Lausanne

© Frederic Mancosu

I almost froze to death for this one, hope you like it!

Photoshop fun

All images © Frederic Mancosu

Bad stuff

© Frederic Mancosu

Click the image for more detail!

Back from my little tour of the Ruhrpott

© Frederic Mancosu

Hi folks!

First of all, happy new year to all of you!

I’m back from a little traveling in the Ruhr area and around Düsseldorf in Germany. And I brought a lot of images with me!

Here’s one of them to start into the new year! I found the remnants of the industrial age one can find in the area absolutely breathtaking. The mining period is still omnipresent around there and the way people deal with it is fascinating. There’re a whole lot of art projects and original ideas emanating from the ruins and make for an extraordinary contrast. As this skating rink made from a water surface that was put there to contribute to a lighting installation. Art, evolution and sometimes revolution, a captivating dynamic. Hope you like this for starters, there’ll be more!

It’s been a while… ;-)

Hi folks!

It’s been a while but I’m finally done with my exams! Which means plenty of time to go take pictures!

We’ll start by having the portrait section grow a little. Here it goes:

©Frederic Mancosu

I shot this the other day in a bit of an in extremis ultrashort shooting… I tend to always get these in the middle of my exams… but then again, a little studio work to crack up the massive bookreading/learning routine is always welcome.

The guy is a good friend of mine and the goalkeeper of a pretty successful local Handball team. I’d been wanting to pull this shot off for a while, knowing the light setup which I had tried already at the racetrack, but not having any idea of the subject to which to apply it. When he approached me to organize a shooting, one idea kinda connected with the other and I finally got to take this picture. We were all quite happy with the results, so I thought it’d be a good thing to share with you guy and gals!

In the effort of picking up stuff, we’ll go on with our flickr group. We got an awesome pic to share from there! So be sure to check back and catch that! In the meantime, we got a lot of fresh snow here, so I’m gonna be shooting that a little! Aaaand… we got a special holiday header! This and more, coming up on FMPB!

Long overdue update!

Hi fellows!

I know, this is long overdue, but that’s the thing with students… twice a year we have a little action going on that makes the blogs stand still… right, as we approach christmas, for us, it’s exam time, not regarding all the deadlines falling into mid december…

But hey, they say an image is worth a thousand words… so here you go:

Nevertheless, I managed to grabble a couple of minutes to go out and shoot the image on top yesterday night. So I can at least get you that much! It is incredible what weird worlds of colour you get into when you adapt the WB to the orange streetlights. It’s an easy to obtain effect in camera, which you can then slightly enhance in HSL. That’s what carrying a greycard is for.

Hope you enjoy this for now and I’ll be back with a little more activity around christmas!

All images © Frederic Mancosu

This week from the group # 5!

Hi folks!

It is about time we talk about great photography again here on FMPB! And by great photography of course I mean the awesome contributions we keep getting in the FMPB Flickr group!

This week, we have an “untitled” work from David Urbanke out of New Jersey!

© David Urbanke

Dave has a very unique and distinct style that conveys this magical feeling his images have. He has an incredible vision of light to which he adds an even more incredible talent. He gets the perfect look out of the unusual poses the poses of his Models in combination with the light and that warm “endless summer” color scheme. At only 15 years, Dave has already pushed his photography further than most of us… if he goes on like this, this might only be the beginning of a great career!

Of course, you can find more of Dave’s work on Flickr!

I also strongly recommend a visit to his website that has just recently gone online at: www.davidurbanke.com/

You should definitely take a look at that!

By the way, do you like this image as much as I do? Well, your image can be up there too! Here’s how it works:

1. Upload your image to flickr.

2. Enter your image into the FMPB flickr group. (find it here!)

3. Put in whatever you’d like to say about your picture as a description, or send it to fredmancosu@gmail.com with a link to the picture.

I think I can speak for all the viewers when I say that we’re thrilled to have Dave’s work up here this week and we’d love to see yours in near future!

Coming up next on FMPB, the weekly portrait and more, so stay tuned!

Let’s talk gear!

Alright, I hear you guys, we had it in the polls and you guys wanted gear, so here we go!

I’m not very good at always having the newest gear, as I’m pretty much into buying only what has an actual effect on what I do. This not being Video, we’ll not see much of the 7D talk here. So let’s talk about a piece of gear that really affects stills. One I just recently got: The Cokin 8 stop solid ND filter.

