very December, I like to look back at and reflect on my photography of the past year. Apart from reliving memorable moments, I find it interesting (not to say fascinating) to look back at completed (and sometimes ongoing) projects and find out which photographs stand the test of time and continue to stand out beyond the first excitement.
The Marta in Herford, Germany, is a museum for art, architecture, and design designed by architecture superstar Frank Gehry. Last June, I went there to photograph. These are the results.
With the notable exceptions of lions, apes and monkeys are my favorite animals to photograph. Their similarity to us humans and the wide variety of facial expressions they are capable of allowing for an anthropomorphization like no other group of animals. For photographers, this is a wonderful storytelling opportunity, and for the viewers, it is a vibrant and fascinating experience to come up with their own stories as they look at the photos.
Recently, I finished a whole series of animal photographs with some new images of apes and monkeys among them. In this post, I’d like to share them with you.
For about six months I have put my animal portraiture aside and focussed on other things. In this time, I haven’t been at a zoo at all. The animals portraits I might have posted on social media were old photographs from my archives. But things have changed now, last month I purchased an annual ticket for one of the local zoos – and I plan to resume taking black & white portraits with renewed vigor. Here are the first results.
Let me introduce you to Bobby. Bobby is a very special Gorilla. He is the heraldic animal of the Berlin Zoo, the first Gorilla ever to live there. And he is dead.
In this post, I demonstrate my monochrome conversion process and how it integrates into the (almost) exclusively monochrome workflow I outlined in my last blog post. It looks pretty convoluted at first, as it involves 4-5 different apps/extensions, but it is pretty straightforward once you get used to it. Read on to learn more.
As a digital black & white photographer, the 21st century isn’t exactly the perfect time to live in. Virtually all digital cameras take pictures in color and those that don’t cost a fortune. Of course, every camera has a black & white mode, but this only means the camera is doing the critical job of black & white conversion for the photographer – not exactly the perfect solution for the creative mind. So, how can we solve this problem and create an (almost) monochrome photography workflow with today’s digital cameras? How can we (almost) free ourselves from colors?
