last week me and four buddies started our little road trip to berlin for the re:publica web conference. I was looking forward to this out of several reasons. First of all meeting some good and fun people, being in Berlin, always great fun as it is one of the two most fantastic cities in Germany and last but not least a good conference.

I was at the re:publica back in 2010 and somehow had mixed feelings, but going on a trip like this with some nice people was the main objective here so I wasn’t really worried. And I enjoyed the conference. The re:publica team changed the venue this year which made a hell of a difference. A lot of work went in there and it was well worth it. I didn’t take a crazy lot of pictures this time, but still got a nice bunch together.

So all in all it was a fun, successful and enjoyable trip.

I also shot a few Brenizers and this little puppy below, freehand of course and didn’t really time it properly so I had someone run with me panning, but hey, at least it gives you a nice look of the center of the venue where every one met up inside. and make sure to click on it to look at it in Flickr for its whole 30000 (it was 48000, but Flickr doesn’t handle sizes that big) pixel beauty! or just clicks here.

Well that first one on top for sure is not Fredau, as you might have guessed. My buddy Ben joined us on that shoot to help out a little and shoot himself and as I often do I use other people than the model to dial in the strobes and so on, at least approximately.

About one year after my first shoot with Fredau she contact me again as she was coming to the Cologne area. This was a few weeks ago now, and I have been super busy and fell behind with the editing, but here we go with the first part now finally. My buddy Luca showed me the Peter Hurley DVD when he was visiting and I had to try that specific four lights, square shaped setup out and I love it. I used four small Elinchrom strip lights, set up in a square and pointed towards Fredau. I put one light to the background, but didn’t go for the complete white look.

Oh and there is as most of the time, no retouching involved.

I love the outcome and the setup. I will for sure use this more often from now on.

I need to get packing for my Berlin trip, so I wish you a great week and take care,

Teymur.

I have been pondering this for quite a long time now.

Should I post good stories from around the web, other peoples work and interesting external links here on the Blog?

Of course all photography , videography and so on related…

Well… I decided on YES! You know freshen things up a little, bring some more and other inspiration to the Blog.

I twitter a lot of stuff and post things on my Facebook timeline, but those can a get a little cluttered with other stuff

also. One thing I am not 100 percent sure about is how often “The missing Link” will be published, once a week for

example, every time there is a good story and so on, but I guess I will figure it out along the way. Also posting at least

one new photo by me along the way. The shot above was taken near the Rhine and the Bike was luckily just all

alone standing there. I have no clue though what kinda bid that is though, so if you have a clue, let me know.

While we are at it… I am also thinking about killing my Facebook Fanpage, as those of you who have liked or visited it

know it’s not really filled with life. I feel stupid just connecting the blog directly to it and post only links, also posting what

I post on my regular Facebook profile and to be honest I am not having any good ideas of what to do with it. Especially

since you can subscribe to peoples Facebook profiles. Any ideas on this? I appreciate any kind of insight!

So lets get to the fun part.

The next two things I also talked about in my not photography related german language podcast “the Knutsens”

yesterday.

The first thing I want to show you is something fantastic I found on the Lomography Blog. The Pinhegg by Francesco Capponi.

A Pinhole-camera made out of an eggshell. Yip, I said eggshell. You can read about the whole process in the Blogpost over

at Lomography.

Let me say one thing… this is the COOLEST thing I have seen in years. Forget the bloody D4s and 5Dmk3s, megapixels and

all the other bullshit. This guy takes photos with an EGGSHELL!!! I still have a plan to build a little Filmlab in my studio to

develop my own black and white photos, but this Pinhegg… this I NEED to try out. I can’t wait to have my own egg prints.

It has something so strangely exciting and mysterious, scifi, but old school. Crude, but sophisticated. You get the idea, I

mean just look at these, this hits all the right nerves with me.

make sure to check also Francesco Capponi Website and Flickrstream!

Another story that got me smiling and blew my mind a little is what I found over at PetaPixel.

