up, in the volcanic highlands

Leaving the coastal areas and entering the inner parts of Iceland, you’re faced with a completely different, but also very interesting and unique, landscape.

The ground is covered by volcanic ashes, small pieces of very sharp stones. This material has nothing in common with ashes remaining after a fire. You can compare it to the iron blast furnace slag, when the iron is melted out of the ore by a steel plant. Do you know pumice stone? Both types of natural pumice stone (black and gray) are eruptive stones. They are quite soft compared to these black material.

Take care!

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Monochrome Madness 51

This photo is taken during my forest walk, 2 weeks ago. Four days after a heavy snow storm we finally got fine sunny, but cold weather. Perfect conditions for a hike through the winterly forest.

This is my contribution to Leanne Cole’s Monochrome Madness.

Take care!

(as always: click on the photo to see it in a bigger size)

the southern landscapes

They are fantastic!

Here we have an example from a few different places.

You might miss trees. That’s true. You won’t find many trees on Iceland. Nearly all trees were cut down in the past for building houses, ships or for cooking.

Nowadays some farmers have planted trees, but they grow very slowly, just like in the high mountain areas. We’ve had temperatures of 10 – 16 ° C (that’s 50 – 61 ° F) during our trip in the first half of July (that’s summer on Iceland).

Take care!

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I’m back …

… from Lisbon.

During the last few days I was in Lisbon, Portugal, with a few friends.

They were some days with nice company, a lot of fun, many interesting impressions and a lot of photos.

As usually for a ‘I’m back’ post, I don’t want to write so much. But, at least I want to show you an, as in my opinion, iconic picture of one of the small, old trams running in Lisbon. They even climb up steep hills and are usually very full despite their tight schedule.

Old, but not useless and definitely a eye-catcher for tourists, but they are still in regular operation, although there are some trams dedicated to tourist round-trips.

Take care

 

 

Monochrome Madness 50

Today I picked another photo from Gullfoss for you. This also wasn’t included in my original post on Gullfoss.

This is my contribution to Leanne Cole’s Monochrome Madness.

Take care!

(as always: click on the photo to see them in a bigger size)

Happy Valentins day

This flower is called in German “Tränendes Herz” (tearing / weeping heart), and I guess, you know, why :-).
In English it’s called bleeding heart (Lamprocapnos spectabilis).

Happy Valentines!

Sigöldufoss

Here we have another waterfall, Sigöldufoss. As I mentioned earlier, the rivers get their water from rain and so on, or from glaciers. In case, a river gets the water directly from a glacier, you’ll find sediments in the water. Thus the water isn’t clear, but colored. Often the water from a glacier river is white. That’s, because all these tiny, dust-like particles reflect the light differently.

The photo on top of this post shows such a situation. Inside the canyon on the left hand, you can find a fresh water waterfall. In the pool below this waterfall, you can distinguish easily between the water coming from a regular river and those, coming from a glacier. The water near the exit on the left, you can see water in two different colors, do you?

Take care!

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Monochrome Madness 49

Today I picked another photo from Gullfoss for you. This also wasn’t included in my original post on Gullfoss.

Look at the tiny people and the toy busses on the parking ground in the upper right corner. Now, bow to the creator of these impressive landscape!

 

This is my contribution to Leanne Cole’s Monochrome Madness.

Take care!

(as always: click on the photo to see them in a bigger size)

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Macphun Valentine’s Special!

Instead of regular roses and chocolate, this year get inspired with a special 30 Euro bundle of 2 best-selling Macphun apps at 25% OFF:

– Tonality, best of MacAppStore 2014’ black and white image editing app,
–  Snapselect, brand new app to sort & organise your pics.

Plus, 10 Lucky Macphun loving customers get a €10 Amazon gift card!

 

 

spring is around the corner!?

Friday late afternoon, when I came back from a short trip through our winterly snowy white forest,  I found these little spring messengers: some already blooming crocuses!

You can find them in different colors: white, yellow, blue, violet and probably some others too.

The photos below shows the other side of our current landscape. On Monday morning we have had our last heavy snow storm, that had severe impact in the commuting traffic: more the 400 km of traffic jam on the motor ways in our state.

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Enjoy!

