#sliderssunday

A simple selective colour slider. Selective colour lent itself to this image, I think. At first, I only desaturated the background, but it was still a little too distracting. The building in the background has a facade with lots of glass and is also clad in orange tiles so there was too much going on colour-wise.

As for the title: The traffic cone reminds me of a diva, a photo model, or even a screen goddess posing at a photoshoot for a fashion magazine – albeit in a somewhat grungy, scruffy Berlin fashion ;) The person responsible for putting up this traffic cone and the caution tape clearly took pride in his/her job, making the cone and the carefully draped streamer look like an urban "Gesamtkunstwerk" (total work of art).

HSS, Everyone!

Tags:   Sliders Sunday Post Processed to the MAX!!! traffic cone caution tape ribbon streamer Looks like a diva diva posing Berlin Germany Potsdamer Platz Linkstraße 2, 4, 6 signal red RAL 3001 red white black grey selective colour color key keying black and white b&w monochrome stairs column modern architecture modern urban diva draped Pylon Leitkegel Absperrband Stufen Treppe Säule selektive Farbe trafikkegle cône de signalisation cono stradale cono de tráfico cone de tráfego ロードコーン 트래픽 콘 交通錐 E-M1 Mark III M.Zuiko Digital OM 20mm F1.4 Pro 1:1 square format Quadratisch, praktisch, gut ThroughHerLens

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...Said everyone's favourite Borg Seven of Nine after smoking some... No, no, not what you think ;) But this semi-translucent, lavender-coloured fluorite, which consists of many cubic shaped crystals with many #corners, has always reminded me of a Borg cube. Albeit a rather psychedelic, flower power, rock'n'roll-type of Borg cube, because the way the cubic crystals are shaped and arranged also conveys a certain kind of cheerful chaos. And lavender also definitely isn't your typical Borg colour. Which makes this a peace and love hippie Borg cube :)

Explored January 10, 2022

Photographed with the M.Zuiko 30mm F3.5 macro lens, the 60mm's little brother. Unlike the 60mm, which is a "true" macro lens with a 1:1 magnification, the 30mm gives you a magnification of 1,25 (2,5 in the MFT world). The fantastic Laowa 50mm Ultra Macro lens offers even more magnification (Goodbye extension tubes!), and it's still on my list, but Olympus – or rather OM System, as the company is called now – had a lens promotion, so I was able to get this already very affordable lens literally dirt-cheap, so I went for it. It's not a pro lens like the 60mm, it's all plastic, no weather sealing etc., but it supports the in-camera focus stacking function, and together with the 16mm extension tube and the Raynox DCR-250 close-up lens (which I've both used for this shot) it's only as long as the 60mm without any extensions. And last, but not least, the image quality is excellent, too. Of course it won't replace my trusty 60mm, but it's a great addititon to it with its extra magnification (and the length of this technical description gives away that I still had to justify the purchase for myself, because Santa had already brought me another new lens). The minimum focusing distance is a mere 14 cm (5,51 inches) which means that you can get really close to your photographic subject, and with extension tubes and close-up lens mounted that focusing distance shrinks considerably once again. In fact, for this image I was so close that the Raynox close-up lens actually touched the upper part of the fluorite. Soft light from above prevented shading from the lens (to which it is prone also without extensions due to the super short focusing distance). OK, enough tech talk, more info on the programmes used for post processing is in the tags ;)

P.S. Thank you wolli s for the tip to slightly oil the subject after dusting it to keep it lint-free, it works!

Happy Macro Monday, Everyone, have a nice week ahead, and stay safe!

I'll catch up with you tonight!

Tags:   Macro Mondays Corner macro close-up extreme macro fluorite CaF2 fluorescent glow patterns cubic chaos purple lilac lavender Resistance is Futile Borg cube Seven of Nine Star Trek Picard The Colour Purple Fluorit Flussspat Würfel kubisches Kristallsystem Lila Ecken und Kanten fluorine fluoriet fluoriitti fluorita fluorină fluoryt florit φθορίτης Флюори́т फ्लोरस्पार 蛍石 Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III M.Zuiko Digital ED 30mm F3.5 focus stacking Helicon Focus Raynox DCR-250 extension tubes DXO PhotoLab 5 Nik Collection Color Efex Micro Four Thirds

