Life

Our son is moving to another house and we had some stuff stored at his old place, a good opportunity to assist him a bit in getting things organised. As you can see, he appreciated us being there.

I have been making photographs of my life and everyone and everything associated with it for as long as I have a camera. I photograph everything that I am remotely passionate about so photographing life is unavoidable for me.
That means that my relatives are very much used to being photographed by me and will not act unnatural when confronted with a camera. When I am there so is the camera, it's as simple as that.

The photograph above is the last one of the series of pictures below. 

Mother and sun were removing a desk. 

The window on the left provided a good primary light source with the walls reflecting enough light to fill the shadows. 

The photographs I made were ok, but a real good one was not there yet. 
Picture #1 is not bad and could be used.
#2 does not show what is actually happening.
#3 is a bit messy and clustered. 
#4 is not bad, gives a good overall picture, shows them both at work and gives the observer an idea about the surroundings. The composition is not ideal though.

You have to try, keep shooting to see what works. 'Work the subject' as it is called.

Then they started to hug. This was of course not foreseen, I would have missed it if I would not have been working on the sequence, it takes some time to get your camera ready and to be in position. 

#5 is not bad, but Veronica is not visible. 
#6 is a really good one. I never mind when a head is partially cut off in the frame and the moment is good. When looking at an enlarged version you will see that Sean is out of focus. It would still be a good photograph, but #7 is the better one. 

Here is #6 in Black and White. You can click on it to see a bigger version.

All photographs were taken with the digital Leica and the 2.0/35mm Summicron, ISO 800, 1/60s and f 4.0. I might have chosen ISO 1600 so I could use either 1/125s to freeze motion a little more or, probably better, f 5.6 to have more depth-of-field, but I am old school, used to ISO 400 films and ISO 800 is already pure luxury to me. The camera can handle ISO 1600 without a glitch though.

Below some more photographs I made that day. Some with the 50mm, some with the 35mm.

The last photograph has a bit of a history.
We lived at Sean's house for some months in 2016 and the church tower in the background  symbolises that period for me.

Therefore I wanted a photograph that showed both Sean, the tower and, if possible, the 'Sold' sign outside the window. It would tell a story.

The luminance range of the scene is very big. I did not measure it, but I knew that I needed to expose the photograph in such a way that the view through the window would not be blown out and be unrecognisable, otherwise I would miss an important part of the relation I wanted to show. I measured the light in the window just left of Sean's head, using the center-weighted light meter in the M10.

That would mean that the shadows might be underexposed. I decided to take the risk and see what would come out. The dynamic range of the M10 is pretty good and shadows can usually be recovered without much of a problem. ISO 1600, 1/60s, f 5.6, 2.0/35mm Summicron.

Below the file as it was produced by the camera.

Dark shadows as expected, but easily recovered using post-production software.

I decided  to leave the shadows dark, just adding enough detail to give some mass and proportion to the body and the face. I also highlighted the face a little bit. That was all, 10 minutes work with Lightroom, Photoshop and Silver Efex Pro 2.