Hopes to Ashes

click image to enlarge

It's easy to guess from the headline that I am not smoking. Not smoking any more, that is.

But here I was more fascinated by the replicating leaning forms that manifested themselves in the viewfinder. To emphasize this a little bit I used bibble5's layers for burning and a bit desaturating the borders. The more I play with this software, the more interesting it becomes despite its overly long beta status and still unresolved bugs. It is just the right tool for my way of handling the raw files, quite straightforward, no fancy effects, just carefully helping to show what's already in the raw file. As a linux user, all that lightroom and photoshop is a non-option, so I am even more glad that bibble5 now fulfills such a great part of my processing wishes.

And despite all criticism in the forums about bibble's slow development process, this definitely is not a case of 'hopes to ashes'.

this photo on flickr

Some rights reserved.

car triptych

click image to enlarge

who invented the white-balance automatic? and who told me to leave it switched on? egad, sometimes i feel sympathy for mike johnston's 'the leica as a teacher idea. at least no whitebalance-automatic that, as every automatic, does as good as it can, but doesn't help me thinking. and getting the balance manually, just by optical impression, was impossible for me, at least at first take.

note to self: one more automatic to switch off on certain occasions. oh yes, and i do this when shooting panos, but here i simply forgot.

this photo on flickr

Some rights reserved.

cascades and bluebells

click image to enlarge

in case you have difficulties to find the bluebells: better click on the image and see it large! trying to find the best compromise between sharp water droplets and the impression of fast moving water i did a small series with different exposure times, and 1/100s gave the best result. this was a bit astonishing for me as i had expected the best effect at slower speeds of maybe 1/30s, i guess this is due to the the big amount of water coming down the mountains after the rainfalls.

the raw file was converted with the bibble5 preview 2 version, and despite some flaws, the region tool and selective color tool can give already great results. without it, the bluebells would be almost invisible in the small image size.

this photo on flickr

Some rights reserved.

sofobomo 09: batticaloa fishermen

click image to enlarge

finally my sofobomo 09 theme has found me: the fishermen of batticaloa. since 2005 i try to spend the early morning hours of my missions to batticaloa on the beach, and over the time i got more and more acquainted with them. since quite some time i planned either a small exhibition or a pod-book on this topic, so using it for sofobomo is just natural.

the next evenings i will spend with bibble5 - the preview 2.1a really rocks - and scribus. my laptop is not too well suited for heavy image editing, this is one more reason to use bibble instead of lightzone. to compile the book should be not too difficult, as the framework is ready: a blurb book is going to be the print target. now it's high time for doing the final selection.

this photo on flickr

Some rights reserved.

green weißbach waters

click image to enlarge

is there a life outside the raw (file)? probably there is. and i do know, yes, that the eye of the photographer is important for the picture, her or his feeling for composition, balance and all those factors that have to be considered in "the moment it clicks". but all this fiercely defending the jpeg as the only necessary format that a good photographer needs (ken rockwell comes to no good remembrance here) in my eyes suffers from a singular flaw: the file from the camera is just another factor for a successful image.

it's an undisputable fact that great photographic art can originate from media that do detract some factors from the photographers influence - think only of the polaroid process - and some pictures work because of qualities that allow to disregard technical qualities in the printmaking process. but the raw file in my eyes is the equivalent for the film original, the basis for an image, basis in a process that reveals image components that would remain hidden without diligent work.

decades ago this work could only be done in the darkroom, now the computer screen has replaced for many of us the darkroom work (let's put aside the new possibilities of this tool or toolkit), but at least i do similar things as before: dodging, burning in, now complemented with local contrast enhancement and local sharpening, partial control of saturation etc.

the preview image to the right at first glance looks dull, but working with the new layer tools of bibble5 (still in preview) and subsequent local contrast enhancement plus refocus sharpening in gimp created a whole new image out of the raw file.

no, at least for pictures like this there is no life outside the raw.

this photo on flickr

Some rights reserved.

sigiriya ruins

click image to enlarge

late in the day the light was soft and the green regained its power after the blazing sunlight. the combination of the red rocks and the plants was very soothing, calming and inviting for a rest.

this is my first try with the beta of the new bibble5. its region feature allowed to keep the shadows in the center away from pure black while the environment was darkened half an f-stop to compensate the effect of 'exposing to the right'. this way the picture is less noisy an richer in tonalities in comparison to a shot where big parts are in the left half of the histogram.

the old bibble4 id did like because of its speed already, but the lack of region functions meant that selective editing had to be done in gimp afterwards (i am an all-linux guy), and therefore lightzone was the tool of choice for low iso shots - for high iso its denoising algorithms simply are not state of the art.

this photo on flickr

Some rights reserved.