Another World

Take 17 milk cows, two cats, two dogs, two goats, one rabbit, some chickens and a donkey with the name Charlie and put these subjects in the beautiful landscape of Dolomite mountains and you get a perfect place where parents can relax and children have a lot of fun.

The name of this place is Col de Tlames, a farm located at 1400 meters above sea level, near S.Martino in Badia, in the Italian region close to the borderline with Austria.

I spent there two weeks in July, with my life partner and my son and then I had also the opportunity to take some pictures for the website of the householder.

I use to live in a quite country area as well, but in that place I had the feeling to be really far away from any civilization (cool).

Actually this blog is not the place to make a review of the location, but it is really worth to mention the tasty milk fresh from the cows and the amazing bright star landscape during the night; the two houses and the cowshed are located enough far away from the nearest village and practically there is no light pollution disturbing the night view of the sky.

The family leading the farm was very kindly and Martin, one of the son, was explaining to us about milking, cows and the lifestyle of the region. Very nice.

As usual for this blog, I would like to present some frames from our photo service.

The indoor photos are the result of the overlay of two different exposures: one for the outdoor scene through the window and one for the interiors. This is a common technique used in architectural photography, in order to get a good exposure either for the part with plenty of light and the part in poor light conditions.

For all the photos I used the Zuiko SWD 12-60 f/2.8-4 lens, set almost all the time at 12mm (equivalent to 24 mm on a 35 mm camera), which was just at the limit to properly cover the indoor scenes.
A wider angle (maybe 8 mm) would perhaps work better in some frames.

With the exclusion of the double exposures, the photos have been post-processed only with the soft filter of Olympus camera, which personally I think it gave a nice pleasant mood, matching the purpose of the photo service.

Only for information, the funny muzzle in the last picture is Charlie, the donkey of the farm.

be Happy,
Luca

Côte d'Ivoire through the car glass

A new business trip in Africa. As usual with short notice, just in time for Visa application, flight tickets and hotel booking. Destination: Abidjan, the "economic capital" of Côte d'Ivoire. Duration of the journey: five days. Shooting conditions: through the car glass.
For the first four days all working time would be in the Hotel, starting from morning to late evening, while for the fifth day a survey to two electrical high voltage substations (Abobo and Riviera) was planned. Actually it was a quite comfortable plan, but surely not the best conditions for trying to collect some nice photos of the country.
Nevermind! The Olympus E-3 body and the 25mm pancake lens would not take too much space in my luggage and hopefully some shooting occasions would somehow arise. This I thought when I packed my luggage (think positive!).
In fact, the chance to take some pictures around arrived on the fifth day, during our survey to the HV substations.
Everyone knows how HV substations look like also knows that the best chance to take good photos is on the way from the hotel to the substation rather than within the substation itself.
However, taking photos through the car glass of a running pick-up in the African roads may affect the the results of your photographic expectations.
The positive thing was that despite the fact the region has tropical monsoon climate and we were exactly in the middle of the rainy season, that day was magically not raining, there was plenty of light and all the African colors were surrounding my eyes.
We know, taking pictures is always a continuous adaptation to the circumstances and this time was not an exception. Only one short stop to eat some very good Lebanese food at Manuela Restaurant, then for the rest of the time I was compressed in the rear side of our nice pick-up trying to justify the fact I took my camera so far. What? Yes, luckily I had window seat :-)
After a large amount of ugly compositions, missing subjects, unwanted objects in the frame, under- and over-exposures and unlikely focus, I could "save" some frames, which I proposed in this post.
Lesson Learned: Due to the movement of the car, a combination of high shutter speeds with reasonable apertures and ISO values, worked quite well. There is no a magic combination of numbers, however, in situation like that I would really recommend to look at the LCD screen after every frame in order to adjust Aperture/Speed/ISO as necessary. Shutter speeds above 1/400 seconds worked in my case good.
Looking in front and panning the subject also helped me in keeping focus.

