Huckinger See once more

The small pools of the Huckinger See are one of my favorite spots, I've been there many times (like here, and here and in yesterdays post of course) because of its solitude, stillness, and wonderful reflections on the water.


Huckinger See (the middle one of the three pools)

While carrying the camera with the tripod I killed my cable release - sheared off the plug that goes into the camera body. :-/ Glad that I didn't buy the super-expensive original Nikon piece but a cheapo simple plastic gadget for 15€.

Using a cable release really makes sense on the tripod for maximum sharpness. I switched to timer release and automatic mirror pre-release to reduce vibrations, but at certain exposure times it shows nevertheless (1/2s was critical with the 70-300VR for example - sharpness was not as good as it could be - its not really a problem but in the 100% view a slight blurriness is evident). It would have been best to use manual mirror pre-release and wait a safe 3 or 4 seconds before releasing the shutter.

Music for the Moment (mftm?): Ishq - "Timelapse in Mercury"

Abstract Reflections

Saturday started with sunshine and mild temperatures for a change (don't worry, the rain is back as I write this) - I went for a spring stroll with the dog and the camera to a set of lonely pools in the forest in Austria, the Huckinger See - well, to call it "See", lake in english, is a bit bold perhaps, its really three pools with brown moory water (that is not deeper than 80cm I'd say), some mallards - and absolutely lovely reflections and colors in the silent waters.

When the wind that brought fresh rain clouds (they've just been away for half a day to fill up) came up in the afternoon it moved the water a little bit, and the reflections of the sunlit tree branches with their sparse buds got a really abstract quality of which I created a small sequence:


Abstract Reflection I


Abstract Reflection II


Abstract Reflection III

These three shots were taken with the 70-300VR handheld. That lens has easily become my favorite by now, the long tele range really helps for abstracts and isolating subjects.

Weitsee Reflection - printed

I ordered a large format print of a photo again, and it arrived here today. I ordered from the online shop of "seen.by" - their selection policy may be questionable (I always wonder what kind of editors select "art" and by which criteria:-P), but the prints they offer sounded interesting enough to try it (don't get me wrong, there are some real gems on that site, its just that I'm like "WTF?!" about a large number of photos they show in their "select" section - which contains what they consider "best of the best" ...well, taste is a very personal thing, isn't it?).

Anyway. I picked a rather old photo - well, old at least for me since I've come quite a long way regarding photography from summer 2007 on when this photo was originally taken:


Weitsee Reflection • Summer 2007, Nikon D70s, ISO400, 1/13s freehand

There were two reasons to pick this photo: 1. its still one of my favorites (part of my renewed "Landscapes & Scenery" album) and somehow defines my personal "style" (more on that below) and 2. its suffers from a certain (though small) amount of camera shake.

"WTF?" you might ask considering reason #2 - well, I wanted to see check something that I've read on my favorite blog, The Online Photographer - the editor mentioned a while ago that he simply ignores a certain amount of camera shake and simply prints the photo anyway (but maybe not very large, I can't remember, and I can't find the post again). You may call me insane to spend about 120€ for a fine art print to verify this of course, but thats what I did.

What can I say? The dude is so right (once more). I ordered the print in 80x45cm (its a 16:9 crop; I think that translates to something like 33x18 inches in the developing countries that still haven't adopted the metric system;-) and when you're looking at it from a reasonable viewing distance (which is about one and a half or maybe two meters for me) there is absolutely NO problem with the sharpness. In other words, its simply not evident that I screwed up by simply not having my tripod with me (and oh yes, my attitude towards tripods has changed quite a lot since then!) and tried to compensate that by squeezing out one stop with ISO400 and shooting at the very limit of what VR can compensate (at least when you're worn out from a tour into the mountains and very very hungry;-).

And the print itself is simply AWESOME! I ordered the "plex" version (scroll down to the bottom of the page to switch it to english) - the finished print is glued on a platter, and on top of the print itself is a thin (about 2mm) transparent plexiglass platter - this gives an enormous depth to the photo, and a look that is equal to a glossy TFT screen (sidenote: which is completely unusable for serious photo editing, IMHO).

