a photographer's view to the world – a traveler's blog
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OK, guys. It seems the polling part worked and you voted for some more UK: Northern Wales.
This tree grows near or in the lake, depending on the water level. As you can see, approximately half a meter of water was missing to make the tree an island.
We were based near the lake during our stay. Thus I got up early to be there for sunrise and left the house at about 6:00 in the morning. I was only about 1 kilometer to walk. As the weather seemed to become perfect for such a morning, I planned to go here right at the first morning. You know, weather is able to change fast and not taking an opportunity can lead to waste a chance. Thus I went out before the planned breakfast to be back at right before the time aligned for breakfast.
Side note: I wasn’t the first one out. When leaving the house for the lake, I met another photographer. But, he was outside to smoke instead of taking photos. Even when I told him about my plan, he didn’t want to come with me. Later he regretted to not having joined me for the little walk.
The silence, calmness, and serenity of this scene gives so much of power. A perfect start in such a week.
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Building a castle or a chateau in the clouds is an idiom in German for working on an obviously unrealistic dream. I’m quite sure, that idiom has its origin in distinct clouds and cloudscapes.
A few years ago, I was sitting on the balcony of our hotel room looking out at the sea and saw this castle, illuminated by the setting sun, floating up in our direction.
I was waiting there for the blue hour to photograph the castle. As I’m unable to read clouds, I wasn’t aware a thunderstorm was coming closer. Fortunately, it passed without starting to rain or throwing more bolts of lightning than this single one.
I experienced this dramatic sky when I was in Iceland. After more than a week of more or less constant rain, finally some light.
The most beautiful cloudscapes can be found at the sea.
But, clouds are also nice when they lay to your feet like a carpet.
Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between the sky and the sea.
As usual, click on the images to enlarge them.
Thanks, Amy for this wonderful challenge this week.
Maybe, I inspired you to dig in your archive and find some images, you can publish your images on your blog and set a link to Amy’s inspiration post. Don’t forget to tag it with LENS-ARTIST, so we can find it.
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On our last night on the Isle of Skye, we were sitting together in the living room of the vacation home and chatting about many different topics i.e. reviewing the just past week when suddenly the topic Astro Photography popped up.
When I started with photography back in the 1980s, I got a magazine in my hands having an image in it showing how the earth spun under the Northern Star, Polaris. I was fascinated at the first moment. I thought carefully, about how the photographer could have created that image, because there was no further information in the magazine.
Needed equipment:
So, that was the easier part. I opted for a slide file with ISO 400 and kept the shutter open for an hour. No problem at that time.
Surprise, surprise – the settings were guessed right and the spinning stars were on my slide as planned. Unfortunately, the lab decided to cut that slide because they assumed having an underexposed image in that place. Thus, I was still without such an image.
I took that image in a rural area, quite far away from my home. So, there was no option to retake it. Over time, I forgot it. But, on that night on the Isle of Skye, all these memories came back. I had everything with me. The only difference is the approach how to capture the starts. Back in film days, it was no problem to keep the shutter open for so long. Nowadays, you have to make sure, your sensor does not overheat. Therefore, you take many, many images of each 30 seconds or so and stack them in postprocessing. We were in a quite dark place on the Isle of Skye and had a clear sky. So, I set up my tripod, put my widest lens on my camera, and dialed in a timer to automatically do a series of 30-second long exposures for a total of about 15 minutes.
The image above is not perfectly aligned with Polaris, but I like it anyway.
Next week, I going to start a new series. You have the opportunity to choose:
a) Northern Wales – 70%
b) Iceland
c) Norway – 10%
d) Graubünden (a Kanton in Switzerland) – 20%
Simply type your wish in the comments. I don’t trust the polling tool below very much.
Update: the poll tool seem to have worked. I put the results behind the options-
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I took this image 14 years ago and I still love it.
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This was another mystery for me while walking on seemingly abandoned cemeteries in Scotland: why is the grass seemingly cut? Many of the cemeteries were not even. There were usually no buildings other than the abandoned chapels. It didn’t look like someone had used an electric power-driven lawn mower (how can one have done this without a power supply) or tracks of a fuel-driven lawn mower. On the other hand, the uneven ground would have made it extremely hard to use such a device. But, you can definitely see, the grass is very short.
Maybe we can see the reason in the back of this image: sheep! they are running around everywhere freely and you have to drive carefully because they don’t obey human rules on how to behave correctly in the streets and they don’t interact with the car drivers.
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