week 39 - Jump as high as you can!

"Jump! Jump as high as you can! C'mon, you can do it!" Read this somewhere today.

It's a pity you can't see her hands :(

Another dog shooting.
The sun was a little high, therefore the too high contrasts and by the time the sun was deep enough my cameras battery was dead and I'm an idiot because I hadn't charged it before neither did I take a second one with me.
I'm really bad at focusing and I really just have to practice to improve the sharpness.
Nina, the dog wasn't very excited about being photographed and I guess you can tell by her look. But she had a lot of fun plashing in the creek and she's just such a sweet dog :)






This dog actually sat voluntary in the creek! Okay, she really does look annoyed.







You might not like this picture, but I love it! Especially because of the naked feet next to the dog.

week 38 - and it all comes crashing down on you again

Do you know that feeling when you think you’re fine and then it all comes crashing down on you again?

Cali likes this one the best so here we are:




I guess being the brother of a wanna-be-photographer is pretty hard.
My friends are living all over the place in Franconia and I have to take the train to everywhere which is really annoying and time-consuming. My little brother naturally lives with our family so he usually has time to model for me. Sometimes he volunteers, sometimes I have to beg quite a bit. And sometimes he refuses to be my model because I want him to do things like painting leaves or jumping over a fence or a wall. He thinks doing stuff like that is embarrassing or just crazy. So I couldn't realize those ideas yet because and it's hard to do self portraits of oneself jumping over a wall. Tomorrow I'll meet a friend and hopefully we'll take some pics...anyway, today my little brother and I went biking in the park and he was fine with taking some photos of him, even if he was expressing my feelings and not his.


Mainly he was just fooling around anyway.


Edit: I finally found the photo again that gave me this idea. I didn't wanna copy it, the photo just described my feelings so well I had to try to show it in a picture myself.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ronaaa/5291204016/in/photostream/

Image editing? Photo manipulation? Some before/after photos..

How much editing is okay? I've been asking myself this question a lot.

I think it's fine to edit a photograph that is strong on its own and does not NEED to be edited. If you're cropping a image to improve the image composition, if you change the contrast and brighten or darken the image that's totally fine in my opinion. I also often improve the color balance or even change the tones if It think it fits.
If you find yourself editing your images in order to correct them, and not enhance them maybe you should go back and try to take the photo again.

It is amazing how much you can do with Photoshop, Lightroom and co. Just take a look at this...http://www.animal-pics.de/thread.php?threadid=19402&threadview=0&hilight=&hilightuser=0&page=8

Some of my photos are almost not edited at all. Here I only changed the contrast a tiny tiny bit.


Some pictures need more editing. Here I cropped the picture, retouched the water drops on the blanket, changed the saturation and sharpened it a bit.
And I have no idea what happened to this blue streak in the die. First I thought I accidentally did something in Gimp but it looks like that in the original as well?? Weird.


Sometimes I make them black and white.


Sometimes you can tell my pictures are edited. Sometimes you can't. This is a really honest post and here I'll show you some before/after pics. Sorry to disappoint you, not all of my photos are out of cam... I will only post examples where I actually edited more than changing contrast. The last one is edited quite a bit and I want you to know that sometimes I like to create totally new pictures. If that makes sense.

week 37 (3) - How can one be so cute?

My little nephew Janto.


Edited.

I love my 4L

week 37 (2) - first ice scream of the year

week 36 - Splash!

Thanks to my very best assistant Cali :D It took us quite a few tries to get these photos. Most of them were out of focus and it was just so hard to press the button on the right time (even in Continuous shooting mode).
And I have no idea what happened to this blue streak in the die. First I thought I accidentally did something in Gimp but it looks like that in the original as well?? Weird.

And here we have a very interesting traveler waiting for the train :D How often do you see an unicyclist in a train? I see one or two every other month but they are always the same persons: Cali and me(oh, and Karen of course :D)