Spending the long Halloween weekend in our second home town Genoa down in Italy, The Significant Other and I celebrated the Halloween evening in style, participating in a Halloween Ghost Tour through the medieval town center. Tagging along was my Leica SL2-S and the TTArtisan 50mm .95 prime “Nifty Fifty” M-Mount lens.
Going through some street photographs from earlier this year I noticed this image I took with my Leica SL2-S and the Vario-Elmarit-SL 1:2.8/24-70 ASPH just before the camera suffered a terminal shutter failure on the second day of my Israel trip. What is still clearly visible here is the incredible dynamic range of the Leica’s full frame sensor. I just love the soft tones on the face of the little girl, the triangular spot of light on her cheek. Given the fact that here is brightest sunlight in the background behind her face, it is amazing the sensor still captured these subtle details of that beautiful little smile.
Exif Data show 1/160 sec | f/4 | ISO 100 | 70mm. Black&White jpg out of camera.
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While multitasking generally is a good concept, there are just some things that don’t run well in parallel. Especially, when they are time consuming activities. Like finding ample time for photography and blogging and matching that with the demands of a time consuming day job. And then throwing in a big project The Significant Other and I have been driving the past half year. And then another personal project that I’ve been on for a few months now. And as much as multitasking might help, the day has only 24 hours (albeit a former boss of mine insisted that a day has 48 hours).
But as the finish lines of the mentioned projects are in sight (no worries – you will eventually read about them here), there will be more time to pick up the camera and roam the streets again.
The photo from the streets of Jerusalem was taken with my iPhone 12 Pro Max.
Wish you a great Friday and a hopefully relaxed ending to a successful week
It was this kind of season – summarized in one image. Instead of being the usual Christmas City ablaze with lights, Nuremberg went through another subdued Holiday season. No Christmas markets, most public events canceled. Mask mandate everywhere and long lines in front of shops to get the mandatory vaccine certificate checked out.
Add the mostly gruesome weather of the last weeks into the equation, then you know why my trips onto the Streets of Nuremberg were rather limited in this kind of season. Below some random street shots that I captured during last Saturdays trip into town together with The Significant Other.
A quick post with a street photograph in between. Isn’t this drive through shopping at it’s best? Driving a scooter through a market shopping veggies directly from a stall still sitting on the machine? Life as it happens on a greek Saturday market.
Image taken with the Leica M and the Summicron 50mm F/2. Image specs 1/125 sec @ f/11 and ISO 400. Postprocessing in Lightroom Classic.
Stay tuned for more posts of my series “Greece explored”.
Although there are quite a few more street photography from our evening in Bologna, I’m closing this series out with an image aptly titled “Ciao Bella”. Taken with the Olympus OM-D E-M1X and the mZuiko 12-100 F/4, specs are 1/160 sec @ f/4 and ISO 3200 at 86mm focal length. RAW conversion in Lightroom Classic.
The next posts will be covering our trip to Greece, where we are spending our summer vacation on the Peloponnese.
“Sharpness is a bourgeois concept” is one of my favorite quotes from the godfather of street photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004). Not that I want to use it as a fig leaf to cover up the fact that I wasn’t able to capture a tack sharp image of this couple being in a rush in a dark alley in Bologna’s historic old town on a late Thursday evening. Image specs are 1/15 sec @ f/5 and ISO 3200 with a 80mm focal length.
Back on the streets. Not only are The Significant Other and I on our way to Greece for the first proper vacation in almost two years. While spending an evening in Bologna in Italy on our way to catch the ferry in Ancona, this also was my return to street photography since the whole Covid thing started. And you know what? Not surprisingly I found out how much I had missed roaming the streets with a camera in hand and capture scenes of life as it happened around me…
Do you still need a present? Well, you need to hurry. At least when you live in Germany. Tomorrow our government will announce that it’s gonna send the whole country into a total lockdown. From early next week until at least mid January, everything apart from super markets and drug stores will be closed. The originally planned easing of curfews over the holidays is likely to be withdrawn. Is it necessary? There is no doubt about it. The intensive care units in the Nuremberg area (as all over Germany) are filled to capacity. And cases are still rising significantly. There is no alternative to the total lockdown. It will be a very, very quiet Christmas.
Today I was revisiting some old photographs from the trip to Moshi, Tanzania, that The Significant Other and I took back in early 2016. I will apply a different editing style in Lightroom Classic, which will be fun. It is amazing, how different you look at your own images after having them let marinate on your hard disk for a couple of years. There will be quite a few posts coming with photographs from this trip. As it looks I will plenty of time to play with my archive in the next weeks. Oh, and I have got all my presents. Hopefully I will be able to see all the people to hand them over.
Fair enough – this is an older street photograph, but one I never posted. But doesn’t it fit perfectly into these crazy days? I guess the space suit works just as well for virus protection. But who wouldn’t want to beam up these days?
“Ground Control to Major Tom Ground Control to Major Tom Take your protein pills and put your helmet on Ground Control to Major Tom (ten, nine, eight, seven, six) Commencing countdown, engines on (five, four, three) Check ignition and may God’s love be with you (two, one, liftoff)”
I have no idea if the guy staring into his cellphone was checking the weather. But a weather check for the Streets of Nuremberg would have shown a cold front passing through today, with heavy rains and a significant drop in temperature. Was definitely time for a warm jacket for everyone out and about.
I was playing around with my Elmarit F/2.8 90mm on the Leica M. Image specs 1/125 sec @ f/4 and ISO 3200. The high ISO is not a problem for the M, and the monochrome images directly out of camera are quite beautiful. The backdrop shows the historic Heilig-Geist-Spital with the River Pegnitz passing underneath.
From a distance – wasn’t there this song by Bette Middler? It’s the core theme of these days, with countries slowly returning to the “new normal” and people trying to find the right balance between staying safe and the necessity of somehow have to carry on with their daily lives.
This photograph of a mother and her child was also taken from a distance. I was standing on the balustrade above the “Liebesinsel” (Island of Love), a small island in the River Pegnitz in Nuremberg’s Old Town.