Black & White Rock Studies

Sunday I made the hike to the Reiter Alpe via the "Alpasteig" and continued to the peak of the "Grosser Bruder". The nature in the whole area is so ravishingly beautiful that I fell into the somewhat typical "photo making madness" - each time after walking 5 meters the sight would changed, resulting in another photo. If that sounds familiar to you, you know now that you're not alone. ;-)

But this means of course: the culling at home becomes a very difficult job, because there's so many personal impressions and feelings involved that a photo can't possibly transport to the audience. Needless to say - I'm in the middle of this process at the moment...

I've picked these three photos because they somewhat stand out and hmmm, maybe deserve a separate presentation. First off a presentation of the entire scene, then some excerpts.


Wagendrischelhorn & Häuselhörner (FinePix S5Pro, 1/40s @ ISO 100; f/8, 70 mm DX)

The track that leads to the Wagendrischelhorn and the two Häuselhorn peaks is in an area that is called "Roßgasse" (the slope in the upper left of the photo above). Its quite interesting that the name has a strong similarity to "Rosengarten" (in South Tyrol) with the "Ros/Roß" part - it has nothing to do with "roses", the color red (german "rot") or "horses" (german "Roß" is a synonym for "Pferd", horse). Ethymologists think that it hints back to the old word of "ruza" which means "scree, talus". Makes sense!


Rock Study I (FinePix S5Pro, 1/45s @ ISO 100; f/8, 90 mm DX)


Rock Study II (FinePix S5Pro, 1/100s @ ISO 400; f/8, 180 mm DX)

All photos were made on the track to/from the "Grosser Bruder" (1864m), handheld - I refuse to carry the extra weight of the tripod at the moment. Unlike on my last tour to the Dürrnbachhorn I had the 12-24mm, the 28-80mm and the 70-300mm lens with me... and once more, the one lens that I needed the least was the "normal" zoom 28-80mm. Proof once more that landscape photography seems to be a question of either wide or tele...

Featured again :)

Woo-hoo! One of my photos (from the recent "Chasing Waterfalls" album) was chosen as a featured photo for Picasa Web Albums again. Thats great! Will I beat Ping's incredible fan counter now? :-)

Whats even greater is that thru the "Explore" function with the featured photos I found that David Ward has a Picasa Web Album too! Its the first time that I see a really famous landscape photographer with a Picasa Web Album - I wish there were more... (I mentioned one of the books that he took part in previously here). Why I admire David Ward? Just look at his photos... and then look at the cameras he made the photos with! "Iceland by Phone" is so impressive, and all the photos were made with the camera of a mobile phone... *sigh*

The sad part is - again it happened that someone not only downloads my photos (I'd have no problem with that as long as its for personal use) but showed them in his own webalbum! With his own name in the photo! I don't link to the album here, I added a note in the first photo of the album.

I just don't know what is wrong with these people... its so disappointing. After the first incident I removed the download possibility to make it a little harder for people to "accidentally" do that, and I fear that I'll now add a big (c) tag with my name in every photo. Its a pity because it really ruins the photos IMHO, but it seems there is no other way...

Back to the Roots :)

I made the last photos with my 18-200VR lens this year in January. Its been in my spare photo bag ever since, I haven't used the lens for half a year because I've been quite happy to carry the "big equipment" with me in my backpack. So, despite earlier thoughts, I decided to sell the lens.

And I immediately regretted it. Soon after I made the decision to sell it and found a friendly buyer, the mountain hiking season started "for real" in July with a week off from work - and oh my, carrying all that stuff with me in the summer heat is really exhausting.

I always had the 12-24mm wideangle zoom and the 70-300mm VR tele zoom with me, supplemented with the 50mm/1.8 - together with the camera body, extra battery, filters, clothes (rain cover etc. is a must if you go into the mountains - you never know how fast the weather changes...), lunch and water the total weight easily adds up to something like 10kg.

On my first hike I even had the tripod with me - and I didn't even use it! Stupid either way. :-) On the second hike I left the tripod in the car - better. On the third hike I had enough of the weight. I thought to leave the camera at home, but instead I picked the super-duper plastic 28-80mm zoom lens and just the camera (with fully charged battery:-). The 28-80's front lens rotates while focussing, so polarizer was not very useful anyway.

