An afternoon in the moor

I spent an afternoon in the moor near Ibm in Austria again - now is the time of the year when the curlew sings its wailing song. An old german name of that bird is "Moorflöte" (moor flute). Unfortunately, I don't know which curlew exactly it is. When one bird starts singing, others join in and its a magical and melancholic ambience for me as the birds fly, singing their song (and I do remember now that some of the electronic sound effects in my song "A Landscape" where inspired by the song of the curlew). There are also some peewits around, I like them very much too - they always fly as if they are tumbling through the air, and their sounds are very funny too.

I walked up a small hill to get an overview of the area, but the afternoon light was not very good. Thats why the photo below is black & white - I like the scenery, but to bring out its original quality in the photo required too much post processing - and the result was just ugly in color.


Afternoon above the moor

I can certainly understand why landscape photographers prefer morning and evening light. I have to teach my dog to change his pooping schedule. :-)

Up on the hill there was a pheasant nearby, but 300mm focal length was nowhere near enough to get a good photo - this is already a crop to about 2/3 of the original size of the frame:


Pheasant

I waited patiently for him to make his call, because thats when he fluffs up his feathers for a moment, but I gave up after a while and screwed in the polarizing filter for some landscape shots - and as soon as I did that, he of course shouted (and the exposure times are just too long with the polarizer). Well, maybe I'm not a bird photographer. I think I can handle that.

And last not least, today I managed to get back home without injuries and biting the dust. :-)

Hold still and close your eye

When I began to get more interested in making photos and capturing the world around me, I would so very often run into a trap: while walking through the forest, some light on the trees is extra beautiful, and I raised the camera and made a photo of it.

And at home, there was simply nothing to see, the magic was gone, I was unable to capture it. I wondered how much talent it really takes to create successful photos of all these beautiful things. And well, there are two problems with my approach: 1. I'm moving and 2. I'm using both of my eyes to evaluate the scene.

I bet this sounds completely stupid, but for me, one of the biggest helpers to decide "should I try to make a photo of this?" is to hold still for a moment and then check: does the scene still have this appeal when I stand still?

And then I close one eye and look at the scene again. Because thats what the camera is: a poor one-eyed piece of gear. If the scene I saw still looks good with one eye closed, it will look good through the viewfinder.

And this method has saved me countless futile attempts of trying to capture what simply can't be captured with a camera.

Nature gives, nature takes away...

After the past 10 days were mostly warm and sunny here in Burghausen I thought that the snow situation in the mountains might have cleared up a little and drove to Inzell to visit "my" beloved Frillensee, the small mountain lake with the crystal clear cyan/blue/green water that is embedded into an alpine forest under the so called "Dunklwand" (dark wall), which is the north side below the peaks of Gamsknogel and Zwiesel, two peaks of the Stauffen group.

But there is still a LOT of snow in the area (and from the sheer amount there I'd say that it will be gone not sooner than mid or end of May) and the path to the lake is partly still covered with lots of old snow, but I went there nevertheless - it was sunny and Toni had a lot of fun, but when I arrived at the lake I stood in shock as I saw this scene:


Frillensee - Wasteland

An avalanche came down over the Dunklwand and destroyed a good part of the south shore of the lake that lies underneath it. The path that went around the lake is completely gone, buried under snow, the leftovers of trees and dirt. The lake is still covered with a crust of ice and old snow, and a lot of small twigs are spread all across the surface (I don't know if that's due to the power of the avalanche - its really hard for me to imagine). The above photo was taken with a focal length of 70mm.

Just for your comparison... what you see above is almost the same scene as in this photo (taken with a 50mm lens):


Weird light (half of the lake is already in the shade of the mountains above)

Hard to believe. The forest, the path, everything is gone. It used to be my favorite place to take photos of the lake, with the forest that descends on both sides and the sky reflecting in the water. Now there is a chaos of snow, dirt and splintered trees.

Its one thing to see an avalanche on TV and watch it with some kind of morbid fascination when it makes its way down - but its a completely different experience to stand in the remainders of this beautiful landscape, knowing that it will take 20 years or more before the scene above will be as beautiful again as it used to be last autumn.

