Street Flowers

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Westend again. Some of last weeks images (Westend Strip Light, City Life) originate from there, and the streets are always worth a deviation from the shortest way to work. Today I indulged in my bokeh passion again, this time with the long zoom on the camera. A conscious decision for a certain lens influences my way of seeing, and while I was a fan of very long tele lenses earlier, this passion has somewhat subsided. But in this image I see a good combination of sharp detail and blurred shapes of the street and its inventory, f5.6 seemed to have been just right.

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poppy flowers in a barley field

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getting up early to catch the first light was definitely the right thing to do today, as the sky became overcast before noon and stayed like this until the evening. i finally got over my feeling of inertia which quite often strucks me after my missions to sri lanka: so many contradicting emotions overwhelm me, compassion with the suffering people not the smallest, that it takes time afterwards to get up and go again, searching for harmony, beauty (not daring to use the word art). but when i was there i was just delving into that feeling of seeing, beeing there, experimenting, framing, that i completeley loosened up and this way really relaxed.

so it was really worth getting up early.

this photo on flickr.

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more tulips

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untypical for tulips, these are white. my favourite raw editor lightzone, which is now available as a commercial and supported product for linux - thanks lightcrafts - proved to be an excellent tool to just enhance the local contrast in the one focused tulip. the shot was taken with a more than 20 year old glass which i do like very much for its creamy bokeh when used white open.

the tulip to the right is red, but as red is so abundant in springtime pictures, i went for 'something completely different' and used the b&w conversion of lightzone. the region tool allowed me to additionally blur distracting foreground elements.

those two shots were made during a two hour excursion with friends from the local photo group. having worked very concentrated for the whole day, it was a pleasure and recreation to come into a "flow" of photographing, just focusing on composition, framing. this happened regardless of the expected results and forms a great part of the pleasure photography gives me.

this photo on flickr.

Some rights reserved.