Hermann and his wife moved out of the apartment they had lived in for 53 years. I photographed Hermann on the last day of moving. It was a difficult time for both.

Photography has always been digital for me. I might have shot two or three rolls of 35mm film when I was a boy, but in general, digital photography has been the “standard” way to shoot for me. After shooting only digital for a couple of years, I started getting curious about what film had to offer. I looked around on Ebay and grew a liking to the Mamiya medium format cameras. The Hasselblads were nice obviously, but it seemed that you payed a big premium mostly for the name Hasselblad. In the end, I decided to buy a used Mamiya RB 67. As these cameras are some 15-30 years old, some of them might come in less than “mint” condition. The one I bought turned out to be having several issues, ranging from broken light seals in the film back to incorrect shutter speeds. After a couple of test films I decided to return it and shelved the idea of my own medium format camera.
A few months later I made a second attempt and got another RB 67. This time, body and film back were working fine, but the lens was a 150mm soft focus lens. As it turned out, it was a nightmare to focus and only really usable as a normal lens from f8 upwards. Additionally, on my first try run in a friend’s studio, I made a mistake with the Mamiya’s flash settings which resulted in the flash not syncing correctly and thus underexposing the images. This really frustrated me. I had really been careful about my shots, set up decent lighting, had a friend come in for a portrait session and the end result was less than overwhelming. In the end, I had spent some 100 euros on developing and contact sheets for a couple of rolls of pretty much unusable film. Once again, I put the Mamiya away and returned to shooting digital again.
Late in december I stumbled upon an ebay auction for the 127mm k/l lens. (The K/L lenses are the most modern lenses that work on the old RB bodies. The RB 67 was replaced by the RZ 67 and sadly those lenses don’t fit on the RB…) After googling a couple of (very positive) reviews, I decided to give the whole thing another shot and ordered the lens. And that’s where this whole business became fun. I spent the holidays doing portraits of my friends and family, and I loved the results. Tack sharp even when shooting wide open, thin slivers of depth of field and a process of shooting so different from my usual digital, day-to-day stuff. For commercial work, digital will probably always be my go-to system. For personal projects however, I’m sure that the RB is going to be playing a big part in my photography from now on. (Although I’m curious to see whether some clients might actually be fascinated by the whole idea as well… we’ll see.)

More to come…

… is not the most important aspect of photography as long as you can operate the Hasselblad as cool as he does.

Since (a) I’m not in the mood for long typing and (b) since this is a photography blog after all, I decided to do simple photo posts more often. Just keep my mouth shut and show some pictures.
These two images I made sometime in March of 2010 with my friend Tammo Vahlenkamp’s Mamiya 645 medium format camera. Lately I’ve really fallen in love with shooting medium format film so this won’t be the last post about this topic. Have a great day!

(Image: Christian Kaufmann for FC Bayern)

This year has been pretty great and I’m the first to admit that luck played a considerable part in this. Many of the good things that happened this year where a result of simply being in the right place in the right time. But in my opinion that is exactly the point. Staying at home in front of the TV is never the right place, no matter what time it is. For every time I was at the right place at the right time, I probably was at ten wrong places at the wrong time. But you have to give it a shot. Every. Single. Time.
I don’t know how many opportunities I missed because I didn’t give it a shot on some day. Maybe, if I’d made that call I didn’t make last month, I could be on an assignment for Nike right now. Or maybe not. I guess I’ll never know. But I do know that every opportunity I did get was because I got my ass off the couch on that particular day.

In September, I was assisting for photographer Christian Kaufmann for a couple of days at Munich’s soccer club FC Bayern. He was originally assigned to shoot their 2010 yearbook, but they asked him to attend their official photo day along with some 30 other photographers and members of the press. This is a yearly event where all the coaches and players are presented and photographed as a group shot and individually.
Locking 30 desperate press photographers in a room with some rather famous athletes inevitably leads to medieval battle scenes and -since it was my first time at an event like this- I mainly fought to stay alive and protect our equipment against the flood of people running around. It was quite an experience.
But the thing that stayed with me longer was something else. Looking around, checking out the other photographers, it struck me that most of the photographers were running on 50% power instead of going all out for a great shot. It was a “straight, on-camera flash, take the picture and then let’s go to lunch” kind of routine for most.