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#SlidersSunday

A photo that I'd always wanted to upload, but I somehow was never happy with the necesseray sliding - until now. Why "necessary" sliding?, you might ask. Well, this was a mere snapshot, one of those "hit the shutter button quickly or that moment is gone" shots that we all know about. Taken already in late spring 2018, when Sabine.R and I were waiting for the blue hour at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of the Cultures of the World - HKW -, the former Berlin Congress Hall). The HKW lies amidst the huge Tiergarten park area, and some of the tall trees there apparently were the local crow population's nighttime gathering place. While the area was almost totally devoid of humans, there was quite a bustle and hustle, a constant coming and going of crows - at a considerable noise level, so probably their day had been an eventful one, and now they were swapping stories ;-) The HKW isn't an easy buidling to photograph (please check my album for more images, if you like), and at one point I was as interested in the crows (which also met on top of the HKW's roof) as in the building itself. When I spotted this crow - and its landing shadow - I was just about to take my camera down to walk around the building to find a different, more interesting angle to shoot from. So I quickly switched my cam (my faithful little "always in my bag" LX100) back on and hurried to get my, hopefully sharp enough, shot. And sort of sharp enough it was, but only sort of. Especially the roof had just a little too much (motion) blur to make it pleasant to look at.

And here the necessary sliding comes in. Apart from cropping the image to that "pop-artish" square format and increasing the colours' saturation and such for that extra "pop", I felt that I had to do something about the "ever so slightly too unsharp" parts of the roof. In the end I decided to borrow the concrete texture from one of the many other sharp images I'd taken there. It was a little tricky to blend the texture in at the correct angle, because even if one thinks so, one never takes two images at the exact same angle, but in the end I think I got it right. Sort of ;-) There also was some considerable noise reduction / detail extraction going on (not in one processing session, but literally over the past months, because I would return to this image every now and then) which, for most of the part, were painstakingly done by masking things out in PS. So it was some sort of revelation and also a slight annoyance when I applied my finishing touches only yesterday - in my newly bought programme Topaz Sharpen AI - which did all of the aforementioned: decrease the motion blur and noise, and sharpen the image still some more...in one single step ;-)

Happy (Sliders) Sunday, Everyone, stay safe, stay well, stay happy!

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#Donnerstagsmonochrom

This is a re-edit of a capture that I've uploaded to Flickr years ago (you can find it in the first comment), taken at the same trip to the Baltic sea island Usedom as my recently posted "White Like Snow" photo. Back then, I wasn't happy with the crop, and I also didn't really like the colour version, but still felt unsure of black and white. So I decided to do a new version in b&w and crop it as 1:1 format; I think the square format is a little more "direct", and it draws the view right to and along the wavy sculpture, "ready to climb up and ride the wave", so to say ;)

For the final new version I did some basic processing in DXO PhotoLab 4, then took the image into HDR Efex (the result looked nice even in colour) and then used a film simulation from the DXO FilmPack, the Ilford Pan F Plus 50. I've also done two more b&w edits in Silver Efex, but liked neither. And who knows, maybe one day I'll do another colour edit of this - or I'll find time to visit Usedom again and take an all new photo ;)

Wellenbewegung #2

Dies ist eine Neuinterpretation eines Fotos, das ich in meinen Flickr-Anfangstagen vor Jahren hochgeladen hatte. Mit dem "Original", das Ihr im ersten Kommentar finden könnt, war ich aber nie so richtig zufrieden, mochte weder den Bildschnitt so richtig noch die Farbe, hatte mich damals aber noch nur selten an Schwarzweiß herangetraut. Und da ich kürzlich ja ein "neues" (sprich noch nie gezeigtes) Foto von meinem 2013er Kurzurlaub auf Usedom hochgeladen hatte ("White Like Snow"), dachte ich, jetzt sei eine gute Gelegenheit, Euch mal diese Neubearbeitung zu zeigen. Ich habe mich hier nicht nur für SW, sondern auch für das 1:1-Format entschieden, weil die begehbare Wellenskulptur, die auf dem Weg von Ahlbeck nach Heringsdorf zu finden ist, ja die Hauptdarstellerin ist - und ich finde, dass der Bildschnitt hier "unmittelbarer" wirkt, so, als könnte man sogleich auf die Skulptur klettern und auf der Welle reiten ;)

