Hynek on Photography

My endless journey to photography mastery plus pictures I've found worthwhile.

Hooray for Editing

While doing my Week of The Gimp, I decided to look at my older pictures, particularly at some I liked from Indonesia.

I did some very limited editing on this one:

An Outlook on the Three Gilis The result can be seen here: Power of Basic Editing

I suggest to compare them big on black: old vs. new

All I did was a curves adjustment, saturation and lightening up some parts of the picture (particularly the palms in the lower right), adding contrast and removing brightness from the sky.

Filed under  //   editing   gimp  

Nikon 13mm f/5.6 - A True Bargain

"Current bid: EUR 12,706.00" - holy shit. :)

JFTR, it's this one.

[via Ken Rockwell (no permalink available)]

Filed under  //   gear   lens  

Commencing the Week of The Gimp

I always wanted to learn graphic editing. Even though I'm unblessed by talent artwise, I still like the idea of picture manipulation

As I've shown in this set, I have some basics. I also know about curves and primitive cloning. But especially curves are something I do rather in Capture NX 2 which isn't a graphic editor but a RAW converter with some editing facilities (which are enough most of the time, that's the main reason I didn't learn enough doing real editing yet).

But I want more. I want more control over my pictures, more possibilities.

I agree that Photoshop is standard but I didn't find a viable way to obtain it w/o paying 1,000 € so far. Thus I'm going for The Gimp for now. With the additional bonus that it runs also on Linux. I'm sure, the important stuff will be easily transferable once I'll have PS.

So this week I will work through a Gimp book, ideally cover-to-cover.

Filed under  //   editing   gimp  

Whirlin' Birdies

Month 2 of Project365 done!

Filed under  //   pic of the day  

First Lesson Learned

So I've learned my first painful lesson concerning lenses:

Tele lenses without stabilization are only usable with a tripod.

I'm going to send back my Sigma 70-300mm F4-5.6 APO-M DG Macro. I've just got too shaky hands and being able to shoot 300mm at a shutter of 1/300 only is with a max aperture of f/5.6 pretty restraining.

I'll get the Sigma 18-250mm F3.5-6.3 DC OS HSM instead. Maybe less quality but I need it for travelling anyway and convenience is more important for me in that case.

P.S. No, Nikkor ain't in my price bracket. ;)

Filed under  //   gear   lens  

Himmel & Kirche

A blue sky, I forgot a such thing exists...

Filed under  //   pic of the day  

Construction Site Culture

Filed under  //   pic of the day  

Transparency

A plant in my office.

Couldn't wait for coming home, so it's just UFRaw+GIMP. :)

Filed under  //   pic of the day  

Recreating the past

Photos with the feeling of the 50s, yet taken fairly recently. Great project. :)

Filed under  //   cool stuff  

Bokeh Power!

Let’s get this started with a cliché. :)

Filed under  //   pic of the day