What can I say? It was fun! Of course I felt somewhat limited with the single lens, but the light weight made the hike much more enjoyable (that why I partly regret selling the 18-200VR now!). And it was "back to the roots" for me because the 28-80mm was the first lens that I ever used, on the borrowed Nikon D70 that infected me with DSLR and photography fever. :-)

Here's one of the photos from the hike on Sunday (more to follow in my web album later):


Pine Roots (FinePix S5Pro, 1/230s @ ISO 100; f/8, 28 mm DX)

And: needless to say that I learned something again that I want to share here: even if you don't want to carry all the equipment up to a mountain peak - take it with you, keep it in the car so that you have it ready! I left all my other lenses and accessories at home that day (of course, this might be the safe path because you never know if someone breaks into your car etc.) - and on the way home I came along the Weitsee once more and the light way just lovely... but without tripod and telephoto lens, it was no good... :-/

Chasing Waterfalls with Yudschin

Monday I drove to Heutal in Austria once more for some hiking. Its a 1.5 hour drive and when I was on the road for about 1 hour I noticed that I forgot my boots - oh great. There's not much hiking in sandals, so I changed my plans and thought I'd make some photos of the brooks and waterfalls.

I began with a small brook that runs along the track towards the Hochalm, I noticed one particular spot in a previous visit, so I climbed down from the track and made some photos (Toni waited patiently). When I climbed back up to the track a hiker passed me by on his descend from the Sonntagshorn - I looked at him and I knew I've met him before, it was on the hike to the Aibleck.

I joined him on his descend to the Heutal (couldn't go much further with my sandals anyway) and we started chatting about this and that, hiking etc. and about photography at a certain point of course... turns out Eugen (thats his name) is a great waterfall chaser, he has collected wonderful and astonishing amounts of information of the waterfalls (which he ALL visited himself and photographed himself!) on his website.

We continued our walk and eventually ended at the Staubfall where we parted, he made the descend down to Germany, Laubau from where he started, I headed back up to the Heutal with Toni. At the Staubfall we passed through under the waterfall and climbed down a few meters on the opposite slope to make photos from a different viewing angle. This is one of them:


Staubfall Detail (FinePix S5Pro, 1/18s @ ISO 400; f/8, 165 mm DX)

This was a particularly interesting photo because the twig was moved by the wind of the falling water all the time. I had to find an exposure that would be long enough to blur the water but short enough to freeze the motion of that twig. At ISO100 and with the polarizer I could get nice and long exposures that blurred the water just fine, but the twig was also blurred.

The polarizer was a must to remove the reflections on the leaves, so was the aperture to get a good quality and sharpness, the only parameter left was the ISO - I carefully bumped it up and at ISO400 I got what I wanted - the photo you see above. Needless to say that it is one of my favorites from that session. :-)

A little bit of luck was involved too of course. It may not have been possible to reproduce the result at ISO400 again because the twig moved up and down differently all the time. :-)

Rain Sequence

Rain I. (FinePix S5Pro, 1/20s @ ISO 100; f/5.6, 180 mm DX)


Rain II. (FinePix S5Pro, 1/35s @ ISO 800; f/11, 300 mm DX)


Rain III. (FinePix S5Pro, 1/90s @ ISO 800; f/8, 270 mm DX)

Polarize Me

The most common usage of the polarizer, or maybe rather, what people say is the most common usage is to get deep blue skies (an effect that is overdone rather quickly, especially at high altitudes, and that looks terrible at short focal lengths) and really vibrant green.

Whats also common knowledge is that the polarizer costs light and therefore requires longer exposure times (mostly between 2 and 3 stops). I often use it to deliberately lose some light in order to get longer exposure times, for example when making photos of water where I want to blur the movement of the water.

But because the polarizer reduces reflections, its also possible to get very long exposure times that dramatically change the appearance of a photo if the bright reflection is a major part of the photo so that it influences the exposure time itself.

Here's a close-up of some reed after a short rainshower. The background is the surface of a lake, the camera was looking downwards in an angle of about 45 degrees to the water surface. The polarizer was already attached to the lens but it was not set to actually do something (so that we can compare the exposure times that are strictly limited to the polarizer effect and not the filter itself):


Reed - not polarized (FinePix S5Pro, 1/55s @ ISO 200; f/5.6, 180 mm DX)

I used the cameras aperture priority mode (like I do most of the time) and let the camera select the appropriate exposure time for me - which was 1/55s for the above photo (well, more like 1/60s, its one of these strange Fuji S5pro phenomenons). Next is the same scene, but now with the polarizer "at full swing":


Reed - polarized (FinePix S5Pro, 1/15s @ ISO 200; f/5.6, 180 mm DX)

I dare say that difference is quite dramatic. The green is much more vivid, but not because of any reduced reflections on the leaves itself (reed leaves have a dull surface that does not reflect much anyway), but because of the longer exposure time (2 stops more!) that was possible by removing the bright reflection of the background.