But that's nature. These things happen. And nature will recover.

Wide Angle, Hard Work

The more I'm using the 70-300mm telezoom, the more I notice how hard it actually is to make good photos with the wide angle lens. This photo was taken at 18mm (12mm DX), and I was really only about half a meter away from the tree trunk, with all of the tripod sections collapsed and the tripod set up in the mud of the small creek that connect the first and the second pool of the Huckinger See area:


Creek and Fallen Tree at Dusk

The first obstacle is to get a good position: a) you need to be really close to some sort of main subject, or else everything will be just tiny and small and lost in the amount of surroundings that the wide angle lens captures (if the photo gives the viewer the impression that he/she is right in the scene, its good); and b) its important that the camera is at level - if its tilted up or down, the keystone distortion will be very pronounced at very short focal lengths. For the above photo, it meant to get down really low and crouch behind the viewfinder on the forest soil. :-}

The second difficulty is directly related to the first - at these very close distances to the focus point you have to focus carefully and stop down the lens a lot (that was f/16 above). A depth of field preview button helps - even if it turns the viewfinder very dark its possible to make small corrections to the focus in order to get the maximum depth of field (hyperfocal distance).

I find lenses with instant manual override of the AF (like the AF-S Nikkors) really helpful, just like detaching the AF from the shutter button as described earlier here. And I've set my camera to shutter priority in all modes for that reason - I don't really want the camera's internal focus control to block releasing the shutter and hinder me from capturing the scene once everything is good just because the stupid thing thinks there's nothing in focus!

Last not least, the exposure itself - I noticed that with so many things in the frame, its quite likely that pattern/matrix metering will have a hard time to really select the best exposure. Its better to use center weighted metering on the important area of the frame (which will still be very large, anyway), and/or use bracketing and careful control of the histogram and the highlights.

And all this takes time. And its a good time, too. Its really strange how my perception has shifted: I can hardly imagine to take photos freehand anymore, even with VR lenses. I simply know now that working with a tripod carefully will always result in sharper images, and the extra time that is needed to set it up also shows in the composition and framing (IMHO:-). The tripod has become my best friend - half a year ago it was just the other way around...

PS: this is the same scene as shown in the january album of the Huckinger See and the same tree trunk as shown in the "Pool and Fallen Tree" photo series in the Huckinger See album (which I just updated with some new photos).

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.

Backlit Trees and River

Backlit Trees and River

Sunday afternoon me & Toni made a walk along the Alz river, starting at the confluence with the Inn river. Beautiful sunny weather (thanks to Shuwen, the weather witch:-) and wonderful evening light.

The above black and white photo also exists as a color version (but its a different exposure). I want to add something personal here. In my very humble opinion, it is a weakness to show different versions/edits of a photo to the public (just to clarify - I'm not talking about the web albums where the goal is to discuss the different edits in order to find the best and hear what others say, I'm talking about the personal websites of hobby photographers). That looks like one can't decide which photo is the best.

What has more impact? One single sunset photo with gorgeous colors and everything, or seven similar ones with different stages of the setting sun? For me, it would be the single photo.

I'm convinced that one of the most important things is to make the decision which photo from a set is the best. That way, the feedback will be really helpful to refine your style for the photos YOU like best - and isn't that the most important thing? For me, it is.

Tree Abstract

I've added a couple more images to the album of the Huckinger See that I created last weekend (or did I? when was that?). I particularly like this photo:


Tree Abstract (close-up)

There's a neat little post processing trick in Lightroom - Vibrance -100, Saturation +100 - what happens? Vibrance controls the "weaker" part of the colors (normally used to make them a little more saturated, of course). By setting it to -100 you make them even less saturated, ie. almost black & white. Then you boost the "normal" color with Saturation set to +100. Maybe it requires a little bit of tweaking for the desired effect, -100/+100 are the most extreme values for the parameter. I like the results in the above photo.

And I learned another lesson: I never figured out what the viewfinder cover is good for so far - but I did now! I was working on the tripod, composed, focussed, etc. etc., then I removed my eye from the viewfinder, grabbed the cable release, locked the mirror up, counted to 5, and got a completely underexposed photo. Hu? WTF?!?

