Month: May 2020

art, culture, history, photo-of-the-day, photography, technical, travel, world

Lens-Artists Challenge #99 – “old an new”

solaner

Today, it’s Amy’s turn to challenge us. And she did.  She was thinking of people wearing traditional clothes in a modern city or using modern machines. Another idea she told us, is a cityscape taken in a city with a history where new building standing beside old buildings or modern vehicles in front of historic buildings.

Here are my images for this challenge. As usual: click on the images to enlarge them.

I want to show you modern machine digging in the ground for coal, cerated eons ago.

Modern art in the middle of the king’s castle of an old kingdom?

Coal made the Ruhr area rich. Nowadays only the once dirty but now the remaining symbols are keeping the memory alive.

Some ancient traditions are kept alive by modern soldiers in traditional uniforms to keep the memory alive.

Once this was a dirty and busy harbor. Now startups, expensive restaurants, media agencies and hotels residing in the brick stone buildings as well as in the modern glass-and-steel buildings.

Even when visiting tiny greek islands you will stumble upon the achievements of modern society.

 

Have a nice weekend and

Take care

art, culture, history, photo-of-the-day, photography, technical, travel, world

Lens-Artists Challenge #98 – “Delicate Colours”

solaner

this week the Lens-Artists photo challenge is organized by Leya

Spring is the season of colors. While some colors are very intense others are soft and delicate. Here in my region spring is nearly over. This week we even got the first day of summer. It was so hot, we were able to sit outside ’til 11 p.m.. Great! I love it!

Thus, I picked some images from my archive. The pasqueflower and the white-pink magnolia are from 2017 and the other images from March and April 2020.

Take care

animals, bird, gear, nature, photography, review, technic, travel, wildlife, world

A special head for wildlife photographer

solaner

In the past I wrote about tripods. A tripod always has a head to mount your camera on. There are many discussions, what kind of head is the best: ball-head, one-way tilt head, two-way tilt head, and three-way tilt head.

Some tripods came with a certain head attached to the middle-column which is not replaceable while other come with replaceable heads or even without a head, where you have to buy one on your own choice.

The head of my old tripod wasn’t replaceable while my new one came with a replaceable ball head. My monopod came with a replaceable 1-way tilt head.

For wildlife photography these heads are not really helpful. The tilt heads are not fast enough to follow the animals and the ball head can’t be fixed fast enough to be a stable ground. Therefore I have a gimbal. I simply dismount the head from either my tripod or my monopod and attach the gimbal instead. Because of the design, the gimbal is quite stable but I can move it around very fast, if needed.

When sitting in a hide where I have enough room to set-up a tripod, I mount the gimbal on top instead of the ball head. When I want to move around in the field or wait in a tiny hide, the gimbal will be mounted on the of the monopod. Both work very well.

My gimbal is made of aluminum and weighs about 1 kg. It’s 19.5 * 7.5 * 21 cm ( 7.7 * 3.0 * 8.3in). It has the correct screw thread (3/8 “) to attach it directly on most of the tripods and monopod with detachable heads. The plate to mount the camera follows the arca-swiss standard.  So, if you already have such a plate, it will fit here too, if not, never mind, the gimbal brings one. There are also some long tele lenses around where the lens mount flange is also fitting in an arca-swiss mount without a separate plate. According to the manufacturer’s specifications, the gimbal should be able to carry gear up to 18 kg (39.7lbs).

The heaviest lens I used a couple of times weighed about 5 kg. When adding my camera there was about 6,2 kg attached to the gimbal, resulting in about 7.3 kg to carry for my tripod. 

To mount such heavy gear to the gimbal needs some fine adjustment to distribute the weight equally. That’s why the lens mount flange is below the lens and the flange is that long. Even when the screw on the top left side is loosened the camera and lens have to be in balance. Now, you tighten the screw a little bit, that you can still move the camera easily up and down but it does not have to swing back automatically. The same for the horizontal turning.


I own this gimbal for about 3 years and I’m very happy with it. Compared to the standard heads, this is really a game-changer, also for the monopod. In my other post, you can read about me first struggling a bit when using the monopod. The gimbal helped me out a lot.