Filmmaker Casey Neistat of internet fame, until now mostly trough this video:

well… this is some crazy and funny stuff already. So now this guy gets hired by Nike to produce an ad for the new Nike FuelBand. Instead of doing what he

was hired to do, he spend all the money on a trip around the world for him and a buddy… well kinda. Here is what came out of it:

Hilarious and fantastic. over 3 million views on Youtube already. Think out of the box… makes sense as it seems.

And last but not least for you guys with a bit more time on your hands an inspiring talk by Aaron James Draplin of Field Notes fame, as part of the Creative

Mornings lecture series. Enjoy and have a great day.

Teymur.

Portland/CreativeMornings – Aaron James Draplin from CreativeMornings/Portland on Vimeo.

A long, long time ago…

funny how these things go. When I sold my Leica M9, I was very lucky that the guy who bought it is on the one hand a very nice guy and a huge photography enthusiast, but also was so kind put me in contact with a buddy of his, who is a great car enthusiast too. Mark is the owner of this fantastic car, the Caterham Super 7. He was so kind to bring it over to the studio and leave it here for a while.

As I knew I had quite some time to shoot the Caterham, I pushed the shoot to the most convenient time I could think of in the time-frame I had. Well… as it so often goes a lot of things came up and stuff happened so I ended up not having too much time to shoot. Luckly though Mark is such a kind guy that we already talked about taking the car outside as soon as the weather allows it. This is a good thing not only as I didn’t shoot as much as I wanted, but also as I don’t fit in the car to drive it to any location by myself. I know, I know.

For the technical side I shot it on my Nikon D3s still with various lenses and a maximum of two Elinchrom strobes with either strip lights or reflectors with grids.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this first taste of this wonderful car as I am preparing a great weekend at the Hockenheim racetrack here in Germany for a historic race event.

Take care,

Teymur.

as promised before the test, sample video of my Nikon D4s high ISO video.

very promising. I will certainly shoot more video soon and maybe even a comparison with the D3s and the D7000.

Take care,

Teymur.

D4 high ISO video test. – ISO 10000 to ISO 12800. from Teymur on Vimeo.

Just a tiny post, as I wanted to add some high ISO photos without any noise reduction. not in camera, lightroom or anything else, this is noise wise straight out of the camera. obviously I did a raw conversion, but thats it.

We went for a few drinks and we all shot some photos again with the D4. and it was really dark in those two bars. its again and again wonderful to see the performance these cameras are showing!

oh and I will post a short video from last night also, shot at ISO 12800 and ISO 10000.

enjoy,

Teymur.

Here we go with another and most probably last “preview” post of D4 photos.

This time playing with high(er) ISO numbers, ranging form 800 to 12800. I have to say I used Lightroom 4s Noise reduction a little though, but its more of a general feeling thing I wanted to show.

We went out for a little food and some drinks with some friends, had a lot of fun and also the photos were shot by all of us somehow as the camera was pass around a little.

enjoy and happy easter!

Teymur.

Say hi to Estrella!

As so often before Estrella and I had planned for quite some time to shoot together and as a free time-slot came up we planned a little portrait session.

It was around Carnival time in Germany so Estrella suggested she would show up in one of her costumes… well… look for your selves, a fantastic idea.

As she did her own make up on this we documented the process a bit. From Estrella to Black Swan.

And I can’t believe I still haven’t watched the movie…

Have a great day,

Teymur!

Just as so much is going at once right now I am not posting a lot, so this is partly to fill in a little, but also to show you a little more what comes out of this wonderful new camera of mine. In the building my studio is in we had a water pipe burst last week, which caused quite some havoc. not too much in my studio, but still enough to make my life a little harder… besides some other stuff my brand new D4 battery charger got killed. So far, so bad… it got worse though as I tried buying a charger for the D4 last week… you couldn’t find one. Nikons professional service NPS here in Germany stepped in and helped out by lending me one over the weekend so I could get my batteries charged for a job on monday. I had to take it back on tuesday though. When I got there I was hoping NPS would and could help me out getting a charger, but the answer was that they hadn’t any and no one even in sales had one or could help me out. This really pissed me off a little. I paid 6k for a cam, which is in the pro section, and they can’t supply basics like a charger quick enough. lucky enough though some shops were getting chargers in by now and thanks again for all the help some of you guys offered and all the tips.