 

How to select your best photo from the bulk

Back, in film days it was easy. You took a film with 20,24 or 36 shots on your trip and gave it to the lab after coming back home. Or, depending on your destination, you even were able to find a lab in your trip location. A few days later you got your developed film and a bunch of prints, depending on your type of film and the selected service. But, this was quite expensive. 1 film containing 36 shots with development and prints was as expensive as a todays 32 GB SD-Card from a medium quality brand (or a 128 GB SD card, when including inflation considerations).

But, what can I do with a 32 GB SD card compared to the 36 shots on film? Do you remember my post on jpg vs. raw? Assuming, one photo needs 25 MB storage, I’d be able to take about 1.300 photos with only one card.

While I’ve chosen my frames very carefully to avoid bad shots when I was photographing on film, I now often waste room by taking additional shots for different angles, take safety shots in tricky situations or when standing on wobbling ground. Or I try different settings, or taking redundant shots from similar plants / flowers / landscapes / posings  … – you name it. This results in a full memory card with lots of photos to be checked.

In my last post on this I mentioned the star system, for marking bad shots with a waste-bin, good shots with 1 star. Next filter all shots and select those with 1 star and mark the best of these with 2 stars. Repeat this until 5 stars are given to your best shots from that trip or shooting. This is a good workflow for finding the best shots, but it won’t help to find and compare similar photos taken in different places or on different trips or on different times. Here you’re on your own – up to now.

Maybe you’re stumbled upon Google’s image search, where you can put an image in the box designed to put the search term into and Google will show similar images from the web.

You can have this on you own computer, too. How? With the new app “snapselect” by MacPhun.

At the first start the app asks you for your images folder. Next, all images in this folder and all other folders below this starting point are read and indexed. For my image folder containing about 10,000 images this step lasted about 30 minutes or so. It creates a folder inside your home directory (Library/Application Support/com.macphun.snapselect_1.0.0) to store small pieces of data for each of the scanned images. In my case this folder needed about 1,1 GB of my hard disk space. But, this is necessary to do the magic: comparing the images and show similar images from all over your image folder, regardless when and where you took that image. Instead of this, it can also use your Lightroom, iPhoto or Aperture catalog. But, I haven’t tested one of these, because I don’t use any of them.

Imagine: you can select one photo of a red rose, adjust the accuracy slider and see every red rose on your disk. The accuracy slider is to define how much the equality of the images should be – or, in other words, how similar the selected images are supposed to be.

Now, you can choose i.e. the best photo for a competition or select the photos to keep or keeping only the best photos on your disk or whatever else you want to reach. In my screen shot above* I selected a folder containing some RAW files containing birds of prey taken at the fall festival in Middelkerke (Belgium) last year. You can see how snapselect grouped the photos showing similar birds and in similar poses. This is really a fantastic help when it comes to select photos.

This is one of the fantastic features of the new snapselect. Go and get your own trial and check it out! You can get it from your Mac App store.

Take care!

* (click on the image to see it bigger)

Weekly Photo Challenge: scale

This weeks photo challenge at The Daily Post is called “scale”.

This photo is also taken from my current Iceland series.

You can see the waterfall Gullfoss. Look at the tiny busses, cars and people. Do you see them? There is a parking ground on the upper right corner and people are walking along the path down to the edge, where the water falls into the canyon and further to the other (bigger) cascade.

More on the fantastic landscapes of Iceland every Thursday.

Take care!

 

 

Take care!

(as always: click on the photos to see them in a bigger size)

Háifoss

This waterfall is one of the highest waterfalls of Iceland. The river Þjórsárdal, a side arm of Þjórsá, falls 122m.  That’s the 3rd highest waterfall of Iceland.

Because of this height, it is a very strange feeling to look in the deep. In addition you have to be extremely careful, not to step too close to the edge of the canyon, as always on Iceland. Often you find grass or other plants growing over the edge and thus covering the dangerous ledge and slack stones.

Take care!

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Monochrome Madness 48

On Thursday I introduced you to Gullfoss, a very mighty waterfall in Iceland and a real tourist magnet. This photo wasn’t included in my other post. I like the structures in the water coming from the rocks below the surface.

This is my contribution to Leanne Cole’s Monochrome Madness.

Take care!

(as always: click on the photo to see them in a bigger size)