 

When I got the gimbal, it was quite hard to move the swing, but after a short time, the oil inside became softer and the swing was easier to swing up and down.

Take care!

 

 

art, culture, history, photo-of-the-day, photography, technical, travel, world

Lens-Artists Challenge #97 – “past times”

solaner

this week the Lens-Artists photo challenge is organized by a guest-host: Sue from The Nature of Things.

She told us that she’s currently locked at home as many (if not most) of us. So, there’s plenty of time to think about things and the past. That’s why she asked “pasttimes”.

When I thought about the topic, an idea came up to my mind: let’s dig in your digital archive and pick the oldest images you have.

I switched from film to digital in the fall of 2008. The first time I was only playing around with the camera to get used to it. I started photography in the late 1970s and bought my first own SLR in 1984. Up to now, none of the films of those days is digitized. In January 2009 I stumbled upon a group of photo enthusiasts organizing photography trips over the internet and I joined them for the February trip. These images are the oldest digital images I still have on my disk.

The funny thing is, the photo trip in February 2009 was to a garage for classic automobiles. Here you can buy and sell such cars. You can also find craftsmen being able to repair these old cars. The main floor of the garage is used to be a showroom. I really love such old automobiles. Unfortunately, they use the available space very efficiently. So, it’s no fun to take photos. There nearly no room to get good images. 😢

The second important thing is, I met a group of people I’m still friends with. We still meet once a month for photography trips. I’m so glad to have been brave enough to ask if I’d be allowed to join.

Take care

art, culture, landscape, photo-of-the-day, photography, world

Monochrome Monday 7-03

solaner

Not a night at the opera, but the opera at night 🙂

In fall 2015 I was in Dresden with a couple of friends. Besides other iconic buildings, the Semper Oper was also on our bucket list. In this case, I had a monochromatic image in my mind when setting up my gear for this image. I wanted to have a black sky to make the wonderful building pop out. Usually, I take my images of illuminated buildings a bit earlier during blue-hour.

Take care!

animals, bird, landscape, nature, photo-of-the-day, photography, technical, wildlife

Lens-Artists Challenge #96 – “crop”

solaner

To crop your image means cutting away unimportant or disturbing parts and giving the important part the best position in the frame. This is part of the so-called image composing. Patti challenges us this week for Lens-Artists photo challenge with this topic.

Because I started photography back in film days, nearly 100 % of my landscape and people images are (IMHO) well composed. But in wildlife photography, it’s a very often used technique.

Here you can see one of my raw images without any editing. Below, you can see the final image

You can see, I balanced the horizon and placed the cormorant on one of the golden ratios.


The image is taken with an 80-400mm lens attached to a APS-C camera body at 400mm.

Take care

animals, autumn, bird, fall, landscape, nature, photography, seasons, wildlife, world

Throwback Thursday: wet

solaner

This is my contribution to The Lens-Artists challenge. This week Tina Shell challenged us with the topic “All Wet”. I’m quite late with my response.

I met these wet cranes last fall when I was heading home. Suddenly there were hundreds of them in the fields all wet from the constant rain.

Take care!

 

Computer, macOS, review, software

Gemini 2 by MacPaw (review and ad)

solaner

Recently, I reviewed another software: Gemini 2. You know, as a sign of the zodiac Gemini is the sign for twin and that seems to be the reason for the name.

Each owner of a computer knows the problem of constantly shrinking free space on the internal disk. Not only new files occupy the precious disk space, but also duplicate files are consuming space. Gemini 2 should help one to reclaim the space occupied by unnecessary doublets.

After starting the program it asks for permission to your user folder and then starts scanning for doublets

When finished it presents a summary slide showing how much space probably could be reclaimed.

But, don’t trust this! Check the found doublets very carefully which one of the doublets could be deleted without causing problems. It scans the folders as well as your iTunes-library and the photo-mediathek. So, it finds i.e. photos exported from your photo-mediathek to the disk, when they are still in the mediathek as well.

Just in case, you want to try it on your own computer, there’s a free trial version available.

Take care!