Entwickelt in DXO PhotoLab 4 (Grundlegendes); danach habe ich verschiedene SW-Ansätze, u.a. auch in Silver Efex, ausprobiert. Diese finale Version habe ich aber nach DXO PL4 nur noch in HDR Efex bearbeitet (da sah sogar die Farbe schön aus) und anschließend im DXO FilmPack mit der Filmsimulation Ilford Pan F Plus 50 (mit kleinen Anpassungen) versehen. Und den breiten weißen Rahmen fand ich auch ganz schick :)

Tags:   Donnerstagsmonochrom Monochrome Thursday Germany Deutschland Usedom Ahlbeck Heringsdorf Skulptur Wellen wellenförmig Wellenbewegung Ostsee Schwarzweiß SW 1:1 quadratisch, praktisch, gut sculpture b&w black and white monochrome undulation wave motion oscillation alb-negru noir et blanc bianco e nero preto e branco blanco y negro siyah-beyaz Чёрно-белое кино 黑白 golfbeweging vågrörelse aaltoliike ondulation mouvement ondulatoire movimiento ondulatorio Olympus Pen E-PL3 DXO PhotoLab 4 DXO FilmPack 5 Ilford Pan F Plus 50 Nik Collection HDR Efex Micro Four Thirds

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#Donnerstagsmonochrom

You don't see images processed in monochrome on my Flickr stream all too often. But here I thought it looked best. The thingy you see here is a playground carousel, photographed at the Britzer Garten. I'd seized the short moment when the carousel was not in use ;) Since the carousel's benches were painted in vivid red, I'd toyed with the idea to go for a colour-key-style processing at first, but in the end I liked the pure b&w look better, because the benches didn't really make sense to me as that special element that should be highlighted with the use of colour.

Converted to monochrome in Silver Efex where I used the preset "Film Noir 2" as starting point. I've still tweaked it here or there, because that filter creates a very contrasty, kind of harsh "silhouette" look with really deep blacks and almost completely blown-out whites, and I thought it looked nicer with more textures left in the image.

Viele Bilder in kräftigem, kontrastreichem Schwarzweiß gibt es in meinem Flickr-Stream nicht, aber hier sah SW einfach am besten aus. Ich hatte noch überlegt, etwas Farbe im Bild zu belassen, weil die geschwungenen Holzbänke dieses interaktiven Spielgeräts in leuchtendem Rot lackiert waren, aber in reinem SW wirkte das Bild doch am besten. Entwickelt in Silver Efex, wo ich das Preset "Film Noir 2" als Ausgangspunkt genommen und dann noch ein wenig angepasst habe, weil mir der doch sehr spezielle, Silhouetten-artige Look dieses Filters (mit tiefen Schwarztönen und fast völlig ausgefressenem Weiß) ein wenig zu extrem war.

Bei dieser Parkmöblierung handelt es sich um ein sogenanntes Sitzkarussell (sitzt man bei einem Karussell nicht eigentlich immer auf irgendetwas? Auf Holzpferdchen, Polizeimotorrädern, einem an langen Ketten befestigten Stuhl?); wenn man, am besten mit vereinten Kräften, an dem glänzenden Tisch-Rad-Dings in der Mitte dreht, fängt auch das Karussel an, sich zu drehen. Kürzlich fotografiert im Britzer Garten in dem kurzen Moment, als das Gerät mal nicht von Kindern umlagert war ;)

Tags:   Donnerstagsmonochrom Monochrome Thursday Berlin Deutschland Germany Britzer Garten Grün Berlin Park public park play equipment playground carousel merry-go-round playground selfie shadow hat shadow selfie monochrome black and white contrasty graphical square format 1:1 Spielgerät Sitzkarussell Schwarzweiß kontrastreich grafisch Schatten Schatten-Selfie Hut le tourniquet carrousel noir et blanc carusel fotografie alb-negru blanco y negro giostra bianco e negro carrossel preto e branco svartvit чёрно-белый モノクロフィルム 黑白​的 DXO PhotoLab 4 Silver Efex Pro Film Noir 2 Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III M.Zuiko Digital ED 7-14mm F2.8 PRO MFT Micro Four Thirds he

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