Solution: the light that shines through the viewfinder falsifies the cameras meter reading. As soon as I removed my eye from the viewfinder, the metering information changed, and exposure lock (AE-L) would only kick in once the shutter button is pressed halfway... (this wouldn't happen in fully manual mode, of course, but I prefer aperture priority usually). Now, using the viewfinder cover each and every time it a bit bothersome - covering the viewfinder with my thumb until I lock the mirror up works just as well.

And my friend Sami will perhaps mention the sharpening again... but well, with a tripod, manual mirror up and a (new:-) cable release, its simply possible to get very very sharp images with a quality Nikkor lens. ;-)

Staircase

Staircase (upwards)

I do not make architecture photos normally. I'm simply not very fond it (and I think its better to stick to doing what I really like and try to get better instead of doing a mediocre job in a little bit of everything).

However, last Wednesday I was in Munich (a work visit to a presentation of a printer vendor whose products we sell). The meeting was on the 14th floor, but the breakout sessions after the greeting part where in the ground floor. :-} So after being welcomed on the 14th floor, about 80 people waited for three elevators of which each had a capacity of maybe 8 people... great planning!

I decided to take the stairs instead (hey, downwards only)... and the photo above is that staircase, looking upwards from the basement floor (the white overexposed blurb in the middle is the roof window). The graphical quality is just too striking, I had to make that photo.

The photo was made with my iPhone and I really have to start a rant about it here: the quality is simply HORRIBLE. The quality that the thing provides with a 2mpx sensor is simply crap. The image is very noisy (you're looking at the heavily de-noised version!) and it seems that the iPhone has no "matrix" metering or some other more "intelligent" metering one would expect in a compact camera like device. The bright roof window caused the stupid thing to reduce the exposure far too much. The shutter release is a button on the touchscreen. Its almost impossible to hold that tiny device still and get a good framing.

The more I use DSLRs, the more I find myself incapable of making photos with compact cameras. When I sent my D70s to the Nikon service for cleaning last summer I used my girlfriend P50 compact for a day in the mountains, and I ruined almost every other shot - lost it due to camera shake! The shutter release doesn't have that good feel to it and the release always somewhat surprised me. I'm not used to these light weight devices anymore. The extra weight of a DSLR does have its benefits!

Minutiae - Backlit Foliage

Minutiae - Backlit Foliage

I took the camera with me on the evening walk through the forest with the dog today... days are getting longer, and it was a warm and sunny friday (feeling comfortable with a polo & jeans at half past six in the evening, woo-hoo, thats really nice!).

I thought I might try some detail-though-not-macro photos of liverleaf in the evening light. Actually, I had the idea a couple of days ago. I think it is good to have ideas beforehand, then think about it in theory, before actually going somewhere and taking photos. Having a goal, to say so. I still end up taking photos of other things anyway. :-)

Theory - good. Practice - hmmmm! I underestimated how thin the DOF is with the 70-300mm telezoom - even at f/11 if you're really close... (see above). So, none of the "planned" shots really worked. Nice blurry background, good bokeh, but not enough DOF for the entire liverleaf flower, and that didn't look good. Lesson learned. :-/

Then I ran straight into these beautifully backlit leafs from last year that still stuck to some bushes. The polarizer took the reflection off their surface so the pure color remained in all its beauty. And again, this shot could be better, too - it would've been ideal if the bent rim of the leaf in focus would've been entirely sharp, and I was already using f/11 - but at 300mm and close to the minimum distance to focus (150cm), the DOF is only about 1cm (yikes!)... oh yes, its good to play with the numbers in theory with DOFmaster again and again. Just to remember these things.

Music for the Moment: Pan Electric & Ishq - "About Time" (this album is almost too good to be true, really!)

Best of March: Pool and Fallen Tree

I picked this photo as "best of" for March because it has this quality of "Waiting for Spring". The snow and ice are gone, but nature hasn't picked up the creation of new life and green yet.


Pool and Fallen Tree

I like the combination of sparse colours here. Taken on March 28th at 16:15. Exposure time 1/2s @ ISO100 with the 70-300VR at 300mm and f/11 with polarizer.