Month: January 2020
Throwback Thursday: waiting for the sun
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Wordless Wednesday: first fresh blossoms of 2020 in the garden
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Travel Tuesday: no roof at the house but daffodils in the garden
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Monochrome Monday 6-40
A winters day in northern Norway. Very dramatic sky. While I was happy about the amount of drama in the sky, I wasn’t happy during the next two days: heavy snowstorms and no chance to go out 😦
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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #81: Find Something Red
It’s Lens-Artists photo challenge time again. Patti challenges us to find something red. She started her post with the phrase “Sometimes in the middle of winter” and my brain completed the sentence with “find something red” despite she wrote “, the world is reduced to stark shades of black and white”.
Red is one of the strongest colors we have. Red means blood, fire, and danger, but also love and warmth. Also, many fruits are red, when they are ripe and thus easier to find.
It would be easy to bring up a color-key image, where everything is converted to black and white while some red spots keep their color. I was also considering some fruits.
Currently, I working on images I took in northern Norway a couple of years ago during winter. So I’d find many images of these pretty red houses surrounded by snow. (Here we have the starting line, where my mind failed in reading it correctly 😀) 
Instead, I picked this pretty blossom, where the red color really pops out
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fenced
People along the coasts try to save the beaches from getting lost during storms. So, the try to break the water streams by putting wooden piles in the sand.
More of my images can be seen on my own blog.
Throwback Thursday: Norway Pano
Last week I was working on some images taken back in 2016 in northern Norway at the Ofotjord.
Here we have a panorama image from that pile of up to now undeveloped images. It consists of 13 single horizontal images taken with a full-frame camera. Each image has 6016×4016 pixel. So, each of them has 24 mega-pixel. All images are shot hand-held at 70mm, ISO 400, f8, 1/1600s. It’s end of February and 13:49 😳. See, how low the sun already is at 17:01h.
Another way for creating such panorama images is by taking a wide-angle lens. But this approach has a downside: you’re losing details. For getting only the interesting part of the landscape you have to cut away huge parts of the sky and probably some parts of the foreground. In the remaining part of the image, the details are very tiny. On the opposite, when taking a telephoto lens, you get smaller parts of the landscape but each of the images has more details compared to an image taken with a wide-angle lens. In the end, all these images are stuck together to get a nice panorama image like the one above.
The resulting image of this process is quite big: 23997×2391 pixel and uses about 500MB in 16bit TIFF format on my disk. Converted to JPG the size shrinks down to about 40 MB but loses some color gradings because JPG only has 8 bit per color channel. I explained the problem with 16 vs. 8-bit color-depth already in the past. Next, I resized the file for web-quality. The image above is the downsized version: 9093×900 and 1.7MB.
Click in the image to see it in a better way.
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Wordless Wednesday: European Crested Tit
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Travel Tuesday: lonely cemetery
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Monochrome Monday 6-39
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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #80 – Leading Lines
In photography as well as in painting you have certain ‘rules’ to follow when composing your image. OK, there is no must, and sometimes it is even necessary to break these rules.
‘Leading lines’ is one of them, and the rule of thirds is another important one. ‘Leading lines’ means you integrated one or more visual lines inside the image in that way, that they catch your eye and lead it to the main subject.
Tina challenges us this week, to show images, where lines lead the eye to the main subject.
In this image, the main subject is the waterfall and the stairs coming from the lower left edge are leading with a positive diagonal upwards to the waterfall, while the waterfall is coming from the upper left corner (when only taking the bright and sunny part into account). In addition, they meet near the lower-right crossing of the rule-of-thirds. And the path-waterfall-connection is framed by two trees. Another rule is, to have the important parts brighter than the supplemental parts.
Don’t get me wrong. You can definitely make good images without following these ‘rules’. And sometimes it’s even necessary to break the rules to get a great image. But in general, they are the factor, that makes an image pop out of the mass or distinguish between good and great. So, my advice is, first learn the rules and follow them before you start breaking them intentionally.
Here’s a summary of 9 easy rules for building your image composition on:
- balance the horizon
- leading lines
- try to find diagonals (preferably from the lower left to the upper right corner = positive)
- rule of thirds
- frame your main subject
- bright vs. dark
- prefer landscape mode as it is more natural for our seeing experience
- use completing colors (red and green or blue and yellow)
- fill the frame
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Waves
When standing on the beach and watching the waves rolling in you can every now and then find things. In the surf, you can find stones, shells, algae or other sea plants and even human waste. At the same time, the surf washes away footprints or any other mark in the sand. Heavier waves are able to form the beach and even the coastline anew. This happens usually during the winter storms.
