Fellow photographer and german blogger Steffen Göthling from Lens-Flare.de has new series on his blog, where he gives comments or a review of images. This week he was so kind to review/comment on my image "Being There".

For those interested and who read german please head over to his article on his blog. 

Big thanks from the now already a little chilly north and this also reminds me that I'm long behind with my blogroll which will hopefully be up one day soon.

06:09PM Nov 06, 2008 by Sven Seebeck  |  Tags: blogs news  |  Comments [0]

Since the golden autumn season is over now and a long and mostly dark winter is just around the corner, I thought I will use that time of low photographic outdoor activities and start a little project for myself: learning more about the history of photography.

I must admit that I know actually nothing about it in general, also my knowledge about the famous photographers from the past is very limited. I started being more seriously with photography a little more than one and a half years ago, and was little familiar with the photographers around today but other than that, there is not so much else. My interest so far, was naturally trying to learn about the technical aspect of photography, the related technical tools such as Photoshop, Lightroom and so on, and trying to learn about composition. This is already a lot of stuff, but this year I think it's about time to expand and add some history knowledge to it.

Since this is going to be a bigger project, I thought I will start with Jeff Curto's podcast "The History of Photography", which is basically a recording of his classes plus he provides the slides and handouts for his class on his website. This looks like a good way to start.

Other than that I will watch the BBC series "The Genius of Photography".

I hope this will give me a lot to start with and while I might dig deeper into the topic I might run across some good websites, I will then update this list, also I will finally use my almost un-used Delicious account to collect/tag links for the project.

How much do you know about the history of photography? Have any intersting links to share? As usual feel free to leave a note in the comments.

09:15AM Oct 21, 2008 by Sven Seebeck  |  Tags: projects  |  Comments [2]

It has been a little quiet here on my blog. My other life kept me rather busy during the last weeks, and all the free time I had, I tried to use for shooting rather than writing about it.

Those waiting for my next and last post in my series on GND-Filter I can inform you, that I hopefully will have it up any time next week.

So far so good.

Steffen Göthling from German blog Lens Flare asked his readers last week to submit their autumn images. Since autumn is almost over here, I submitted a little older one and he was kind enough to include it his post. Have a look at the article and the other submissions on his blog right here.

Many thanks to Steffen from me.

12:28PM Oct 15, 2008 by Sven Seebeck  |  Tags: blog news  |  Comments [1]

In the first post in this series I wrote a little introduction to Graduated Neutral Density filters what they do and how they look like. In this post, I’m going to show you what you actually will need in order to use them.

My biggest confusion when ordering my first filter set, was, what I would actually need, or what I will get and/or how it looks like. So here I have put together what all is necessary hoping to make it a little easier for others.

What do you need?

The filter set consists of three parts:

a) The filter holder:

This filter holder is equipped with filter slots for two filters.

b) The adaptor ring:

The wide angle version of a 77mm ring:

And this a 67mm version:

The difference between the wide angle and the basic version is the thickness. The wide angle one is smaller in order to prevent vignetting on wide angle lenses.

c) The filters, well obviously:

The GND filters come in strengths from 1 to 3 stops in both hard and soft transitions. 4 stop filters are available as a special order. For anything stronger it’s recommended to use two filters together.

I’m using the Lee Filter System, which you also see here. Things might be a little different in different systems.

So, whether you get the Starter Kit  or the Foundation Kit for the Lee Filter system you always will need an adaptor ring, suitable for the lens or lenses that you plan to use it with.

How does this come together?

Attaching the filter system is very easy. First you screw the adaptor ring to the lens:

Then you clip on the filter holder to the adaptor ring:

And finally you can slide in the filter(s):

This is basically all that you need in order to use them.

It is possible to upgrade this filter holder via the “Upgrade Kit”. Using that, you can use 4 filters together.

Are there other filters available?

The benefit of this filter system is, that you can also get all kinds of filters for it. There are Neutral Density filters available, warming filters, graduated colored filters, black and white filters and so on.

Also there are special Polarizer Filters available which can be attached to filter holder via an adaptor. I don’t have any of these yet, but I’m looking forward to expand my filter collection a bit in the future.

I think that’s it for this post. I hope it has shown clearly what is needed in order to use these filters. In the next post I will try to show some examples on how I used them of several of my images.

If you have any further questions or if something is wrong or unclear, you’re welcome to leave a comment.

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with Lee Filters in any way, I just use it and I hope everything I wrote here is correct. Just to make sure.

12:07PM Oct 03, 2008 by Sven Seebeck  |  Tags: filters how-to tutorial  |  Comments [1]

For me the Sunday is always the best day to sit down with a nice cup of my favorite Café Latté and get inspired by some great images on the net.

Looking at pictures is so important for my own development, I get so many new ideas from that, even though I might not have the chance to go out and try something similar. But I try to keep a good idea, framing, concept in mind.

I thought it would be nice to share some of my favorite images from some fantastic photographers which I ran across this week.

Tristan Campbell from Absolutely Nothing posted a beautiful tree:

Subtle shades at dawn

and Uwe Eischens from Accessible posted another one:

http://www.accessible.de/?p=1670

David Baker over at Milou posted some images I liked:

http://milou.phototage.com/archives/4159_1048088568/310050

http://milou.phototage.com/archives/4159_1048088568/309998

Russel Turner has posted a nice long exposure with some rocks at sunset (I have a thing for images like that):

http://syspix.my-expressions.com/archives/5577_1502691925/309952

And Tero Tielinen posted the beauty of autumn in Finland:

http://www.terotielinen.fi/index.php?showimage=117

In this series I will focus on photoblogs, since I’m not sure if there’s a good way to kind-of “fav” images from there other than adding them to Delicious or Stumble Upon for example.

01:48PM Sep 28, 2008 by Sven Seebeck  |  Tags: blogs favorites spll  |