These are the results of a photoshoot with actress Becca back in September last year. We shot in Becca’s flat with a very simple setup - one flashhead with a softbox (camera right) and a reflector.

The lovely make-up is Haleigh Maskall’s work. You can find out more about Becca on her website and see all images from the session here.

The last two weeks in November I spent traveling through the Western regions of Cuba. We flew into Havana, stayed there for four nights and explored various parts of the city.

Then we went on to Viñales in the Pinar del Rio region where we stayed 3 nights. We made a trip to the beautiful Cayo Levisa and hiked through the Valle de Viñales. The next stage of our trip took us to colonial Trinidad in the Sancti Spiritus region. We liked our casa particular here so much that we eventually ended up staying for five nights.

Trinidad itself is a world heritage site and well worth a visit but we also spent a couple of days relaxing on nearby Playa Ancon and also to Cienfuegos, another colonial town, for one day. At the end of the trip we headed back to Havana and visited the Playas del Este before we took our flight back to the UK. The map below shows our route:

Accommodation wise we stayed in so-called casa particulares which can probably described as the Cuban equivalent to a bed and breakfast. These are private homes whose owners rent out one or more rooms to tourists.

They’re not the Ritz but they are clean and perfectly alright plus you also get the chance to speak to the locals - something that’s not easy when staying in a hotel. Transport wise we had first contemplated hiring a car but then, after witnessing cuban traffic first hand and checking the rates at some car hire agencies, decided to try the buses first.

This turned out to to be a good move, the long distance buses (the ones that can be used by tourists) are European standard and quite cheap. If they don’t turn up for some reason (happened to us once) it’s usually easy to organize a few fellow travelers and share a taxi at a reasonable rate, even for longer distances. Taxis also take you everywhere where the buses don’t go, so getting around without your own wheels is not a problem at all.

This was not a photographic trip by any means but obviously I would not go on the road without a camera in my bag. We travelled with a backpack and therefore low weight and compact dimensions were high up on the priority list. I grabbed the smallest DSLR I could find in the office and stuck a matching 18-105 lens on it. All images of the trip were taken with this combo in RAW format and later processed in Adobe Camera RAW, you can find them here.

It’s one of these things. I lived for about nine years only 45 minutes drive from there and did not even know the place existed. However, moving abroad has somehow made me more sensitive towards all things cultural and historic. As a consequence, when I nowadays go home to visit my family, I always try to visit as many places and see as many things in the region as possible.

This time I went to see the palatial gardens in Schwetzingen and was stunned by their sheer size and beauty, I would never have expected something like this in my backyard. In there you’ll find little temples, lakes, mazes, water features and all sorts of things. Despite all these versaille-like characteristics, even in summer, the place is almost deserted on a weekday which makes it the perfect place to relax and take some pictures. The weather was brilliant, blue sky with some clouds and of course I had taken a camera with me. Unfortunately I had forgotten my circular polarizer though…

Anyway, If you’re ever in the area I can strongly recommend a visit to the park. You can find my set of photographs on flickr.

I had promised the guys to take some pictures but unfortunately the light turned out to be quite tricky, all red and yellow. Whatever camera you shoot with, its white balance won’t be able to cope with these conditions and neither did mine. The out-of-camera results weren’t very nice and not even recoverable in RAW conversion. So I decided to convert the images to black and white.

I used the Channel Mixer in CS3 (with the monochrome box ticked) and then did some contrast fine tuning with Levels. You can check the results out here.

If you don’t have a clue what I am talking about and would be much more interested in the music check out the Laetoli Steps myspace where you can listen to a couple of their tracks.

Well, this is my second post and this time I have even managed to include a photograph. I am hoping to install the K2 theme plugin in the next couple of days or so and then ‘customise’ the design a little…let’s see how it goes…

]]> http://www.larsrehm.de/blog/?feed=rss2&p=4 http://www.larsrehm.de/blog/?p=3 http://www.larsrehm.de/blog/?p=3#comments Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:29:05 +0000 admin http://www.larsrehm.de/blog/?p=3 …and I am afraid it won’t be a very exciting one…pretty much a test exercise. So I have finally managed to sort out a webspace with an SQL database and even installed wordpress on it. Hopefully there will be opportunities (and time) to publish an article here and there and I would be even more delighted if somebody actually read the stuff…but you never know…maybe somebody will.

In any case, I reckon most future contributions on here will have some relation to photography, walking, cycling, London or a combination of two or more of these. I have until now occasionally put messages up on my myspace blog but myspace is just too 2007 and therefore from now on it won’t be updated. If you want to see it anyway, you can find it here.

That’s it for now, the next task will be to change the appearance of this wordpress blog. Do they have skins or themes or something that you can download? Well, I’ll start my research right now, so this is where my first post has to end. Bye for now.