So it worked all out now, but still kind of a strange experience… ah well… enough talk for now and as soon as I have some more shots down with this puppy I do a more elaborate “review”.

Enjoy!

Last week was a fun week for gear lovin’ geeks!

first it was the D4, the the new iPad, then the D4 again… wait what?! well some of you might have followed the little “incident” with the first D4 I got, which was the first my dealer got.

It somehow was dead on arrival. I picked it up in the afternoon and got to unbox it in the evening. after charging the battery nothing really happened. it stayed off, no LCD activity or

anything. Well it was really disappointing and I returned it the other morning to the shock of my camera store, but I was lucky and they were quick to organize me another one with just

one day of wait.

So this is no review, I didn’t have enough time to shoot with it, but I got a good idea about some major points for me. As more and more people are taking their deliveries of the D4 the

diverse reports are pouring in and some very prominent sites were baiting with stupid comparisons and even more stupid revelations and findings. Ok I get it, you want more visitors.

bla bla…

It is a strange trend though that nowadays we tend to over expect and fantasize about new products… the iPhone 4s, the new iPad, the Nikon D4, the Nikon D800, the Canon 5DMKIII

and so on. There are more speculations about not released products than ever before. At least I feel that way. I digress. the Nikon D4 is so far nothing short of a fantastic camera and

I love it. It doesn’t look very different, but it’s all in the details. One of the most important changes, for me at least is the change in the grip and shutter button area. They have change its

ergonomics drastically, to the better, for my hand at least. It is much grippier and smoother at the same time. The extra cursors on the back somehow have not affected my use of the

camera so far, but as I said I didn’t have a lot of time to tweak all the settings to my personal taste yet. One very fantastic thing are the illuminated back buttons. SOOOO GOOOOOOOD!

Anyway, the XQD card feels like a miniature PC-Card and somehow like a cheap excuse to charge more money for the same amount of memory. My real problem with the XQD at the

moment though is, that there is only one slot and one CF card slot. I still don’t understand and don’t like the mixing of two card type slots. The Nikon D3 was the first camera, to my

knowledge, that had the dual card slots. and what a fantastic idea and feature. Would not want to miss that ever again on a camera, but mixing two formats just goes on my nerves as

at the moment I need two different card readers until a proper and fast combo card reader comes out. Also, the card reader that Nikon kindly packs with the D4, is USB 3.0 which I can’t

use properly on my macs, “yet”, and they don’t have a firewire port. Besides that it seems the XQD could be a nice robust little bugger. I also hope Nikon will somehow, magically, offer

a transformation kit or so to change the CF card port into a second XQD port. really hope that works…

Besides all this the autofocus seems to have improved significantly and I really like the photos that come out of the D4 so far. And of course, WHY NOT?! The Higher ISO performance

is as stunning as I would have thought and as always I will not go into scientific or nerdy comparison battles, that is for more SEO orientated sites to do. Below you will find some random

and simple shots I took on the first day. A lot more shots will follow of course and also more infos and tales of my experience with the D4, so enjoy the photos and be on the look out for

everything that follows, I promise you it won’t get boring. you know the least you can expect are some fast cars and beautiful women…

Just did a quick RAW conversion on them. Have a good one!

Teymur.

We are at the end of this little journey, I hope you enjoyed it so far and will keep enjoying it.

With some more time on my hand in a few weeks or so I will review all the other photos I have again and see what I might still edit or maybe even re-edit from this vacation.

Also I am thinking of preparing prints for sale of some of the photos, so if you have a favorite please let me know, it makes my own decision process easier

Take care and enjoy the rest of your week.

Teymur.

oh and for the rest of the Hawaii posts just follow the link to the collected posts.

A little too busy for more text and I am very sorry about that, but I will make up for it with these photos.

And jip… its a weird time of day to post for me

have a great day and enjoy!

Teymur.

There is no need to stop now!

Not much to say besides, enjoy!

Oh and have a great day!

Teymur.

Here we go with the second batch of photos.

