My first Interview

Interview

I have recently been interviewed by happyphoton.de. I was very surprised when they asked me to anwer their questions because I thought that my style is not at all one that would qualify me for being interviewed. I always had the feeling that the only artists that get the chance to say what they think are the ones that are very good in a specific style of photography for example BW, Portrait or Photoshop or something like that.
I was more than happy when I got the mail because earlier this week I got the getty sales statement that I already blogged about.

All the german readers of this blog can read the interview here.

Since most of the readers here are non-germans (at least I believe so) I will translate it for you now:

 

INTERVIEW

 

What are you doing jobwise (if photography is not your profession)?

I am at the age of 20 and I just started an apprenticeship in an marketing agency in September. Before that I served my civilian service where many of my images came into being (too much free time and too many ideas).

 

What role does photography play in your life?

Since I started shooting photography has become more than a hobby for me. It is my balance in the freetime. Those shooting moments are the ones that let me relax most. And I ALWAYS take my camera with me because what I hate most are situations and moments that I cannot capture. I happened to me several times that I left my camera at home. I regretted it most of the times.
Besides that the contact with other photographers is a very educational and interesting thing which lets me see photography as a medium for meeting people.
I have met several photographers which I got to know via flickr and I still am in good contact with many of them. There are also friendships that emerged from that.
Among those meetings there have been many international experiences with people from other countries such as Switzerland, chile and the USA.

 

How did you start photographing?

When I started with photography it was more like a means to an end than an appeal or something like that.
I have always been interested in getting along with digital image processing and someday I started getting into that and teaching myself everything I needed to know with the help of online tutorials, books etc.
I had no person to ask.
When I became better at processing it wasn't sufficient to process images from the web anymore because I couldn't say that those were "my artworks".
So I took the 5MP compact cam from my parents and started shooting flowers in the backyard and processing them. The results fascinated me.

 

What equipment are you using?

From that time on I got out again and again, played around and only two months later I had decided to buy me a DSLR. I had the money for doing this and so I bought my Canon EOS 400D + 18-55mm + Canon 50mm f/1.8 + Tamron 70-300mm. I am still using this combo.
When I decided which lenses to buy I didn't pay attention to tests. I only decided according to price and focal lengths. I found it senseless to buy lenses for more than 150 euro since I was a beginner. This attitude did not change since that day. I am more than happy with my selection.

 

What is the most difficult thing when you are shooting?

Focussing in the darkness and shooting portraits of people. But I am working on both.

What inspires you?

I am getting my inspiration from everything. I view many images on the internet, I am very attentive when going through the streets or I just play around with all day stuff on rainy days. And in many cases I just start shooting and the ideas emerge while doing so. I just point the camera towards everything I find interesting and almost every time there is something good resulting from that. Old things are very inspirational too

 

Have you got a favourite place?

There are many. I have a special affection for old buildings which are spread over berlin in uncountable numbers. I love it to imagine the stories, looking through old papers and just absorbing the atmosphere of those places. The biggest difficulty is it to capture this atmosphere because images only appeal to the eyes. The special things on location are the different smells, the spiderwebs, the darkness and somehow the illegality and the danger that is present everywhere since there are holes in the ground, fragile walls, brads etc. Ccapturing all this in an image is a big challenge and it always makes me happy when it works out.

 

A film that has changed your worldview?

I would name those two:

1. The Counterfeiters
2. From Lions and Lambs

 

What tips can you give to beginners?

Try around and just do it! Dont let yourself be restricted by the expectations of others.
Have fun! This is the most important part and one can recognize that when viewing the results.
Aside from that its very important to know your equipment. This does not mean reading the manual but that in some situations its just irreplaceable to know where the important buttons are situated. As often as I had to change lenses or settings while standing in pitch-black rooms I now feel that I really KNOW my camera.
Besides that this preserves you from missing moments because you dont know how to adjust the exposure time.

Getty Images: My first sales

As I already wrote on Flickr I have had my first sales on Getty. I have started there about 5 month ago so it really took a while until I sell my first stuff. In fact I dont like to speak about numbers(you may understand) but I can tell you some other details about this sales.

In fact I had three sales:

This one has been selled one time. Pretty reasonable I think because its very stock-like and a very good shot of mine.