Two and a half weeks ago, a new year started. A new year comes to us just like the waves on the ocean. Some waves are small others are bigger and some even might be shaking the foundations of life. You won’t know in advance what the year will bring to your life. You also won’t know in advance, what it will take from you. But, you have to take it and you have to cope with the…
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Throwback Thursday: paint it black
“I see a red door and I want it painted black
No colors anymore I want them to turn black”written by Keith Richards / Mick Jagger
Some time ago, I heard some familiar-sounding tunes coming from my daughter’s room. Although I knew the lyrics, it sounded a bit different. It was much faster and the voice a lot higher than I had it in my mind. Surprisingly, she runs it over and over again. So, I went over to her and asked her, if she would know, how old that song is. She started guessing with 10 years than 20. before she gave up.
It’s from 1966!!! So it’s more than 50 years old!!!!
OK, she was listening to the Nightcore version of the Chiara cover which was used for the movie “The last witch hunter”. The Chiara version certainly is way younger. But, I had asked for the ‘original’ version.
In case you want to refresh your memories, I’d recommend to check out also the Chiara album version. This cover is quite good in my opinion as it transports the song from the 1960s to our current time without throwing it into the blender first. The Australian choreographer Anne Murray produced a great dance video to the song. It’s also available on Youtube.
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Wordless Wednesday: frosted
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Travel Tuesday: without a roof
Quite often we came along sometimes where the only building didn’t have a roof. It’s a quite funny experience.
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Monochrome Monday 6-38
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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #79 – A room with a view
For this challenge, I went back to Iceland again. Amy asked us for an image of a “room with a view”.
I take such images very seldom. But, this one is different from the others
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Throwback Thursday: Kemnade
This is a partial view of an artificial lake about 20 km from where I live. The image is taken on January 2nd, 2010 during our monthly photographer’s photo tour.
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Wordless Wednesday: mallard drake
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Travel Tuesday: strange encounter
After a short time, we were used to seeing sheep often on the streets in rural Scotland or laying beside the street. But, this encounter was really strange: a few cows were walking slowly along the street without any human being.
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Monochrome Monday 6-37
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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #78 – Special Spot Shot
Now, nearly all festivities are over and we’re coming back to normal. So, the Lens-Artist Photo challenge starts again. Ann-Christine asks us for our special spot shots. I was on many special spots during the last years. Some of them mean a lot to me, others are only interesting and/or impressive. An example for a location that means a lot to me could be the visit to Mt. Saint Michel or my trip to Seychelles beside others.
But, for today I chose another very impressive spot: Diamond beach on Iceland
Here we have black lava sand at the beach. Not far away a river ends in the Arctic sea. The river comes from a glacier lagoon. Every now and then, icebergs fall of the glacier and drop in the lake at the foot of the glacier. From here the low tide pulls the smaller icebergs through the river to the sea where they become smaller and smaller. The in-coming high tide throws the small blocks of ice on the beach. The very low standing sun is able to inflame a fantastic warm light inside the clear iceblocks. This special moment only lasts a few minutes until the sun dropped behind the glacier and the magic minutes were over. The image is taken at 23:10 😲
I ordered a big print of this image for our dining room. Just like some other great nature images, it rotates over the year in hanging there.
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Throwback Thursday: A review of 2019
As usual, I did a review of my images taken during the year for creating a photo book with the best images and the most memorable images. I should represent the activities I made during the past 12 months as well as remind me in a compressed way, of what I experienced.
You know, I often create photo books containing the best images taken during a photo trip (i.e. to Wales in June). But, the annual review often contains also images that didn’t fit in such a book or were taken at other opportunities.
When preparing the book, I was very surprised about the change in kind of the images. In the past years, most of the images were landscapes or flowers beside some wildlife photos taken at certain opportunities. This year, animals (especially birds) were dominating the selection 😳. Only 3 quite bigger piles of landscape images were on the desk: Wales, The Netherlands from our summer vacation and the trip to the heathland in fall. OK, there were some other landscape images, too, but theses were mostly only single images.
Here are my top 12 images from 2019: (click on the images to enlarge them)
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Happy New Year
When standing on the beach and watching the waves rolling in you can every now and then find things. In the surf, you can find stones, shells, algae or other sea plants and even human waste. At the same time, the surf washes away footprints or any other mark in the sand. Heavier waves are able to form the beach and even the coastline anew. This happens usually during the winter storms.
Today, a new year started. A new year comes to us just like the waves on the ocean. Some waves are small, others are bigger and some even might be shaking the foundations of life. You won’t know in advance what the year will bring to your life. You also won’t know in advance, what it will take from you. But, you have to take it and you have to cope with the changes.
So, I wish you a happy new year and may a gentle warm wind strengthen your back and dry up the tears remaining from the past year.
Take care!
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