Some Baseball. Vienna Wanderers vs. Diving Ducks at Wr. Neustadt

Diving Ducks Batting
600mm, f5.6, 1/800s, ISO200

Time to shoot some action, haven't done it for a while
Been in Prague, Czech with my JBModel stand for last few days (no time for real shooting...) but today, back in Vienna, had to test new 300mm f2.8 lens!
Austrian Baseball League moved into their finals and today Vienna Wanderers played Diving Ducks in Wiener Neustadt. This is was 2nd game of the finals. Weather was good sunny with some clouds and dry. Perfect conditions with soft light and relatively bright. Next weekend I will follow further games.

It was purely one lens day, as I mentioned 300 mm and few times I mounted also 2x converter which gave me focal length of 600 mm! Problem with the converter though is that you loose 2 stops of light (from f2.8 to f5.6) and focus is slightly slower. In any case it is great and cheaper solution and worth trying.

My Press card helped me to get in without any questions and was able to shoot the game from and around dugouts. Every inning or so I kept changing position to get different angle and also when sun broke through I wanted to have it behind me. Most of the time though sun was behind the clouds.

Double Play by Diving Ducks
300mm, 1/1600s, f2.8, ISO400

New Filters Tests - Glass Enhancer, Straw, Blue, Sepia from Lee

I bought few new Lee filters during last weekend at Photokina in Cologne:
Glass Enhancer - unusual filter enhances any red or orange features within an image, leaving other colours unaffected.
Landscape Set which consists of
Straw Graduated - a greater yellow warm-up for landscapes. Accentuates foregrounds when inverted.
Real Blue Graduated - gives a deeper effect to skies.
Sepia Graduated - gives a brown tinted monochrome look.

It was time to run few fast tests at Wienerberg, in the park close to my house.
I setup the tripod chose simple composition with some water, bushes and sky. Setting sun was almost right behind me. Found correct exposure for the foreground took the shot with manual focus set 1.5m and settings: 16mm, 0.5 sec, F16, ISO100... and no filters at all:

16mm, 0.5 sec, F16, ISO100, no filters

Sky is clearly way to bright, I metered before the difference and it was about 3 stops brighter than foreground so I mounted 2 stops ND grad and placed my new Glass Enhancer. The scene does not contain too many reds but still wanted to see the result. Glass Enhancer takes 1 stop of light so I increased exposure to 1 second:

16mm, 1 sec, F16, ISO100, 2 stops ND Grad and Glass Enhancer

Difference is clear, colours are much vivid. You can see the moon on blue sky. Both pictures are straight from the camera without any post processing, and of course second is the winner. Tomorrow I will make more tests with clear reds.

Photokina 2012, Köln, Germany

Manfred Baumann's Photo Workshop

In almost last minute I (we) decided to visit Photokina 2012 fair in Köln, Germany. With two of my photographers friends based in Vienna - Rafal Konkol and Robert Kolsut - we were planning outdoor shooting and then idea popped-up... let's got to Cologne for Photokina 2012, one of the biggest photography fairs in the world, definitely the biggest event in Europe. Fast idea and fast decision and trip's plan quickly evolved and matured. It is only 900 km and that can be covered in roughly 8-9 hours using German motorways...

Just about to enter Photokina 2012

We left on Friday noon and arrived to our booked room outside Cologne, in Düren, little bit before 10 p.m. Quickly unpacked and looking for some food had a chance to see this small city's centre. Could not really go off having in mind early wake up in order to be at Photokina at 10 a.m.. We decided to leave the car and travel to Cologne by train. We found out that Photokina ticket also covers train trip to and from the fair.

Finally we got there... the place huge, massive to say the least. I do not remember so many people around me with cameras and tripods. Seemed like everyone had a camera, people were shooting each other like crazy. During those few days millions of pictures must have been taken.

Erlaufsee by Night. Night Photos Cont'd

Erlaufsee, 20mm, 36 sec, f/2.8, ISO 6400

Being in the mood to shoot at night and having good weather support I had to go somewhere last night as well. Somewhere further away from Vienna city lights. I thought Erlaufsee by Mariazell would be good choice. Small lake surrounded by hills and relatively far from larger city. I have been there some time ago remembered calm crystal clear waters of the lake. 130 km drive is nothing special so let's do it.

Having had short nap in the afternoon (got up at 6 p.m.) I headed south west towards Erlaufsee (lake). Border between Lower Austria and  Steiremark (Styria) roughly divides the lake into two halves. I have problems with captioning the pictures. Physically I was on Steirmark soil but overlooking Lower Austria (Niederösterreich) at the same time. How to classify such photos...

Anyway, got to the place after 9 p.m., and my hopes to be in really dark surrounding died instantly out of natural causes. Drove for an hour or so via serpentine deep dark forest surrounded roads just to see nice and calm place with small piers, as it used to be, now covered with restaurant tables and restaurant lights all over. What else could go wrong?!

Besides building's strong yellow lights there was number of strong lanterns placed along lake's beach so to speak. Light was all over me while I was looking for complete darkness!

Stars Trails, Night Photography

60 1 minute pictures stacked together
16mm, f/2.8, ISO 6400, 60 x 1 minute

Last night we had new moon.
Best time to shoot stars and night sky. Month before I was not able to shoot stars for the simple reason - bad weather. Yesterday and today conditions seemed to comply. I had to take the chances.
Stars and sky are one thing but you also need some foreground interest in the frame. I checked what old ruins are available within 100 km radius of Vienna and are located on some hill. I really like this website http://www.ruine.at/. Very good source of information with coordinates and google maps links.