The white balance was fixed to shadow, there's no difference in color temperature for both photos - yet the polarized version looks much warmer thanks to the more natural background.

Best of June: Illumination (color version)

Illumination (FinePix S5Pro, 1.3s @ ISO 100; f/8, 12 mm DX)

It was quite difficult this month to pick my personal favorite, but in the end I returned to my first choice - the photo of the backlit tree in the woods near Nonnreit. Following my friend Ping's suggestion I increased the brightness of the backlit treetop. I applied some local corrections to fix the burned out parts on the bottom (can't resist: LR & Fuji magic, once more - its the first time I realize how much highlights I can salvage with local adjustments in LR, too).

Distilled Water (Lightroom tip)

Here's a little tip to enhance water with Lightroom. All it takes is a graduated filter. First the original photo (its already developed of course, but no effect on the water):


Water without alteration (FinePix S5Pro, 1/450s @ ISO 100; f/5.6, 50 mm DX)

And here's the "distilled" version with a graduated filter dragged in from the bottom, a little bit of negative exposure compensation (-0,20), maximum clarity and maximum contrast:


Water with more reflections & mirroring (FinePix S5Pro, 1/450s @ ISO 100; f/5.6, 50 mm DX)

I think its quite visible how much more of the reflection of the cliff in the river is there in the "distilled" version. This works quite well on all kinds of long time exposures with water, too - its possible to over-expose the water until it is not much but a white/grey mass and then get it all back like that in Lightroom (oh yes, I've used this quite often already in the photos I've shown in my web album;-).

Honk if you find this tip useful. :-)

Branch and Reflections, revisited

I was on a late walk with Toni this evening at the Huckinger See again. I had the camera with me and I was sweating like a horse because it was so damp in the forest after all the rain. The following scene might look familiar to regular visitors of my blog:


Branch and Reflections, revisited (FinePix S5Pro, 10s @ ISO 800; f/4, 50 mm DX)

This photo was made at 20:30 (8:30pm for you US folks). It was so dark in the forest (go figure: 10 seconds at ISO800...), the autofocus would fail quite miserable even with my 50mm/f1.8 lens (I don't know whats the operating aperture of the AF in the S5pro/D200 but I don't think its something extraordinary).

Something new to add to my photo backpack: a torch! It would sure have helped to have a small pocket LED torch to illuminate the focus point and use the AF that way - or at least to be able to read the distance markings on the lens! :-)

The white balance for these photos is another issue: I left the camera on automatic white balance which would result in a really strong magenta cast over all of the background - but the greens are just excellent! I adjusted the tint of the WB for less magenta, and thats what you're seeing now (LR's auto white balance does something similar). Very weird.

Blue hour at the river

I was on my evening walk with Toni on the austrian side of the Salzach river when I noticed that a fog lifted from the river after the rain. It looked quite promising, so I brought little miss Toni home, grabbed my backpack with the camera and tripod and rode down to the river with my old trusty bicycle. It was a quarter past 9 in the evening, and I came home one hour later.

In addition to the photos that I already presented in my web album for June here is another version of the "Blue Hour" photo in portrait orientation. I like it because there's a hint of the moonlight reflecting on the water surface:


Blue hour at the river (FinePix S5Pro, 10s @ ISO 100; f/16, 22 mm DX)

The first photos from the session were made in relatively bright light (solstice was only 10 days ago), but it was extremely difficult to find something contrasty enough to focus on in all the fog. The autofocus was pumping the lens back and forth pretty much.

Another difficulty was the exposure - the fog was relatively bright, but overall it was relatively dark. Would it result in a normal exposure? Turns out it wouldn't. I added a full stop of exposure while it was still bright enough to get the bright white fog really bright white. At home I found out that two stops would have worked too. I have to remember that the camera display is misleading and too bright.

And then there was the white balance. I left it at "auto" this time, trusting the Fuji, and what I saw on the display looked pretty good. At home I found that the color temperature was still too low and many of the photos had a magenta tint, a result of the wrong white balance of course. I manually corrected the white balance for the photos that were made in the remaining daylight to something between 7500K and 8000K.

When the light was fading away I left the white balance mostly untouched, giving the photos (like the one above and two more in the web album) the typical strong blue tinted look of daylight film when used at night (the "real" color was somewhat warmer and more neutral, but I quite liked the effect, and since it came like that out of the camera its legit, isn't it?).

Next up is the really difficult task to pick the one single "best of June" photo. Three (well, four if I count a black & white version) photos marked with five stars in Lightroom this month. :-}

(Wow, covered all major aspects in one post - focus, exposure, white balance:-)