I got the comment that the typical beach photos and so on were missing and its true, there will be a few coming up for sure, but the majority of photos will be different.

There are a few reasons for that… first of all I am not “that” guy. shooting a beautiful beach scene takes either a very remote location or a lot of time and maybe some stitching and so on and being on a family vacation I was not going to go down that road. The other point is that Oahu and Hawaii in general has so much more to offer. It all of course comes down to taste, so I hope you will enjoy these either way.

It was our second time on Oahu and as much as I enjoyed it I would choose a different Island, if we ever get back to Hawaii… just to see the whole range of wonderfulness these amazing Islands offer.

Ok ok enough talking for today… enjoy and have a great week!

Teymur.

FInally I got around to finish my photos of our Hawaii vacation. I will split it up a little, so make sure to look out for the coming posts too.

So my girlfriend, my mom and I decided to fly to Oahu once more. My mom had never been to Hawaii and we had such an amazing time last time that we really wanted to go back.

And again Oahu didn’t let us down. I just love the island and the people. sure especially Honolulu and Waikiki are very touristy, but as soon as you get away a little it’ even more mind blowing.

Given the fact my mom was with us we didn’t go on any longer hikes and all, but c’mon with 75 years old she still thinks, as I do, that eating a burger with fork and knife is for whussies! and I love the fact she insists on listening to Metallica and Volbeat while we are driving around! Rock on Mom!

Ok, enough of that, I am in a little hurry anyway, so I’ll leave you with the first batch of photo, enjoy and have a great day!

Teymur.

There is this thing in Germany called Karneval and it has nothing to do with what americans for example know as a carnival, its more a mix of Halloween, St.Paddys Day, Oktoberfest  and I don’t know, maybe Independence day and it goes on for a whole week. Cologne is the best place to experience the whole thing and I have kept away from it for a few years now

I know, I know, but after so many years of growing up and living in Cologne I grew tired of it a little, but wanted at least to go out on one day of Karneval and shoot a few frames. So kinda spontaneous asked around and we ended up being a photo walk of two. My buddy Ben, who’s photos of today you can find on his photoblog, met up just went for a quick stroll and I think you can agree that there is no reason to push something too hard, so we took it really easy today. walked a round a bit, check out the beginning of the parade, had some good food, talked and went home… great day for sure.

Power Rangers FTW!

so enjoy and have a good week!

Teymur.

Long time no see my friends! Sorry for my absence on the blog, but hey, I am back!

Back in the day when I started to get back into photography more and more I was shooting everything that got in front of my Sony DSC-F828. What a wonderful camera it was. A bridge-camera as the kids call it today. Anyway the key part of me wanting to improve more and more was when I started shooting some of the action figures, movie collectibles and toys. The above photo was shot 3 days ago in my studio as I bought the Goldorak aka Goldrake aka UFO Grendizer Figure. I had one already, which is the header of my Facebook timeline, but that is only about 8 cm (3,1 inch.) and this beauty is a bit over 30 cm (12 inch.).

I shot it with two strip lights on each side of the figure and added a silver reflector from the front.

Below you have the humble beginnings of my toy photos and what then led to my troopies365 project. I will do a separate tropes365 post very soon too were I talk about the whole project and the upcoming book, which I am very excited about!

So enjoy and let me know what you think and even more importantly what fueled your photo-lust!

Oh noooooooo!

The new year starts with a goodbye! a wonderful one, but still a goodbye.

I changed the lighting a little bit on these and also the post processing, Fredau took a bit more intense stance and viola…

I really hope you all arrived well in 2012 and that we will keep in touch well. As always love to hear from you guys!

Take care,

Teymur.

oh dear,

it over already! what a ride, eh?!

but we are going out with a bang as they say. not only do I have some very sweet studio photos of the amazing 458 Italia, but also the Video we taped on one of the days that weekend.

Well when I say we, I mean my buddies from the “Two Dudes” and Holger, as I was only driving the car.

Lets start with the photos though.