 

The other two customers bought this:

This was a big surprise for me because in fact this was not more than a snapshot and I was very unsure about publishing that one. At the end I decided to do it since I had never seen such a door before and found it a catchy image at least. It didnt receive too much feedback and I would have never thought that this might earn money one day.

One the right hand side of this page you find a link that leads to my getty page. At first it was hard to understand that it hasnt been the artistic shots that have been selled but this one that is really one of the worst (or least artistic) in my stream.

Nevertheless I am glad that I decided to upload this one.

My aim for the two years of the getty contract is to earn as much as I have spent on my equipment. Those first sales made this goal become a bit more realistic. Its all depending on the next month so I will keep you up-to-date whenever something is happening.

Before/After "bygone days and what has changed"

This is the Before/After of my most recent shot "bygone days and what has changed". I am loving RAW format in moments like these!

Prints

Panorama

As I told you on Flickr recently I ordered prints. They just arrived and I am more than satisfied with the result. I ordered some standard size prints and a huge 150 cm x 25 cm one.

The quality is amazing and its just as I wanted it to be.  I have been disappointed by prints from different online services many times but in this case there is no criticism from my side.

When I decided to order such a panorama I had the problem of finding a printing service that offers prints in this size and this aspect ratio (1:6!). Finally I only found one that offered what I was looking for.

www.europoster24.de is only shipping inside germany so I guess most of the readers of this blog cannot use it. If you know some international printers that ship to other countries please leave a link in the comments. Thank you very much.

Moo

I also ordered Moo cards. Even though many of you will know Moo already I give a little introduction to all the others.  Moo.com is an international printer that is offering a mass of photo products. Their speciality are business cards with a really good price/benefit ratio and awesome printing and paper quality. They are printing in London and Rhode Island and are shipping the whole wide world.

Not long ago they celebrated their 3rd birthday and gave out 10,000 free business card packs to flickr users. I used this offer and ordered such a 50 pack. I also ordered the free 10 pack that they offer everyone who registers an  free account there.

This is a little selection of my ones. Even though I am only an amateur photographer I like that I now have something professional to give out with my flickr page on the backside.

I can only recommend to try it. Order the free 10 pack and see what I mean.

CF Card Problems

This post is a summary of the things that happened to me during the last weeks regarding CF Cards.

Part 1:  Image Errors

As I wrote on Flickr before I had massive problems with my CF card. I only have got one and this one didnt let me down since I own my camera(more than a year now). During the last weeks more and more images that I transfered to my pc were broken. That means that they look like this when I open them in Camera Raw:

I thought about what could have caused this problem, read through the internet and arrived at the conclusion that this erros have to be a CF Card problem.

The biggest problem was that I couldnt see if an image is broken or not when I viewed them on camera because all images seemed to be ok when I viewed them there. How is that possible? Every RAW file has a little jpeg in it which is used as a thumbnail so that the camera doesnt have to load the big RAW files all the time. Those jpegs were ok but the real RAW file was broken so all I had were these little jpegs. Not acceptable for me.

These problems occured shortly before I went on holidays so I borrowed two CF cards from a friend of mine and used them in these holidays. Today I came back and transfered all the shots from camera to pc. I was surprised and confused when I realized that not only the RAW files from my CF card, but even from both borrowed CF cards had broken RAWs. This was not explainable with a broken CF card so I had to think about this again.

I instantly realized the reason for that. I had read something on the internet that explained all that. Not my CF Card but my internal CF card readers is broken. I tried to transfer the images using an external USB Card reader and it worked. No broken Raw files anymore. Pretty crazy.

So if you are finding damaged Raw files among your shots dont worry. Just try another CF card reader and it might help. In my case it did.

Please scroll down for the update!

Part 2: CF Card scamming on Amazon

When I realized those damaged RAW files I instantly thought that my CF card would be broken. I would have pretty explainable because I am using this CF card for a whole year now and it has saved about 35,000 shots. I bought it on ebay for 13€ so this performance would have been ok and a senile CF card would have been explicable since it wasnt a San Disk.

So I decided to order a new one. No problem these days. I knew what I wanted and so I visited Amazon.de and searched for my Card: Extrememory 4GB premium.

What I found was this: Click. The offer is a pretty good one and the price was the same that I paid on ebay one year ago so I bought it.

When it arrived I instantly wondered. The product description said that it would be delivered in an original packing. My first CF card was shrink-wrapped and so I expected this one to be packaged the same way. But it wasnt. All I got was a little mail with the CF card in a CF Card box. No shrink-wrapping or original packaging.