Things to consider when shooting stars and sky:

• You need dark place. Really dark place, 50-100 km away from large cities. Even the location from last night was not dark enough, there was small town below and it casted yellow tungsten lights. However this time I used to my advantage. I had old tower lit...
• Solid tripod. Has to be really solid as all frames will be shot with 30 seconds and more. Sometime even 16-30 minutes. 
• Wide angle lens, wider - the better.
• Cable release to be able to (A) - remotely shoot the frame, (B) - lock the shutter button when in BULB mode i.e. when shooting with times over 30 seconds.
• Intervalometer - handy tool to have when you can setup long exposures e.g. 16 minutes and you do not have to stand by the camera and monitor time. Also it will automatically shoot as many shots as you need with defined intervals. I used it last night.
• Some source of light...

Pumpkins Fields. Fantastic Cloudy Weather

Over last few days, actually last weekend plus Monday I added close to 2000 km, driving to Poland and around Silesia with my JBModel stand. This is the reason for less activity on the blog and websites.

On the way back to Vienna, right after Czech border I noticed few pumpkin fields and they reminded me of coming Autumn. While driving along the fields I thought I would have to come back to the place to take some shots. It took me few days to organize myself including clearing out shop stuff. Finally today I found time to come back to the location and to my joy the weather also played correct tune. 

Nice thick clouds and forecasted rain. Then you think, deep grey world around you with decent orange and green pumpkins - they must pop out of the images with their contrast colours and zero harsh light. Lower Austria (Niederösterreich) is not really the land for pumpkins comparing to Styria (Steiermark) but you can still find some pieces here and there. 
This was really one of last moments around here to shoot pumpkins on the ground, on most fields they were already cleaned from leaves and sorted in rows ready for collection. I found only spot were the still laid around in natural manner. But leaves and branches were already dry.

Pumpkins ready for collection, Lower Austria, Drasenhofen area.
16mm, f22, 0.3 sec, ISO100, 

Wien Donaustadtbrücke (Bridge) - Playing Colours, Black & White Wins

Donaustadtbrücke, Vienna

I shot only one picture today.

Well not fully true but close...

Once I setup the tripod and framed the scene I have not changed the position till the end of the session. To be completely honest - I did once to test vertical frame, but I did not like it as much as horizontal, so all subsequent shots are framed horizontally.

Also vertical composition was cutting off my longest line - the bridge and here I am explaining what I mean.

I was looking for simple composition with lots of lines, and what better can be found with lots of lines than the bridge, and especially suspension bridge. There are lines everywhere - horizontal, vertical, diagonal.
Whole picture is composed of lines that lead the eye around from left to right and up and down. You just cannot stop wandering around the frame building up the desire of crossing onto other side to see what's there. This is what I wanted. I got almost there... I was after more dramatic weather effect but today's sky did not comply with my wishes. Cloudy forecast happened to be fairy tail. Later towards the evening the sky completely cleared.

Meeting Friend in Budapest After 20 Years

Old Fence by Danube
185 mm, 1/2000, f2.8, ISO 100

Internet and photography are simply fantastic. All of a sudden you can find your friends from good old school times. It just happened to me. Got in touch with old time mate from high school - Greg - who happened to live in Budapest for now... and has similar interests i.e. photography. We simply had to meet.
So last weekend I spent in Budapest, Hungary, at his place to remember great old school times and took the opportunity to take snaps around the city. At the same time I tried to explain to Greg and his family some of my tips and tricks.
Photography wise it was tough Saturday, in the morning we had few minutes of showers and some clouds and I was hoping for more clouds but then the sun simply started to pour its light onto us, and that was it. I had to deal with harsh and flat light for the rest of the day. I have been to Budapest before quite few times but never had enough time to scroll around and to concentrate on shooting. This time it was different, my main objective was to scroll around together and shoot or mainly to find good spots for the future. Of course we started with the most known places and tried to take different photographs. I am not sure if I had fully managed that but I tried. I must spend few weeks in Budapest to really capture the feeling of this great city. Danube banks in Budapest are simply amazing and so much different to Vienna. There are so many spots you want to capture and so little time, especially with good light. Good sunny weather is not ideal for that purpose.

To deal with daylight sun I decided to use mainly my 10 stops grey filter to be able to use long exposures that would give me some different feelings. In general I like long exposures, pictures shot with 10-30 seconds or minutes show different reality. Like if we were somewhere frozen in longer chunks of time, like if we stopped by and the world kept spinning around by us and left us intact.
In some cases I also applied soft ND grad filters and also tested with Singh-Ray Gold-N-Blue polarizer. I wanted to transform dull scenes into something more interesting.
I am posting few examples.

We are by Budapest Citadel, Gelert's Hill, noon sun high in the sky slightly behind me. Composed the frame to get more clouds and wanted to pop-up some non-existing colours from flat light.
Mounted Gold-N-Blue polarizer and used 3 stops soft ND grad and 3 stops grey filter from Lee.
It is not ideal, but I still like it. Especially bluish sky and dark clouds. They remind me of Iron Maiden album's cover - Brave New World. You should see that cover to compare (and of course listen to the album!)...
Just cut off trees in front and crop square and it is like Brave New World cover....