Light/Shadow (Huckinger See, Part 3)

Yesterday I went to the Huckinger See again... I just can't resist it. The silence and solitude this place provides is simply wonderful. Again I did not meet a single person and strolled around for about 2 hours. I can certainly focus my mind best and be open to new images when I'm alone. The three pools have lost some water, its quite visible that it is less than last time - perhaps all the fresh green sucked it up. :-)

I added 6 new photos to the existing web album. Its partly similar scenes as the photos that already are in the album (the first one of the new photos, "Lightstripes", fills a missing gap, it shows the third of the three pools for the first time), I thought it would be nice to document the progress of nature and spring (problem is: my viewpoints are slowly but steadily overgrowing with new reed and blackberry bushes).


Light/Shadow

But if I had to pick one single photo as my personal favorite, it would be the above black & white image. I saw this scenery and immediately noticed how the frame is subdivided into 4 parts: lights/shadow and the same in the reflection of the pool. And the same moment I thought "black & white". Since Daniele&Martina noted that some of my black & white images lack real black and real white and are more like greyscale images I tweaked the contrast a lot (and I really like the result), but other than that, no major post processing has been applied.

What else?

I read a nice article about "overcooking" images written by TOP editor Mike Johnston, and I confess I am guilty. While I do not strive to just plainly show reality and think that it is necessary to sometimes amplify certain features in order to transport the impression (as I wrote in my lengthy post about post processing already) I tried to be more modest in my post processing edits, the third batch of the Huckinger See photos really has just some contrast and saturation corrections.

And then there's this book called "Developing vision and style" which I just finished... well... I can't really say reading, but more like, browsing. For the most part, people describe their definitions of the words "vision" and "style", and well... its just not for me. The photos that accompany the babbling are very nice (of course). There's always been an argument that the camera doesn't matter, I first read it on the pages of Ken Rockwell, but more recently also in a nice comparison on The Luminous Landscape (a Canon G10 vs a medium format digital back).

At the end of the above mentioned book is a list of the properties of the photos being shown. Of course there's all sorts of analogue gear listed (some more exotic too, like a 6x17 panoramic camera), lots of full frame Canon 5D's... but also a Canon Powershot compact camera, and my good old entry level Nikon D70s (with the 18-70mm kit lens), and a Nikon D200 with the 18-200VR lens - yes, the very lens that is often considered as being "unacceptable" on anything more than a 6mpx body - by hobby photographers that want to be experts... (which reminds me that I should test the 18-200VR vs the 70-300VR in a real world environment - just out of curiosity).

Of course, the size of the prints in the book is nothing more than about 20x30cm at most, but nevertheless... its absolutely impossible to say which photo was taken with which gear, and there's no visible quality difference between the photos taken with an analogue medium format camera, and those taken with a 6mpx DSLR or the compact camera. In fact, one photo showed some moss on rocks, and the moss was so very green that I thought "this must be taken on Velvia film" when I first looked at it (because of the green hue) - and its the photo that was taken with the Powershot compact camera... go figure.