This week, it’s Tina’s turn at Lens-Artists photo challenge and she challenges us with “Distance“.
When it comes to distance, I first think about being far away i.e. in one of my dream locations.
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Lens-Artists Challenge #90 – Distance
Author: solaner
I'm a passionate photographer and like traveling. Follow my footprints through the world.
along the pipes
Throwback Thursday: Eyjafjallajökull
Today, this image turns 10. You can see how red the sky is. That’s a result of the series of eruptions of the volcano Eyjafjallajökull in southern Iceland, which started on March 20th. The huge amount of volcanic ashed blasted in the sky during the eruptions forced the aviation to pause for a couple of weeks. The impact was worldwide in the northern hemisphere because of the enormous power of the eruption which brought the ashes to the upper layers of the atmosphere where it could be spread quickly by the jetstreams.
while prop airliners are quite resistant to these ashes, jet engines are at risk to get broken because of the ashes might melt inside the jet engine and dispose of the movable parts of the engine and glaze them over. When this happens the engine is broken and the plane is about to crash.
Btw. when looking at certain paintings by William Turner starting from around 1821 you can notice a very reddish sky. Now it seems, this wasn’t artificial freedom but reality affected by the series of eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull from 1821-1823.
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Wordless Wednesday: pink blossom
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Travel Tuesday: everything is wet
Let’s stay a bit longer at the Fairy pools. Do you remember the big rock in the water? We had quite bad weather when we were there. After each image, the front lens needed to be dried and cleaned because of the rain. Another side effect of the rain was, there was a lot of water in the river.
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Monochrome Monday 6-48
Is it fair, to show blossoms in monochrome now when they finally start blooming and end the winter? Last week, we had two wonderful sunny and quite warm days (approx. 14-15°C). Birds are singing everywhere. It’s their mating season and they try to attract a partner. The buds are growing on the trees and bushes, ready to break up soon to give free the leaves and the petals. Just like the blossom of the star magnolia in the image above. In my opinion, the image works well in monochrome because of the naturally white petals and the backlit situation in the scene. What do you think? I’m looking forward to your opinion. Just type it in the comment box below.
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creator vs. taker (ad)
Isn’t this a quite funny headline? You know, I’m a photographer. As a photographer, I show you the world the way it is and how I see it. To bring my images to your vision, I need to develop them. For developing the raw data recorded by my camera, I need some software known as raw developer. It’s just like in the old days where the photographer took the exposed film out of his camera and put it in some chemicals to magically get colorful images out of a grey stripe of plastic.
In 1988, the first version of Photoshop was introduced. This was initially an image manipulation program and became later quite popular not only for advertisers but also for photographers. I personally don’t need these functions for my images. Beside working on deeps and highlights, vibrance, cropping, and sharpening I do nothing to my images. Thus, I only need a raw developer and nothing else.
One raw developer I work with is Luminar by Skylum. This product appeared first in 2016 for MacOS only. Now, it’s available for Windows also. When Syklum started integrating artificial intelligence for some reason, these features became more and more powerful and made life easier for people photographers as well as for landscape photographers.
The current version, Luminar 4, replaces all previous versions of Luminar, including Luminar Flex. So, saving edits as editable separate files isn’t possible anymore and I suspect, this won’t come back anymore. Even the option, to export an edit as a PSD file for Photoshop only saves it as a flattened file.
This past week, a new version of Luminar was released: Luminar 4.2
Although, this is a new minor version, the changes are remarkable! This version brings new tools to your hands. These tools are powered by artificial intelligence to enhance your images in a very natural way. I guess, most of the skills were taken over from Photolemur, a company Skylum took over after 2018. With Luminar 3 AI skills were introduced for the first time and enhanced with Luminar 4. Now, Luminar steps up quite further and brings some additional creative tools to your hand. To show you a bit about what’s possible, I attached one of my Images.
Here we are in Tromsø, standing at the edge of the harbor and looking over the fjord to the part of the city located on the other side of the fjord with the famous Arctic Cathedral. I included the clouds from an image taken about an hour earlier from the same place looking in the same direction while waiting for the blue hour. The other two objects (aurora and planet) are taken from the standard library supplied by Skylum with the installation package.
Despite, I don’t like these make-offs, it demonstrates what’s possible and how realistic it looks like. I have to admit, the software does a great job. Although, I focused here on the tools for landscape photographers, I also encourage people photographers to have a look at Luminar 4.2, as it also includes some great AI-supported tools for them (AI Skin & Portrait enhancer and shine removal)
To test it on your own with your own images, there’s a test version available to download for free to check all features out. It’s available for Windows and for MacOS. A license is good for two computers.
When using the code “SOLANER” during checkout, you can save a few bucks.
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