Introducing Year of the Alpha – 365 Days of Sony Alpha

[sury]

Nice details Toni. Interesting choice of the motif. It is sort of iconoclastic to say the least.

Sury

[Kalainen]

Nice details Toni. Interesting choice of the motif. It is sort of iconoclastic to say the least.

Yeah, it's interesting to guess the motifs of Simberg - he very seldom explained any of his work. Nevertheless, this sort of 'off-the-beaten-path' frescos makes it more interesting than most of the other churches..

-Toni

--
Toni Ahvenainen (1976)
Year of the Alpha - 52 Weeks of Sony Alpha Photography: http://www.yearofthealpha.com
Flickr-account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/109262328@N06/

[Kalainen]

Season of Touit - Picture 7
Week 36, Wednesday - Where's home?
"Ants are true adventurers that can get anywhere and it's a little wonder that they don't get lost. To see world from their scale is something that fascinates my imagination in a very child-like way. I'm surprised to see that there is so little anthropomorphism, that is – personification by giving human attributes and characteristics to animals and such – in macro photography. Ants would make a great subject as they have been anthropomorphized so much by human culture in general. Everyone knows ant colony as an image of mass society, but it is as justified to see them [...]"

Read full post at my blog: http://www.yearofthealpha.com

Toni

--
Toni Ahvenainen (1976)
Year of the Alpha - 52 Weeks of Sony Alpha Photography: http://www.yearofthealpha.com
Flickr-account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/109262328@N06/

[Birma]

I like the ant's eye view, Toni . The a black ant and white background work really well. Great detail in the ant.

[Kalainen]

I like the ant's eye view, Toni . The a black ant and white background work really well. Great detail in the ant.

Thanks Birma! As soon as I imagined the shot in my mind I knew the black and white would work well. This one was fun to build, but getting ant in the right place and stay there were much more difficult. It took my couple of hours to get this done..

-Toni

--
Toni Ahvenainen (1976)
Year of the Alpha - 52 Weeks of Sony Alpha Photography: http://www.yearofthealpha.com
Flickr-account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/109262328@N06/

[Kalainen]

Season of Touit - Picture 8
Week 36, Saturday - The Landscape mode
"Ultra wide-angle lenses are often considered to be special lenses for special purposes, especially a lens as wide as the Touit 2.8/12. Having used the lens for couple of weeks now, I've really grown to like the focal length it offers (but not mastered though) and I think the special label is somewhat misleading. There are at least two simple ways of using it in any photography. Firstly, one can use the wide angle to cover as much as possible of the entire view seen by the eye. In my mind this is the 'landscape mode' and the Touit 2.8/12, of course, works great here. [...]"

Read full post at my blog: [urlhttp://www.yearofthealpha.com/?offset=14096878 ... inate=true]http://www.yearofthealpha.com[/url]

Toni

--
Toni Ahvenainen (1976)
Year of the Alpha - 52 Weeks of Sony Alpha Photography: http://www.yearofthealpha.com
Flickr-account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/109262328@N06/

[Kalainen]

Season of Touit - Picture 9
Week 37, Wednesday - Poor little daisy
"It seems that I have a soft spot for withered and desiccated flowers. While I'm certainly not a florist, I like to watch how they transform when they wither and how their beauty takes a permanent form through this process. To get perfect desiccated flowers you need to make sure you cruelly remove their water at the right point before they start to decompose and keep them in relatively dry air. Because of life, sometimes one needs to fix them in order for them to survive longer; like this particular daisy for which I had to put sticking plaster because of broken stem. It looked a kind of poor and I thought it would make perfect candidate for my first experience of focus stacking. [...]"

Read full post at my blog: http://www.yearofthealpha.com

Toni

--
Toni Ahvenainen (1976)
Year of the Alpha - 52 Weeks of Sony Alpha Photography: http://www.yearofthealpha.com
Flickr-account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/109262328@N06/

[sury]

Toni,
Looks a tad over sharpened to me. It could very well be my display.
Interesting subject though not very common. Nice capture.

Sury

[Kalainen]

Toni,
Looks a tad over sharpened to me. It could very well be my display.

