compensate in any way for the motion within the frame.

However in such cases as my today's photograph it is great to have an old manual lens stabilized and shoot just slightly softened picture at 1/6 second shot from hand.

D 52 - Mistletoe's Log

Today I tried and tried again to catch an interesting triangular composition. Not entirely without successes but while I was doing so I encountered another fantastic frame just waiting for me a hand reach away from my front door.

A mistletoe hanging on here since Christmas with a part of poplar branch which it fell down with.

Equipment

E-510 with Helios 58mm lens. Flash with softbox.

What I learned

My triangle shaped compositions are getting better and better.

Prime lenses force you into seeing the world through their focal length. I shot for last 3 weeks almost exclusively inside my apartment but I did it with 30mm Pentacon (60mm after 2x crop factor) and few times with my Zuiko 14 - 42mm zoom.

Once I put on the 58mm lens (116mm after crop) I found new photos in the very same places which I exhausted with shorter focal length(s).

This forced perspective limitation provokes creativity and exploration. This makes photography fun and even adventurous in a way.

D 41 - Happy Birthday, Gosia!

For she's a jolly good fellow (or 'gal' I should say)!

As requested by today's birthday celebrator I present: Toucan contrasted with something soft.

Equipment

E-510 with Helios lens, flash with a softbox.

What I learned

The pleasures of contracted work. Perhaps this contract was quite peculiar but still I was asked to do specific photo in limited time. I was surprised with how tough it is to create something satisfying in such conditions.
I wasn't at all surprised however that I started doing it after 10 p.m. That's just me.

D 38 - Not a square

Today I was looking for a square compositions to continue the geometric theme.

Equipment

E-510 with Helios 44-4 lens.

What I learned

Squares never quite worked out for me. The box was rectangular, yes. Yet the first shots I made proved to consist of triangles as far as composition was concerned. The later photos which I made straight from the front of the box were not anything that I would like to share, so I posted the triangular one.
It could be worse, I could be stuck with only square compositions unable to come up anything more dynamic.

Anyway tomorrow I'm back to square (one).

I've been looking for usable range of applications the highest ISO setting in my Olympus but without any firm success.