As always, Be Happy!
Luca

Natural Light in Sudan

  

Eight days in Sudan, between Khartoum, the capital of North Sudan and Heglig, an oil field located at the border line with South Sudan, in the region of South Kordofan,.
The trip took place in March 2013, almost one year after the attack of South Sudan army to the Heglig camp.

Before starting, due to uncertainty on safety conditions in South Kordofan, I decided to avoid to carry with me any additional photo equipment, which probably would attract too much attention. So I was traveling only with the Olympus E-3 body and the 25mm pancake lens. This means I had to deal only with the available natural light and I had no options for different lenses, which perhaps could work better than the compact 25 mm I carried with me.

Luckily, due to the latitude of the region and the begin of the dry season, there was plenty of light.

I found the local people really nice, ready to help me either in my job and in small daily issues, often related to the hard environmental conditions; I would never thought it was so uncomfortable not having a lip balm with me.

During our stay we had to visit also a neighboring oil field called Neem, located 170 km North-West of Heglig. We went there by helicopter, which I discovered it can offer very good light also for hi-key portraits (I believe the engineer who designed the helicopter was not aware of that).

In this post there are some photos of people have been worked with me or around me in this mission.
The first the third and the fourth pictures were taken on the helicopter, during our transfer from Heglig to Neem.
Whilst, in the picture below, a guy is decommissioning a crude oil engine, which have been damaged by dynamite during the attack of South Sudan army on April 2012. One of the same engines is also captured in the last pictures, in front of the African sunset.

That's all for this short post. See you soon.

"On my camera card" and "Fifty of Fifty" - a new gallery and a new project

Starting from today there is a new gallery in my photographic website. The name of the gallery is "On my camera card" and it can be accessed from the navigation bar.

What's inside?
"On my camera card" gallery there are my latest shots. The images I am actually working with, uploaded directly from the camera to the web site without any post-processing. All the adjustments are only per camera setting.
The uploading comes from a wi-fi SD cards plugged into the camera and therefore the images on the gallery will be uploaded just few minutes after the actual shot, representing in fact the latest photographic works, day by day.

The image that opens this new gallery is a B&W frame shot yesterday (10th of January 2013) at home - picture below. For this shot I used an old 50 mm f/1.4 Zuiko OM lens mounted on the Olympus E-5.
The beautiful aurora of glowing light around the subject - in this case my life partner - is created by using the well known Michael Orton technique, which basically consist in blending two or more images of the same composition; one in focus and the others out of focus.
This can be achieved on the Olympus E-5 digital camera, without additional post-processing software, by overlapping two or more consecutive shots.

The 50mm Zuiko OM lens I used in this shot is also the subject and the common thread of a personal photographic project that hopefully I will publish (soon or later) in this website.
The project - "Fifty of Fifty" - consists in 50 images shots with 50mm OM Zuiko lens mounted on Olympus E-5 body.
It represents a study on photographic composition. The idea is limiting some creative possibilities, such as the use of different focal lengths and colors in order to force other composition skills and open the mind to different original creative solutions.

The f/1.4 50mm OM Zuiko lens is a natural choice for the project, for many reasons. The 50 mm focal lengths do not provide any magnification of the subjects; what your eyes can see without camera does not change through a 50mm lens, which in turn is an advantage in the mental process of composition.
It is small and it has a lightweight construction; hence it can be easily carried everywhere.
It has a large aperture (f/1.4), allowing to work well in low light conditions and to have very narrow DoF.
There is no zoom and this make the 50mm lens more physical because it is necessary to move far or close to the subject depending on the aim of the actual composition.
The focus of the 50mm OM Zuiko lens is only manual. This can be a disadvantage in some circumstances, especially in the situation where a fast focusing is necessary. Nevertheless this is part of the game.
Hopefully I will come back early with some previews of the project.

Bis bald!
Luca