Yesterday I bought a book that I wanted to get since several months: Herbarium Amoris by the Swedish photographer Edvard Koinberg.
Since I saw his photos in an exhibition here in Schleswig I love his work. This book is showing many more of his excellent work than the exhibition could. He is following the annual circle of plants, as presented by Carl Linnaeus, the famous Swedish natural scientist.
Koinbergs portraits of flowers are really showing the beauty of even the smallest and most ordinary plants. He is not only showing them in full beauty, but also wilted plants or newly born leafs.
Luckily, a book store in Husum has the book in offer these weeks, for 30 Euros it is a must-get! I didn’t watch it all yet, but what I saw so far is great.
And again, Koinberg made me experiment with flowers and light. Subject this time: A dandelion, picked just in front of the building. It had already lost most of it’s seeds.
The photo on the top is taken with nothing but the light of the grey sunday coming through the window (from left behind the camera). I used a tripod, as I usually do when taking close-up photos to be able to compose the photo as I wish and set the sharpness where it has to be.
The second photo (below) was taken with my “poor man’s macro-lens” – the 50mm manual lens attached backwards (front-to front) to the 18-55 zoom lens. The light came from my Metz flash, shot through my new white umbrella. it came from the same direction as the daylight. But the bright flash allowed me to use a shorter shutter speed (1/90 of a second), which seemed safer for me at this close distance.
(I finally decided to get a new camera. It is getting too bothering to work with the broken Pentax K100D, which I still like a lot otherwise. But the total absence of an exposure meter makes it hard to react quickly to new situations sometimes. It’s time to move on. I bought a used K20D from a member of the German digitalfotonetz forum, which hopefully will arrive before our trip to the etsy meetup in Hamburg next thursday.)