Whats nice about the print service of seen.by is that they check the resolution of your upload and only offer print sizes that will be of good quality (the above photo has a width of about 2900 pixels and its total resolution in the 16:9 crop is 5 megapixels).

And finally... (closing words, lot of text again, I know!) I mentioned "personal style" above, and I want to explain it. I consider this photo a "classic" of my personal style of landscape photos. First, it contains water and a reflection, and I really really like that.

And second (more importantly), it has a certain quality of "emptiness", an absence of a bold center point of interest... and I don't know, I simply like this kind of shots very very much (if you look at the Lanscapes & Scenery album, you will find more of that). I know that these are not the most catchy images and they certainly don't serve the cliche of "successful" landscape photos (at least thats what I think), but I think its more important to do what I really want to do - after all, its my hobby and I have to do what makes me calm and fills me with joy the most. Otherwise I'd need a different hobby. :-)

Music for the moment: Hecq - "Night Falls"

Waiting for Spring... again...

In March 2007 I was on track into the mountains already. Last year I created an album "Waiting for Spring" because the mild and nice weather offered some photo opportunities - but this year's weather is so cruel and cold even now that march is almost ending that there's simply not enough photos for another album. Global warming? Not in Southern Germany!

In the meantime I'm practicing handling the sheer weight of my "basic" equipment that I intend to take with me on my hiking tours - the new backpack is quite nice, I like it! Working a lot more with the tripod, too. The 70-300VR is a really nice lens when shot from the tripod. The wonderful sharpness can even be seen in this web-sized photo I think:


Old trees

The "basic" equipment consists of the S5pro body (of course, d'oh!), the 12-24mm wideangle zoom, the 70-300mm telezoom, the 28mm/2.8 and the 50mm/1.8D plus the polarizer & ND filter with step up rings, ND-grad filter with filter holder, retro adapter, cable release, tripod, extra battery, memory cards. I never wrote it down before, and looking at that list I realize: "Holy crap! I really can't leave anything away!"


Old leaf (with reversed 50mm/1.8D) - the upper right corner was bent down and is already outside the focal depth field... *ouch*

As you can see I practiced some more with the retro adapter - when I place the subject directly below the tripod and point the camera straight down I can use the geared center column of my tripod as a built-in macro focussing rail (moving the camera up & down). Not really professional, but I can focus quite precisely that way - if I CAN get the camera close enough, that is. :-)

Soundtrack for the moment - haha, those were the days! Gaaaawd, I was 15 years old then.

Macro fun with a retro adaptor

I bought a retro adapter for my 52mm lenses (I have two: the 50mm/1.8D and the 28mm/2.8), just for fun, just to try it out... its a small adaptor ring that is attached instead of a lens, and then the lens is attached to the retro adaptor ring - in reverse. In Germany, this thing is also called "Umkehrring" (reversal ring). You can focus just unbelievably close that way. So close that a 1 Euro coin or a pussy willow does not fit into the frame.

The major problem is the focussing itself: you can only find the focus point by moving the camera back and forth. Which probably requires a macro focussing rail like the one from Really Right Stuff. Which is - IMHO - darn expensive. :-)

The photos are not very shiny examples of composition :-) but I am simply impressed by the magnification that can be achieved with the reversed lens, so here we go:


Liverleaf flower (spring is here!) - reversed 50mm/1.8D lens, 1/4s at f/22 (the flower is about 2cm in diameter)

The liver leaf was particularly problematic because I couldn't get close enough with my tripod. I removed half of the middle column and was able to get within focus range that way. I think I spent 10 minutes or something crawling on the forest floor until I was within a range and position where both focus and light would work... :-}

Another problem is the metering - the camera simply says "f/0" because it has no aperture information. The light meter of the S5 works in manual mode, but of course I had to manually stop the lens down (and depth of field is really really thin being that close to the subject), which as a result turns the viewfinder veeeery dark. Manually stopping down means the lens must have an aperture ring, so only the older lenses can be used in a way that makes sense (that means in the Nikon world, the "G" type lenses don't make sense with a retro adaptor).


