Photographic views on things.

365 Dishes: Travel it, dine it, shoot it.

  • Unripe pepper (piper nigrum) panicle
  • Complex set meal in a Japanese style restaurant in Singapore
  • Periodics® Table of Spices by Uwe-Jens Karl

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  • Uwe-Jens Karl
  • Grating the nutmeg
  • Basil | Ocimum basilicum [73 Ob]
  • Periodics® Table of Spices

I am amazed to look at things through a viewfinder.

365 Dishes initially was one of these "food blogs". It was logging one photo per day of one dish I was having for one year. Its "outstandingness" was the camera I was using - an iPhone 4S - and that it contained at least 25 spinach dishes after some 12 months.

My friends knew me as the funny guy who rather eats without a cutlery than without a camera.

Uwe-Jens Karl
One day I got an email from my hosting company which let me know that my account was suspended due to a malware infection. All I could figure out was that more than 60,000 WordPress sites worldwide had been infected (through a newsletter plugin) then and that it would be impossible to restore a clean copy of my installation since all my 20 backups were infected, too. So I had to set it up from scratch, I changed the concept and now 365 Dishes is called "Photographic views on things", and this describes best what it wants to be all about.

In my full-time job I am managing a spice business and my spare time is completely booked with photography, Mac & Co. while travel is part of both working and spare time. You wouldn't probably be surprised if I added here that I love shooting spices.

I slightly focus my work on food and tabletop photography and in my house I have set up a photo corner with basic studio echipment. On the other hand, I do not nail myself down on food and tabletop, but I also enjoy travel photography (street, people, nature) and latest - sports.

 


Thanks to my young daughter who is on performance level in a figure skating class in Berlin, I found a reason to buy a second camera body with sports photography characteristics (basically, highspeed autofocus) and so I bought Canon's 5D Mark III.  

Sure, my echipment was expensive and it didn't make me taking better photos. But I have more fun with my bad pictures now.

Heiko Kanzler
Figure skating photography is quite a challenge due to generally poor light conditions and fast moving photo motif. Anyway, overall fair photo quality in terms of sharpness and luminosity that can be produced by a combination from 5DM3 and EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS USM lens in a skating hall.

For studio purposes I mostly use an EF 100 mm f2.8 L IS USM lens on a Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III body which I bought back in 2008 as the first full-frame (36 x 24 mm) sensor DSLR with 20+ MP resolution available on the market then.

Traveling without photo equipment in my case means that at least my beloved Leica X1 compact camera is with me. I never enter arguments about the pros and cons of this camera, but I very much love the photos one can produce with this piece and a bit of handiness and patience. Yes, it has a lousy monitor and a poor autofocus, but I never want to do without the expressive pictures that you can force it to do anymore.

In my post-processing workflow I use both Lightroom and DxO Optics Pro, but neither Photoshop nor Elements. It is not that I don't like this software, but first I generally avoid editing JPEGs and second I want to keep the most natural character of my pictures. So my workflow starts from RAW and ends with exporting to JPEG on highest possible quality level.

For some time, I feel bored with most of that digital photo flood that's coming over us day by day and which all looks the same somehow. And, of course, I also relate this to many of my photos. One day I discovered on a backup volume scanned photo prints that I had taken 15 years ago or so with an analog EOS 300. Just mum, wife and children in our garden, nothing arranged. But what expressive colors, contrasts, dynamics and even a little bit of a film grain without any post-processing! No comparison to what an average digital camera - regardless if compact or DSLR - would produce. Or look at Instagram with all that grunge and vintage filtering.

Obviously, getting back to analog photography wouldn't be an option, at least for me. I need my photos available for immediate online access. So I began to experiment with several analog film emulating software and I understood that this could be - if not the solution - so at least an acceptable compromise for giving my digital pictures sort of an analog finish. I am very happy here with DxO Optics Pro where you can apply original analog film presets directly to your RAW photo file.

Well folks, I am not a professional photographer and I do not earn a living with photography. I am just an enthuziast who likes to look at the world through a viewfinder and I cannot stop surprizing myself with how things look after I have shot them*.

 

* I bet you've guessed the quote here!

Also visit me at periodics.de.

  • Saigon grilled chicken
  • Singapore Japanese dinner
  • Kuala Lumpur street cooking stand
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