I’d been reading about the Cokin system every once in a while and always lusted about getting me one of those someday. The huge problem with the things though is the availability. At least here in Switzerland, there’s no easy way to get them. At least so I thought. The other day I went to see the new 100 Macro at my photo retailer’s and saw a Cokin catalog lying around. Two surprises there, well three actually (the third being the Macros new IS)… The first was the fact that my retailer could get the Cokin stuff at all and the second was the affordability. These things are not cheap, but compared to the B&Ws and the HOYAs they’re pretty okay. Plus, once you have the holder they’re only about 30 bucks a piece. Considering that and to distract myself from wanting a 100L Macro, I got an 8 stop solid ND to start with, as its effect is the hardest to digitally replicate in post. What it does, is basically keep the equivalent of 8 F-stops of light from getting into your camera. This allows for way slower shutter speeds. Where you’d normally have a 1/100 of a second, you get 4 seconds if my math is correct (it never really is, but you get the idea ).

Today I finally found the time to test it in the field. We went out, fought the elements and got to a little pond a few miles from the house. The weather was terrible as it has been all weekend. With intense fog and hefty rain. Once on location, the first piece of gear that turned out to be very useful was the ultraflat Velbon I brought. In nature photography to be able to stretch the legs of a tripod out sidewards is a superb feature. This way we could set it up over the water and have the camera in the perfect angle. Next up was the filter. It consists of three parts. The first one is a solid metal adaptor Ring. It’s well crafted and screws into the filter Ring and broadens the front of the lens to make it fit into the the holder. It also has the weird side effect of having your lens say “FRANCE” where it should say “JAPAN”… French lenses, seriously?

With the adaptor thingy on, the holder slides right over it and clicks in with a little pin. The holder is made out of quite flexible plastic, it doesn’t feel mega solid, but then again it doesn’t have to. It has room for three filters which on the one side is good, as you can stack filters. On the other side, it protrudes pretty far out because of that. Doing that, it shows up in the frame at angles wider than 21mm. This is the first of the two only downsides of the P series. If you’re doing very wide angle photography, you should go with the larger holders of the Z series. The other downside is that one can’t use the lenscap over the adaptor ring, so you need to purchase the special Cokin lenscap or, as I do, take the whole thing off after using it.

Aside from that, the whole thing is quite cool. As mentioned, one can slide up to three filters into the holder. So far, I only have one filter so I can’t really tell how stacking will affect image quality. What I can tell though is that using one doesn’t really reflect negatively on iq. I had the fear that, given the distance between the filter and the front element, reflections could be an issue. But even with a strong light coming from behind the camera, I found no decernable flaws on that front.

Beyond that, the filter does exactly what it is designed for, it keeps a lot of light out of your camera. This makes composing and focussing your image quite difficult. Here’s where the two part solution regarding the adaptor ring and the holder really shines. You can do whatever you have to do to take your picture and then just slide on the holder with whatever filter you have stacked on there. Quite an awesome feature compared to a screw-on filter.

So… this is pretty much as far as I can go with this review so far. I still have to test it a bit more and I’ll update as I do. Yet, the first impression is very positive.

All images © Frederic Mancosu

Ghosts anyone?

Hey folks!

Its really rather sparse this week on FMPB, cauz’ Im drowning in work over here… which in itself isn’t a bad thing, but leaves the blog a little unattended.

Yet, I still managed to get outside the other night in order to have a little something to post for you guys.

So nice and ghosty, here it goes:

© Frederic Mancosu

Hope you like it for now, we’ll try to get back to the old rythm a little over the next days!

So stay tuned, there’s more TK!

Last week’s weekly portrait #6!

Hi folks!

A lot’s going on over here these days, so the weekly portrait hasn’t been all that weekly lately… sorry for that.

And what if I told you that on top of that, it’s not even really a portrait this time? Well let’s see how you like it anyway

There’s a bunch of guys in this country who (apart from being a bit crazy) are so much into rugby that even nighttime, ice and snow can’t keep them from playing. One cold and foggy winter night, I saw the floodlights on again in the distance and decided to go have a closer look. Within seconds, I was deep frozen, walking into the dark woods of the park surrounding the field. I could hear yelling as I got closer… this had to be it… and there they were…

Hope you like it!

Coming up next, another superb contribution from the group!

All images © Frederic Mancosu