Pussy Willow - reversed 28mm/2.8 lens, 2,5s at f/22 (the whole thing is about 1cm in reality)

And then there's the shutter - at low ISO (which I prefer for quality reasons) the times are really long because you need to stop down the lens as much as possible for sufficient DOF. I used the self timer for these shots, but manual mirror prerelease (M'up) and a cable release would have been ideal.


1 Euro coin - reversed 28mm/2.8 lens, 6s at f/5.6 (indoor, artificial light)

I have to admit that I never understood the fascination of macro photography (all these insects and other creepy stuff - brrrr!), but at these magnification rates its quite appealing (the "wow!" factor). I read about the retro adaptor in the "Audubon Society Guide to Nature Photography" by Tim Fitzharris first (I mentioned that book previously), and its a nice - and very cheap! - first step into macro photography.

Thoughts on Post Processing

I've been thinking about post processing and my personal take on it for quite a while, it surfaced in some of my posts here and there when I compared film with digital, talked about filters, showed before/after examples of photos and fixes for common problems in (my) photos, etc.

When I say "post processing" I don't mean fixing obvious technical faults like chromatic abberation, vignetting, sensor dust, lens distortion, etc. etc. - even though we may start to argue which is just a "fix", and which is an alteration of reality.

When I say "post processing" I don't mean replacing entire parts of an image with another image either, like "foreground of image A and background of image B" - even though we may start to argue what HDR and exposure blending/fusion is in that case. From a purists point of view, HDR may already be cheating, because it does something that the camera can't do (which IMHO is a big pile of nonsense).

By describing what I don't mean and which objections some may already have at that point, its clear that the discussion about digital post processing has reached philosophical dimensions today. So, what do I mean when I say post processing and the discussion about it?

I mean the people who worry about perfect white balance - and sacrifice natural hues of warm morning and evening light, cold blue shadows, the distinct green tint of the sunlight through the leaves of a forest on a sunny day for it. I mean people discussing tonemapped to death-by-chewing-gum HDR, and photos that obviously lack post processing when everything is pale and without contrast. I mean the discussion about "naturally" reproducing "reality".

Now, we live our linear existence in a three dimensional world, and try to capture what we see with two eyes by opening the shutter of a camera for a more or less short time. There are the two problems of photography: 1.  lack of "3D" on a "2D" photo, to say so, and 2. lack of the ability to capture time/movement (we have movies for that). So, can this be a natural reproduction of reality? I don't think so - what we see with our own eyes is so much different from what the camera can capture. And besides that, what the camera captures is also lacking environmental sensations like temperature, wind, sound, smell, etc.

Therefore, I think it is only natural that we want to intensify the captured image - it is simply an effort to transport the moment (that made us release the shutter first place) to a possible beholder that was not there "in reality" when we took the photo.

I think its good to interrupt the large amount of babbling with a photo. Here's what the camera saw on March 16th, 2007 when I made the ascend to the Zwiesel:


"Blue Mountains" (Nikon D70 + 28-80mm AF-Nikkor on program automatic, JPEG out of cam)

Aha? Now, if you say that this is not very impressive, I'm with you... but on with the text, and on to the meat of things.

One of the most wonderful things I got from my girlfriend as a christmas present (ever!) is John Szarkowski's "Ansel Adams at 100" biography and fine art print book. And there is one paragraph in the book that sums "it" all up:

[...] as Adams stood on a granite shelf four thousand feet above the floor of Yosemite Valley, facing the motif that he later titled "Monolith, the Face of Half Dome" [...] it came to Adams that the finished print might more closely match his sense of the emotional power of the experience if he revised the tonal relationships of the picture by exposing his negative through a red filter, which would deepen the tone of the sky almost to black. Adams remembered the occasion because he had, for the first time, consciously applied a specific technical solution to an aesthetic problem. He used the red filter not by rote, or because dark skies were good, but because a dark sky was necessary for the picture he envisioned. [...]

Thats it. A technical solution to an aesthetic problem. And it doesn't matter if you attach a filter in front of your lens or work on the contrast and color on the computer IMHO.

