2018 - Project 52 Print - Manfred Mueller

[Manfred M]

This is the first time I shot April Skyee; a four-hour long session of cosplay superheros and super-villains that I shot at back in August. I have heard that another shoot is planned in the next few months, so I'm hoping that the rumours are correct and I can shoot this group again.

She was also the model that I shot during a Projection workshop that I posted earlier this year, although it might be hard to tell :

Projection with a whale vertebrae

Projection - Matrix inspired

I have a shoot scheduled with her in four weeks, so I'm going to have to figure out a theme for that shoot.


#18 - War on Gotham 2017 - Enchantress




Back to Epson Hot Press Natural. The paper is very nice for portraiture.

[Shadowman]

Nicely captured.

[Manfred M]

This is another shot taken at the UNESCO World Heritage Site at the ancient Cave Temples at Badami, Karnataka State, India. Here I spotted a group of Hindu pilgrims, being lead by a Holy Man, visiting these ancient Hindu and Jain religious sites.


#19 - The Pilgrims



Printed on Epson Hot Press Natural

[Shadowman]

So many interesting elements within the composition, the holy Man looks very powerful and the pilgrims in their individual levels of curiosity.

[Manfred M]

This shot was taken in Helsinki, Finland and is of the alter of the Lutheran Cathedral in the downtown of that city. It's a crowded spot popular, so using an ultra-wide angle lens comes in quite handy. Wide open (f/2.8) at a 15mm focal length on a full-frame camera works quite well as all the tourists behind me and beside me were outside of what the camera picked up. A hot-shoe mounted bubble level let me ensure that I did not add any noticeable parallax distortion to the shot. The main trick was to do a lot of dodging and burning to compensate for tonal variation in the scene.


#20 - Helsinki Lutheran Cathedral - Altar




Printed on Epson Hot Press Natural paper

[Donald]

I remember seeing it when you first presented it. I like it very much. I am sure it will be seen at its gloriously best in a print.

[Manfred M]

This shot of the exterior of Helsinki's Lutheran Cathedral is a blend of three different images taken over a 2-1/2 hour period starting at Golden hour and ending at the end of Blue Hour (it takes a long time to get dark towards the end of May this far north). An added complication was that I did not have my shift / tilt lens along, so I ended up having to make some significant perspective corrections to the final product. I made some reference images with the camera level in order to scale the size of the building properly.

#21 - Three shot time blend of Helsinki Lutheran Cathedral exterior




Printed on Epson Cold Press Natural

[Wavelength]

Excellent images; The group of Monks is outstanding with lot to observe; every face looks like a portrait with a different expression...and no body is looking at you, adds to the strength of this image!!!

[Manfred M]

This is one of the shots that I had to work hard for. A three day trek got me to Ghorepani, in North-Central Nepal and shortly after starting our descent, back to Nayapul, on the fourth day we came to an opening and got this gorgeous view of Machapuchare, or Fishtail Mountain. Machapuchare is a "holy mountain" and people are not allowed to climb it.


#22 - Machapuchare




As with all of my landscape shots to date, I printed this on Epson Cold Press Natural.

[Cantab]

Manfred, your image of Machapuchare is spectacular! Composition, lighting, etc.--everything works.

What size print did you create?

[Manfred M]

Manfred, your image of Machapuchare is spectacular! Composition, lighting, etc.--everything works.

What size print did you create?

I'm using 8-1/2" x 11" paper for this series. There is a 1" border all around, so the actual print is 6-1/2" x 9".

[Cantab]

I'm using 8-1/2" x 11" paper for this series. There is a 1" border all around, so the actual print is 6-1/2" x 9".

Manfred, I'd had a very vague recollection that this was the case. Have you beem tempted to print it in a somewhat larger size?

[Manfred M]

Manfred, I'd had a very vague recollection that this was the case. Have you beem tempted to print it in a somewhat larger size?

Right now my issue is storage. I have enough empty 8-1/2" x 11 photo paper boxes so that's where I am storing all the prints I am making in the Print 52 - 2018 series.

I'm looking at getting an archival storage box that will hold 17" x22" prints and will start doing that size. The walls in the house are running pretty close to maximum for hanging things up, so I am looking at storing them and rotating the prints from time to time. I have a number of prize winning shots from this year, so they will be the first ones that I do.