After the studio shoot with the Nissan GTR, which was my first car studio shooting, I learned a lot and one of the must important things was that for the classic studio shot you need a large, clean, white surface without any texture so I thought I had planned ahead well with getting a 3,60m x 3,60m sail and frame beforehand for that. Well it unfortunately it wasn’t enough. Not enough for what you might probably as… what you want for those classic photos is a clean white reflection on the car, that emphasis the cars lines and form. So when the sail or soft box or whatever you use is to small you get a lot of unwanted reflections. I was for example fighting a lot with the aluminum frame of the sail this time.

We got it under control, but it certainly wasn’t the perfect solution yet. I found an amazing huge soft box made by Chimera just for this purpose, but it is about 10.000 dollars. So I need improvise for the next shoot, but if you know anyone at Chimera that could organize a testshoot or loaner with this beast I would be very very thankful.

Enjoy these and let me know what you think!

and now here we go with the the very cool video the guys produced, I think we also learned a lot while filming this, but a very cool video for our first time!

for the HD Version head over to their Vimeo channel though!

and as this adventure is over I want to thank everyone involved a lot for all the help and especially to my friends at Maranello Motors for being so generous and kind!

All the other 458 Italia posts can be found following THIS LINK!

Thank you and enjoy!

Teymur.

A shorter post on a bit earlier time than usual, but we are off to the airport for our vacation now, so excuse that please.

These shots are basically part of last weeks, but I didn’t want it to get too much so I split it up a little. I am sure you will enjoy these as much!

Have a great week and talk to you later!

Teymur.

this part I had so planned out in my head and never tested before.

I wanted a beautiful and elegant model in a moody scene with the car, but not the cheap car magazine bikini type thing. I am pretty sure I pulled that part off to the extend that is not a cheap bikini/car shoot… (thought don’t get me wrong, those can be done well also), but I ran into a few problems that evening. first of all I miscalculated the timing a bit and I was loosing light faster than I thought, than I could have used two assistants to shuffle around lights and so on.

I didn’t have those so I needed to improvise and then save the rest in editing, which is something I normally do not like too much, at least not the saving part.

I wanted to shoot with Iris for quite some time now and finally got the chance, so here is where I am even more disappointed that I didn’t get exactly the photos I wanted. Iris was a trooper in the cold weather she didn’t complain, posed wonderfully and I really need to shoot with her again, first because she is great and second a little for my ego to show that I can do better

I certainly don’t think the photos are a catastrophe, but not at the level I wanted them. lighting the model and the car properly with two lights only is a challenge and as I said, I really want to give it another go one day. For now enjoy these and let me know what you think about them!

then we have the second part of this experimental stage. here we shot the whole scene with only one light, several frames and my assistant moved around the strobe from frame to frame, afterwards in post I then merged them together. I am happier with these, but here also is room for improvement. not bad for a first try though. here also I am looking forward to what you think.

hope you enjoy ed these and have a great day!

Teymur.

We are getting closer to the end and christmas is only a few days away. This set helps us through the cold times I hope with the wonderful sensuality and beauty.

Enjoy and let them maybe inspire you a little to create.

Teymur.

Vrooom!

As I said int he previous post this was the very first time of shooting a moving car out of a moving car.

I could have used a rig and maybe will give it a try at some point too, but this choice seemed to be a bit more organic and also more versatile.

I was sitting in the back of my trusty Landy which has the great advantage that the back hatch is split half half, so I can open the upper halt only and still be sitting safe in my car without the fear of falling out.

It still wasn’t very comfortable, but hey it’s for the art, right?

This is something you definitely need some practice in, same as the panning in motorsports photography for example.

Enough words, let the pictures speak for themselves.

and I know these are all very similar photos and normally I wouldn’t post them all together, but this is the first time for these kind of shots and each has a bit different dynamic and detail.

I really hope you enjoyed these as much as I do and have a wonderful day!

Teymur.

I really never had the problem of not being able to sort shots out this badly, but I really think they are all worth it.

Still proud of them and the collaboration with Fredau was really a joy.

My goal for next year certainly is to shoot a lot more than this year. Somehow I feel I did not shoot a lot for myself this year, I might be wrong though

So go ahead and enjoy these.

A great week for you all,

Teymur.