So... if post processing in the digital domain helps you to better express what you saw (or wanted to see), you should do it. You have to take the risk that no one else but you will like the result (but given the sheer amount of cheering comments for completely over-the-top HDR images it seems to be a small risk); the important thing is that you have done what you think is right (or what was right, at that time - I mean: our perception and our sense of how and if and why a certain photo may or should work - or not - changes all the time). The response from the public, from your family and friends will quickly tell you if it was good (and different people have different tastes, of course).

This should not be mistaken as some religious finding-your-spiritual-self workshop style thing like "just play around with it, whatever the outcome may be, its OK" (but of course, there will always be someone out there who finds a crap experiment with wrong white balance "quite interesting" as long as you serve hip beverages).

The key is our own vision. And just like filters, post processing can be used to lessen the difference between that what we see with our own eyes, our own vision, and what the camera is able to capture, to transport the "real" beauty of a scenery - and I'm writing "real" here (with the doublequotes) because that may very well be a more or less artificial rendition. Just like Ansel Adams' photo of Half Dome with the black sky.

And after that, there's only one mistake you can make: show the photo before and after post processing. :-) So here's the post processed version of the photo shown above:


"Blue Mountains" (Nikon D70 + 28-80mm AF-Nikkor on program automatic, post processed with Lightroom)

And you can be quite sure that what I saw on that day where these silhouttes of the mountains disappearing in the blue haze - and not the white muddy foggy blurb like on the first photo. :-) I still remember that day and that scene and picked this one as an example, because another man with a camera who was already on the descend passed me by when I made this photo - and he said: "its not a good day for making photos"...

Website Update

With all these photos, it was time to make up my mind and decide how I want to present them to the public. I decided to use my Picasa Web Album as a sort of "log" for my activities throughout the year, containing a larger selection of photos from tours into the mountains etc. (and I've been filling up some gaps with photos from older tours in the past couple of days and weeks).

With the help of a working colleague (he speaks this thing called HTML) I've updated my own website, it now contains hand-picked galleries that I will constantly review and update with photos (which of course includes removing photos from those galleries if I don't see them fit my own standard anymore). These albums are not limited to a particular timeline, its simply photos those that I like the most, no matter how old or new they are - like this one:


Salzach Reflection • Spring 2008

I wanted the website to be really simple so that it would load fast, I can maintain it myself :-) and that the photos are immediately accessible to visitors. With Lightroom and SimpleViewer, I can update these theme galleries with a few mouseclicks. The website used to be a redirect to Google Sites in the past (which was the reason for adding the albums in a subdomain), but the service became too limited for what I wanted (the online editor does not support tables, and a manually added table would be compressed to death and not be really readable in the editor once saved, so making changes was a real pain in the butt), so its now on my own (fraction:-) of a server at my domain hoster.

For those who have been following my activities in the Picasa Web Album there's not much really new there, but most of the albums have been updated, thinned out, the photos receiving new post processing, that sort of thing. Its really easy to browse the photos with SimpleViewer. Check it out! The first "new" album is the Landscapes & Scenery album. In the future, I will occasionally post short notices here when I update one or the other album.

PS: the music website has been moved to my other, older and music-specific domain. I haven't yet decided if I need an additional blog for my own (german) rants about technology and the world in general. :-P

Swans in the Rain

"Swans in the Rain (Innspitz, Germany)"

This peaceful scene was captured in early May 2008. Sometimes its good to revisit older photos (and thanks to the bad weather and being "trapped" at home with a bad cold, I have plenty of time for it at the moment).

The Innspitz area (where the Salzach river joins the Inn river) is a good place for watching birds. Throughout the year you can see mallards, swans, seagulls, comorants. And jumping fish trying to catch flies. I've yet to capture one in mid air. :-)

Take the Blue Pill

"You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe."

I've prepared a blogpost about my take on post processing (something that occupies my mind for quite a while now) and I wanted to finish and publish it today, but my head is aching, and my nose is running - so I have to stick to pills at the moment until that slight flu that I seem to have caught is over, and my head and nose are cleared again. :-)