Obviously you don’t have to go over the top and bring an assistant carrying a Profoto strobe with a softbox along with 20 pounds worth of power pack and other equipment, like we did. (Christian was shooting and I was following, carrying and aiming the light) Sure, we got the best light in the room, but with only a little extra preparation one could have got 95% of that quality. Just take your flash off your camera and stick it on a monopod. Maybe spend 20 euros / dollars on some kind of diffuser and you’re done. Bang. You’ve got good light instead of a snapshot. You don’t need studio strobes or assistants. With one simple off-camera flash, a monopod and a cheap diffusor dome, you don’t need an assistant to get a great shot. You only need two hands.

Of course, the tabloids and newspapers that most of these guys work for don’t give a damn whether the athletes are lit well or not. As long as they are reasonably sharp they probably won’t even see a difference. But somebody might. And if you have to spend a day of shooting there anyway, you might as well make a good picture. Heck, why not make a great picture while you’re at it?!

So what if the guys at the paper don’t care. It’s a good picture. Maybe some guy scouting for a photographer to hire stumbles upon your portfolio and this picture lands you a job you really want to do. Maybe some future client will choose you simply because you’ve got a face in your portfolio that he recognizes. Or maybe nothing will come of it. Maybe this wasn’t the right time after all. But you went the extra mile. You tried. And tomorrow you’ll try again.

mtk

Just have to share this: The awesome photoshop shortcut rapper. Good Luck memorizing it all…

“So what do you do for a living?”

“I’m a photographer.”

“Oh cool, so what kinds of images do you make?”

“Ah, you know, passport photos mostly…”

….

Some more recent shots over at the website…

mtk…

It’s done. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you may know that for some time I’ve been working on my new website. While I liked the old one, I wanted a more elegant way to show my images. My pal Stefan found me a great basic structure to work with and did a great job with the custom work. I spent a lot of the time choosing the images I wanted to show and created a completely reworked portfolio including much more of my recent work.

I also added images from a couple of photo series (including the Boulderwelt shoot) I shot, you can find those under “projects”. A few scans from recent publications featuring my work can be found under “tearsheets”.

Check out the new website here: www.brunoaxhausen.com

A couple of issues remain, but most should be worked out in the coming days. If you come across any problems with the new site, a short email or a comment here on the blog would be greatly appreciated!

I hope you enjoy your visit!

Some pictures take years to be made. And some take less than a day. Our neighborhood is full of interesting little shops and the most intriguing is a small bicycle repair shop. It’s a tiny workroom, stuffed with dozens of bicycles, replacement parts and tools. A while ago I went by the store and had a feeling that there might be a picture there. I made a note and forgot about it.

Today, while being slightly grumpy about a not so promising day, I remembered that shop and decided to walk over and simply ask the owner if he’d mind if I made a portray of his shop sometime. I was thinking about scheduling a date for sometime in the next couple of weeks. Conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi, I really like your shop and would love to take a picture of it sometime…
Owner: Sure, 3 o’clock?
Me: …
Me: Sure.

I walked off, slightly confused by how easy that went when it hit me: I didn’t have most of the equipment I’d need. My lightstands were still at a friend’s studio, I didn’t have a decent wide angle lens for the kind of shot I wanted to do and I had no idea how I could create the kind of light I wanted for this shot.
The next couple of hours turned out a little hectic, racing all the way across town to collect my gear, borrow a 17-35mm 2.8 wide angle lens from another photographer and figuring out the lighting while riding on the subway. In the end I had an hour left to make a couple of test shots at home before packing my bags and walking over to the store.
I set up my lights, made a couple of testshots and told the owner I was ready. Took 5 images, said “Thank you”, packed my gear and left. That’s it. Not everything has to be a big production, some images don’t even take a day.