The second thing that made me wonder was the fact that this CF card looked different than my other one. Look at this:

Since its the same company I wouldnt know how this difference in printing could be explainable. Even the holes where the pins are implemented looked different. I thought that this might be a cheap copy but decided to try it first. So I took it with me on holiday and used it for about 200 shots. At first it worked really well but then I turned my camera off and switched it on again and viewed my shots. Instead of the 200 images I shot the display showed me 132. I turned it off and on again and it showed 128. From this moment on I changed the CF card because I thought I might restore the lost images with a data rescuing software and it would be good not to overwrite the data.

Now that I am at home I tried to restore the images but all I was able to restore were about 30 TIF images. Not as good as a RAW but better than no images.

When I transfered the shots to my pc I realized that the reading speed of the Amazon card is only about 3-4 MB/s while my ebay card goes up to 9MB/s. This is an other evidence that this might be a copy.

Even if I ordered this card via Amazon it wasnt Amazon that sold this but a little company that sells stuff via Amazon.

I will try to get in contact with the company that sold this and will send it back. I will keep you up-to-date. I think I will also inform Amazon.

I hope this helps you and  protects you from making the same mistakes. Please contact me if you have made the same experiences. I would be really interested to read about that!

Please see Update 2 below for an important update.

 

Update 1 :

The problems occured again and I started to search for the reason again. It seemed to not be the CF Card reader because the problems even occured when I copied images from a USB stick to hard disc. I called a pc service agent and he told me that it could be a damaged RAM Memory. I exchanged my 4GB RAM for the 1 GB that were originally delivered with my pc and the problems didnt occure again.

Then I ran memtest which is a little, free program that tests the RAM. It is really helpful because it shows you whether the RAM are working good or if they are producing writing errors. Perfectly working RAM should deliver a test results without any errors. After one hour of testing my RAM delivered 8 writing errors. These errors can show up pretty versatile while working on the pc. In my case the errors occured when I copied RAW images and so some image copies were broken after copying because such a RAM error occured while copying this file. I now complained my RAM and got new ones and they work perfectly. No errors or broken images since exchanging them.

edited 27-07-2009 - 01:49

 

Update 2 :

I asked Extrememory to check the warranty number of the CF Card that deleted my images and they told me that it is valid. So it seems that it was not a faked CF Card but one with a production defect. I will send it back now to receive my money back.

edited 27-07-2009 - 16:39

Before/After "coldness"

This is the Before/After of my most recent shot "coldness"

For information about the making please scroll down.

I did this shot using a little flashlight without much power and my shower. I put the flashlight behind me pointing towards the ceiling and set the camera to ISO 400, f/8 and an exposure time of 6s. I used the selftimer to get into the shower and positioning myself.

In postprocessing I corrected the color temperature, overlayed the original image with a bright BW version and blended both. After that I simply brightened the whole image using curves and cropping the left- and right hand border away. Thats it!

My Images on Getty Images. Part 2

As I told you before some images of mine are on Getty for sale and I had the chance to nominate five more to appear on Getty.  Yesterday I got the answer and they told me that they want 4 of the 5 images that I suggested. Pretty good percentage in my opinion. I was really surprised when I got their mail because they do not only want 4 of the 5 I suggested but even 4 other images that they found on my stream theirselves.

The images they also wanted are these ones:

 

 

I pretty much understand this selection, lets say I understand 3 of them but the last one is really not reasonable for me. Maybe this is hard for me to understand because Getty inconclusively looks for artistic images only but for simple images that show something special too. I shot this from a fitting room and it was pretty much a snapshot. At this day I have been really unsure about the question if I should upload it. Now I am really happy that I did.

If you want to have an overview about my shots on Getty you can get it here. But those news are not everything that is going on with Getty at the moment. The other thing is a second "Its your turn" action that gives me the chance to nominate 10 more images of myself for being added to the Getty collection. I was really happy when I heard that because Getty is the only way for me to earn some money with my photography and I am really interested in increasing my selling chances. So at the moment I am looking through my stream and making mind notes which images I could suggest. That is why I have created the "Getty" set on Flickr.

If you like to help me you can do this with simply nominating 10 images from that set. I would be happy if you would do that.

So lets see what comes out. My first overview of sales will be available at 20th of July and until that day I have no idea if there has been any sales made yet.