It's the Flickr default sharpening (which you cannot, of course, turn off). Sometimes it irritates me, but not enough that I would load different version of the picture to Flickr. I've tried to streamline my update process as much as possible, but it still takes a bit too much time to drop new images into various forums..

Interesting subject though not very common. Nice capture.

Thanks!!

-Toni

--
Toni Ahvenainen (1976)
Year of the Alpha - 52 Weeks of Sony Alpha Photography: http://www.yearofthealpha.com
Flickr-account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/109262328@N06/

[bakubo]

I just now went back a few pages to see some of your photos. The ones of the little girl in water and the one of her in the tree are my favorites. Very nice!

[Marcell Nikolausz]

Hi Toni,

Nice work. I really started to follow your blog recently, especially because of your close-ups and macros. Nice work with the Zeiss Touit 2.8/50. I still have mixed feeling about this lens. No question, that the picture quality is perfect, but the price for this perfection is too high for me. Medium priced or even cheap macros can make wonderful job, but I follow your blog, maybe you can convince me that there is some extra in Zeiss worth to pay. (In addition to the fact that there is no real alternative as native AF lens.)

Cheers

Marcell

[Kalainen]

I just now went back a few pages to see some of your photos. The ones of the little girl in water and the one of her in the tree are my favorites. Very nice!

Thanks for the kind words, Henry! That girl is my sweet daughter Aura, now 2-years old. If you know about my one year photography project then you also know that I have divided the year into five seasons. Photographing Aura's summer was my third one and the most precious one as well. Now I'm exploring couple of Zeiss lenses..

To get better view of the photography I've done within this project see my Flickr-account: https://www.flickr.com/photos/109262328@N06/. That's defineatly easier way to see all of them together..

-Toni

--
Toni Ahvenainen (1976)
Year of the Alpha - 52 Weeks of Sony Alpha Photography: http://www.yearofthealpha.com
Flickr-account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/109262328@N06/

[Kalainen]

Hi Toni,
Nice work. I really started to follow your blog recently, especially because of your close-ups and macros. Nice work with the Zeiss Touit 2.8/50. I still have mixed feeling about this lens. No question, that the picture quality is perfect, but the price for this perfection is too high for me. Medium priced or even cheap macros can make wonderful job, but I follow your blog, maybe you can convince me that there is some extra in Zeiss worth to pay. (In addition to the fact that there is no real alternative as native AF lens.)

Hi Marcell! I'm very glad to hear that someone is following this season particulary because of Zeiss. It feels that I'm reaching the right audience.

As for the Zeiss, it really is a nice lens - but I also very much understand your concern about the price (in real life it would be out of my reich). In coming posts I will tell about the image quality in more detail and after that I will try to contemplate particulary about this 'extra' what Zeiss brings to table. However, I don't want to see myself a person who will try to convince others to buy Zeiss - I'm not a marketing guy. If possible, I will share my Zeiss experience in detail and everyone will have to decide what it worth on their own. That way it's a fair game.

Do you have some special application/need for the macrolens or is it just for fun/hobby? If I know your needs better, I might be able to raise some points which might make it easier for you to determine if the Touit 2.8/50M fits for you.

-Toni

--
Toni Ahvenainen (1976)
Year of the Alpha - 52 Weeks of Sony Alpha Photography: http://www.yearofthealpha.com
Flickr-account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/109262328@N06/

[Kalainen]

Season of Touit - Picture 10
Week 36, Saturday - The Obsession with Sharpness
"As far as I can tell photographers are pretty obsessed with the sharpness, but I can surely relate to this feeling myself as well. Looking at the picture and seeing all the small details captured in a moment of split second is just fascinating. This sort of obsession with sharpness is profound with high resolution cameras, because one can zoom in and see even more details. No wonder why 'is it sharp?' or 'how sharp it is?' is number one topic in many photography forums. Like many other Sony Alpha users (especially those coming from the Nex legacy), my first experience regarding sharpness happened with the Sony E-mount kit lens (SEL1855). [...]"

Read full post at my blog: http://www.yearofthealpha.com

Toni

--
Toni Ahvenainen (1976)
Year of the Alpha - 52 Weeks of Sony Alpha Photography: http://www.yearofthealpha.com
Flickr-account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/109262328@N06/

[sury]

Out of this world, Toni.

Sury