[tbob]

Just finished scrolling through the entire thread. To get caught up. Brilliant set of images. I am intrigued by the ability to go the next level and have control over the entire process. I may possibly pursue this if I move Currently i have a friend and fellow photographer do my prints. I trust his artistic judgement, however it would be nice to follow through on my vision.

That having been said, I know from post processing that my skills may be a little suspect.

[Manfred M]

This shot of a praying monk was taken in the Liker Monastery in Ladakh in Northern India while I was in that part of the country early last year. This monastery was established almost 1000 years ago. While there are about 120 monks that live here, only a handful were praying when we visited. The room was quite cold (after all, it was January in the Himalayas) and dark (natural light only), so high ISO setting and low shutter speeds were required.

I very much like the way the light from one of the small windows on the camera right side hits the hand of the monk. There was a lot of dodging and burning required to create this image.


#23 - Praying Monk - Liker Monastery




This image was printed on Epson Hot Press Natural paper.

[Donald]

I am sure the tones crafted by the natural light and the way you have completed the image, will look spectacular in the print.

[joebranko]

This shot was taken in Helsinki, Finland and is of the alter of the Lutheran Cathedral in the downtown of that city. It's a crowded spot popular, so using an ultra-wide angle lens comes in quite handy. Wide open (f/2.8) at a 15mm focal length on a full-frame camera works quite well as all the tourists behind me and beside me were outside of what the camera picked up. A hot-shoe mounted bubble level let me ensure that I did not add any noticeable parallax distortion to the shot. The main trick was to do a lot of dodging and burning to compensate for tonal variation in the scene.


#20 - Helsinki Lutheran Cathedral - Altar




Printed on Epson Hot Press Natural paper

Hi Manfred,
Was it a compositional decision to have the altar off center in the shot? Or were there other considerations?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[Manfred M]

Hi Manfred,
Was it a compositional decision to have the altar off center in the shot? Or were there other considerations?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

First of all, not centring the subject generally results in a stronger composition, so I usually do not aim for centred subjects.

The other issue is that this shot was done with an ultra-wide angle lens (15mm focal length on a full-frame camera). One of the issues when shooting that wide is that there is a tendency to have a lot of floor and / or ceiling in the shot, so that tends to give a rather uninteresting image. The way to combat this is the have other elements in the foreground. In this case, I used the small table and the baptismal font as those foreground elements, so the positioning of both these elements played a major role in how I framed the shot.

[Manfred M]

I had a shoot last night and have another one on Saturday and one on Sunday as well, so I thought I would get this week's print up a bit early again.

Upper Canada Village is a Heritage Park located on the St Lawrence River, near Morrisburg, Canada. It is a major tourist attraction and we tend to visit whenever we have visitors from outside of Canada.

It owes its beginnings to the construction of the St Lawrence Seaway in the 1950s. A number of villages along the banks of the St Lawrence River were destroyed by the flooding of some of the land stemming from the Seaway and the control and power dams that were built. Some of the historic buildings were disassembled and moved to higher ground as part of the heritage preservation work. These became Upper Canada Village and the buildings were generally from the mid to late 1800s.

Upper Canada, was the part of British North America that lay along the western parts of the St Lawrence River and around the northern parts of the Great Lakes.

One of the buildings is the carpenter's shop, complete with a rather authentic looking carpenter. We got to chatting with him and discovered he is really a carpenter who came from the Isle of Wight in the UK. He is a popular photographic subject; I decided to capture him working in his shop. He does make tools and furniture that can be seen around the village.


#24 - Upper Canada Village Carpenter's Shop





This image was printed on Epson Hot Press Natural paper

[Cantab]

Manfred, for me this is an absolutely wonderful image -- perhaps in part because I like woodworking with handtools.

The composition works well as does the dynamic range.

When you post these print images on CiC, do you use a scanned version of the actual print or the unprinted image file?

A second question:
For this series of prints (letter size paper with a caption), do you have a template that you then simply plug in the image file and then type in the caption?
I'm going to try to do something similar but have limited experience with this kind of format.