Sailing boats

More color. And like yesterday's picture, this is actually old stuff. What makes it "new" is the post-processing treatment I applied after ignoring these photos for quite some time.

Yogurt

I'm unearthing a couple of older color photos quite some time after I stopped taking them. Maybe I'll try again one day.

Bag of fish

I couldn't resist to add another photo from the Tsukiji fish market. Again a picture that grew on me after I initially rejected it.

November 11, 2008 in Tokyo, with the M8.2 at ISO 320. The photo was slightly cropped and converted using TrueGrain. Then I added a border.

Autobahn

On the A7 while heading south on November 30, 2008. Not the first photo on this blog out of a car window, but this time I was the driver. I forgot how fast I was when I took the photo, but I like to think that it wasn't dangerous. I snapped this when it started to rain and it definitely came out as expected.

The M8.2 at ISO 320, converted using TrueGrain. Uncropped, but the photo needed a border.

8 Eyes

In the Akihabara area of Tokyo on November 10, 2008. I'm not sure anymore if the title was inspired by the photo's content or if I was rather subconsciously reminded of a Japanese Jazz LP called "Eight Eyes and Eight Ears" which I've had for a long time.

Taken with the M8.2 and the 28mm Elmarit at ISO 320.

The picture was converted directly to black-and-white in Lightroom without the aid of external tools. It was then slightly cropped and I added a small border because it looked as if it would otherwise fall apart.

Tuna

Another one from the fascinating Tsukiji market in Tokyo. Most of what's happening there is about tuna.

Shot on November 11, 2008 with the M8.2 and the 28mm Elmarit at ISO 320. Converted to black and white using Silver Efex Pro.

Overtaking

I saw how the little girl on the scooter tried to pass the guy who almost blocked the whole sidewalk with his garbage can. I followed her for a short time and took two shots when she finally succeeded. This is number two.

NYC, on March 21, 2009. Taken with the M8.2 at ISO 320, converted using TrueGrain.

Part 3

Yet another view out of a window - this time from a boring chain hotel in Cambridge, MA on December 8, 2008.  This seems to become a kind of a series.

Taken with the M8.2 at ISO 320, converted using Silver Efex Pro.

Three grumpy old men

Japan seems to have a plethora of old men whose main job it is to stand in front of construction sites, parking lots, and other places, doing essentially nothing. Well, OK, sometimes - very rarely - they might open a door or something like that, but most of the time to me it looked as if they were there just to be there.

This is probably a good thing as these guys might otherwise be unemployed and sit at home alone, but - coming from another part of the world - it looked strange to me.

This particular construction site even had three of them. Taken on November 10, 2008 in Tokyo with the M8.2 and a 28mm Elmarit at ISO 320.  Converted to black and white using Silver Efex Pro.

Here's an update I received from a Japanese visitor of this blog: "Those grumpy old men are very common in Japan. The Yakuza (Japanese mafia) bullies contractors into hiring them to do practically nothing and then takes a (big) cut. Along with loan sharking, it's one of the ways the Yakuza survives in the modern world."

Not too abstract

I already mentioned Saul Leiter. He - more than anyone else - inspired me to look for colors, patterns, and reflections. It's an interesting challenge to find a good combination of these that on the one side results in a painterly, almost abstract picture but on the other hand is still a photograph in the sense that it actually depicts something you can recognize. And, at least for me, it should be an objet trouvé (as opposed to, say, something you arranged in a studio) or else I don't care.

This one here is a view into a shop window in my hometown Hamburg. Certainly not a Leiter and not where I want to be, but it's a step into the right direction.

Shot on July 26, 2009 with the G1 at ISO 320 using the kit zoom at 41mm with the aperture set to f/10.

Thanks for all the fish

Together with a friend of mine I was in Tokyo last year. I had bought the M8.2 only a few days before this trip and of course I took it with me and shot lots of pictures. A few nice ones remain, but the majority of them seem strangely alien to me when I look at them now. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea after all to use a brand-new camera for an exciting city I had never seen before - not to mention that I had never shot digitally before. I would probably have taken totally different photos had I been there some months later.

Nevertheless, as I said there are a few which aren't too bad and this is one of them. We spent one morning at the very impressive Tsukiji fish market and we were lucky because only a month later the authorities decided to close it for tourists.

The photo (shot at ISO 320 on November 11) was converted to black-and-white using TrueGrain but wasn't cropped or otherwise modified. Once again a shot where I forgot which lens I used, but I think it was the trusty old 35mm Summicron.