Setup
The basic idea was having the subject stand in front of his workbench / bicycles / tools with a rather narrow light hitting his face that should fall of quickly towards his torso. The background I wanted to be light enough to make out details but without drawing the viewer’s eye away from the subject’s face.
As a main light, a beauty dish would have been perfect, the only drawback being that I don’t have one. So I chose the next best thing, an old pizza carton wrapped around my SB-600. It forms a narrow snoot, channeling the light and throwing a very tight spotlight onto the subject.
For the background I was initially hoping that a slightly longer shutterspeed and moderately raised ISO setting would suffice. As it turned out it didn’t, so I put up an SB-900 on a lightstand, raised it up as high as possible and aimed it at the ceiling. That way, the light bounced back from the ceiling as a softer and more even illumination, without changing the overall feeling of the store. It also helped with putting slight reflections on the metallic parts in the store.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I shot at Boulderwelt. It was a fantastic experience, although it left me with a nasty cold and a sore throat (not from the cold). I ended up with close to 60 awesome participants and hundreds of images I’m really excited about. Regarding the future of these images, I’m currently working on a couple of ideas although I’m not yet completely sure what final shape they will take.

Setup revisited

The basic setup worked pretty much the way I’d planned, with one key light through a softbox on the subject and one strobe firing into a white reflector which in turn reflects the light onto the background. Note: I switched from a white styrofoam to a big white Lastolite reflector as it was easier to transport.  I triggered the strobes with the D90′s internal flash gun which worked great for the most part. For reasons I haven’t figured out yet, sync reliability kept decreasing as the day went on, which bugged me a lot. It started great with maybe one misfire out of 40 shots until late at night it fell below 50% (!). Still unsure what was happening there, changing batteries on the strobes didn’t help either. (I wish I’d had a couple of Pocket Wizards for this gig, they are definitely on my shopping list once I’ve got enough money…) Note: I haven’t confirmed this, but one reason could be that the D90′s IR trigger output level decreases with decreasing camera battery power. (I didn’t change batteries on the D90, only on the strobes…)

Pictures to the People

The fundamental idea of this project was that everybody should be getting their images in full resolution for their own use. I didn’t know how many people it would be beforehand, but I knew I would have to be prepared for getting out pictures to a lot of people quickly and efficiently. I’d worked as an assistant for a Munich based studio recently where we had a day-long casting for an advertising campaign. In order to keep track of some 40 applicants, we had them hold up a piece of paper with their name and contact information and took a picture of each. It’s a great way to keep track of people you photograph, since you’ve got a connection between their faces and their contact information right there with the images you take. I decided to steal that idea, so I had everyone write down their email addresses on a piece of paper and took a picture of them before moving on to the “real” images. It still took me a whole day to get all of the final images out, but that was mostly waiting for the files to upload on my server. (Everyone got a download link for their zipped pictures)

Last Thoughts

As I’m browsing through the finished images, I’m overwhelmed by the many great people I’ve met in the course of these two days and how much fun the whole affair has been. One question I’ve been asked many times was “why?”.  As I told the people who asked me during the shoot, when you’re trying to make money with your photography, you run the risk of losing touch with the reasons why you started shooting in the first place. You stop shooting simply for the fun of creating something cool. And creating something cool was the main objective for this project. I wasn’t even sure what exactly would come out of it. But I knew that with some planning and a handful of great people, this could really turn into something nice.

Of course this doesn’t mean that I would mind if some kind of paying job came from this. Ever since turning my hobby into a profession, the basic idea of advertising myself wherever possible is present in the background and I don’t mind that. It’s part of being a professional photographer and I accepted that as part of the job. But the real reason for this project remains the pure fun of creating something. Of going out and doing something instead of sitting at home and thinking about doing something.

So, why not?