Photography - Another Passion

Photography & Art

Beside amateur radio, photography belongs to my favourite leisure-time activities. One of the cameras used is a MINOLTA 505SIsuper with the following lenses to choose from: MINOLTA AF 50 mm 1:1.4, SOLIGOR AF Zoom 28-105 mm 1:2.8-3.8, and SOLIGOR Zoom AF 70-210 mm 1:2.8-4. A MINOLTA 5600HS serves as the flash unit. It is a very good and compact analog SLR system and ideally suits my purposes.

Since March 2006, these photographic tools are completed by a SONY DSC-R1 digital camera which utilizes the excellent ZEISS Vario-Sonnar lens (1:2.8-4.8 14.3 -71.5 mm digital).

Main focus is on portrait, nature, landscape, and experimental photography.

Very obviously so, the good old dark room from good old analog times has been replaced by the many and manifold PC programmes. Manifold - I use quite different PC programmes for the post-production process of my photographs, as each exhibits advantages and disadvantages of their own. Here is my "dark room" software list:

Software*	Source	Application	freeware/licence fee	URL
Animation Shop 3.1.1	Jasc Software, Inc	Animation	licence fee	www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/ us/en/Product/1152105040771
DxO Optics Pro 7.2	DxO Image Science	(Automatic) Image enhancement and correction**	licence fee	www.dxo.com/intl/
Foto Suite 2006	Microsoft Corp.	Image editing and enhancement	licence fee	www.microsoft.com
HDR Darkroom 4.0	Everimaging Ltd	HDR editing	licence fee	www.everimaging.com/
Image Data Converter SR	Sony Corp.	RAW format conversion	freeware (part of DSC-R1 software package)	-
Image Ready 9.0	ADOBE Systems, Inc.	Image editing and enhancement	licence fee	www.adobe.com
Paint.NET 3.5.10	Paint.NET	Image editing and enhancement	freeware	www.getpaint.net
Paint Shop PRO X	Corel Corp.	Image editing and enhancement/filtering	licence fee	www.corel.com
Photo Filtre 6	Antonio de Cruz	Image editing and enhancement/filtering	freeware	www.photofiltre.com
PhotoImpact X3 5.01	Ulead Systems	Image editing and enhancement/filtering	licence fee	www.corel.com
Photo Impression 6.1.8	ArcSoft, Inc	Image editing and enhancement/filtering	licence fee	www.arcsoft.com/en-us/index.asp
PhotoScape 3.4	Mooi Tech	Image editing and enhancement/filtering, animation	freeware	www.photoscape.org/
Photoshop CS2	ADOBE Systems, Inc.	Image editing and enhancement/filtering	licence fee	www.adobe.com
Photo Studio 10	Zoner Software	Image editing and enhancement/filtering	licence fee	www.zoner.com/de-de/products
Picture Publisher 7a	Micrografx, Inc.	Image editing and enhancement/filtering	licence fee	www.igrafx.com
Virtual Painter	P. & A. America, Inc.	Filtering, picture conversion ("virtualization")	licence fee	www.virtualpainter5.com
Xtreme FotoDesigner 6	Magix AG	Image editing and enhancement/filtering	freeware	www.magix.de

To scan my (analog) MINOLTA pictures, I use a Hewlett Packard PSC-750 in conjunction with one of the above-mentioned image editing and enhancement programmes.

To scan my old negatives and slides, a ROLLEI scanner DF-S110 is in use since January 2010.

Although I've once been sporadically working for a German photographic magazine, I've never been an outstanding photographer myself - so please do not expect any masterpieces here. You can nevertheless visit one of my photo galleries below. They are included to simply show the bandwidth of my activities and reflect the great fun and satisfaction I gain from all my hobbies.

Make your choice of one of the exhibitions by clicking on the respective picture in the left frames!

Friends Show Their Talents

Photo Gallery 2 is dedicated to very good friends: I 'd like to provide a stage for showing their talents - their photographic competence - to the Internet public. The rules are easy enough: the author himself should like his photographs and should feel to be sort of identified by them, and so should I as his editor and "provider". As it seems, the measuring tape is not positioned very high... Is that really? I doubt this, as, in the end, you, the public, will decide upon the acceptance of this exhibition: by the pure number of your visits or, if you can afford the time, by sending an e-mail with your sincere, honest, and fair comments. Thank you very much in advance!

A first exhibition is now available - with short captions in German. The - mostly ambiguous and playful - texts turned out to be more or less untranslatable. So we decided to leave them in the original language. As photographs - if they are good ones... - should not depend on too much spoken language and explanation at all, this does not appear to be of too much disadvantage. Hopefully...

Hartmut Rasper: An-Sichten - eine fotografische Wegreise (with captions in German)

Everything can be virtual...

Photo Gallery 3 is concerned with our "real" world, particularly how photography - sometimes with the help of a computer - can "alienate" it. Does a photograph really depict objective reality? Incorruptibly so? If you affirm this - why, in so many cases, are people disappointed about their photographs, because, as they say, they "did not get what they saw"? But what did they really see when taking the picture, and what did the camera see for them? And why did the camera not record their portrait of reality? One of a couple of answers is that a camera is a technical device, a "machine" without feelings and reflections - very much in contrary to the person operating it, the photographer. But even the camera changes, manipulates (in the neutral sense of the word), alienates the objects of the real world - by the settings of the diaphragm (depth of focus!), exposure time, by the choice of the lens, by using (colour and other) filters - to mention only a few facets. This is why there are three - mostly competing - realities: the photographer's, the camera's, and last-not-least the reality's reality, the "true" (whatever that is) world.

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