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Tag: blue hour
Wordless Wednesday: no-one at work?
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Throwback Thursday: On a winter hike
I took this image on Saturday before last. Near the end of this year’s winter. But starting in the beginning.
Friday night two weeks ago we got severe ice-rain. For a week we had temperatures below 0°C. So, the ground was frozen everywhere. The upper areas in the air were warmer than the lower so that we were supposed to get rain instead of snow. But, because of the frozen ground and the low temperatures in the lower air areas, the rain would freeze as soon as it reaches the ground. Very dangerous conditions, when out in the streets. All plants got wet and encased inside the ice because the rain started freezing right after coming to rest on the ground or on twigs as well as on the streets and passways.
The next day, the rain changed to snow and from Sunday the landscape turned into a winter wonderland. Very soft and quite dry snowflakes were laying everywhere, even in the lowlands. You know, I’m 200m above sea level. So, we get about 15-20 cm of snow that weekend. The next few days only a few additional flakes came to accompany those already arrived. Starting on Thursday, the weather changed again: the clouds vanished and the sun came out more and more. On Saturday we had a stainless blue sky, temperatures around -10°C (up -20°C at night).
Perfect conditions for a winter hike!
At around 16:30, when the sun was already quite low (sunset at 17:42), I noticed this golden glow in the trees. Do you remember, I told you about the ice-rain. These ice encasings are the reason, why the trees are capturing all the golden light and glowing so much.
Yesterday, I already showed you an image, how the ice encaged the twigs.
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Throwback Thursday: One night in Frankfurt
Recently, I was talking with someone about photography. Because that guy is living near Frankfurt, I was checking, where and when I published my images taken in Frankfurt. Surprisingly, they are not here on my blog. The posts are still online but don’t have any images in. I put the images on a separate gallery server that doesn’t exist anymore and set only a link to that location in the post. So, this is kind of a repost.
I was in Frankfurt for a training in November 2009. As I would have been alone in a hotel each night, I took my tripod and my camera with me and planned to go out after the training for taking some night shots in the city. That was my first trip for night photography. The difficulty is to balance the bright lights with the extreme darks while having quite long exposure times.
First I went to a certain skyscraper where you can go on top of the building to have a view over the city. The sky was proposing, unfortunately, it was extremely windy. Setting up my tripod as planned was impossible. The wind simply moved the tripod away. So, I dialed in a quite high ISO to get my shots hand-held without the tripod. The ultra-wide-angle lens allowed me to use a quite open aperture to get a good depth of field and still have the exposure time on a handleable value for hand-holding the camera despite the heavy wind.
At that time, I wasted a lot of quality not only because I had to use high ISO instead of my tripod. I also relinquished to photograph in RAW instead of JPG. For this post, I took out the original images and retouched them as much as possible. But, there was not much possible to recover.
Whenever possible, go the extra mile and photograph in raw. You have so much more quality.
After leaving the tower I also walked a bit through the city. Now, I was able to use my tripod. These images are taken at ISO 200 and aperture times of several seconds each.
What have I learned from that trip?
- use RAW!!!!!
- I should have split that trip into parts to have the nice blue night-sky in all images
- I should have closed the aperture more to get nice stars around the small lights
- I should have taken more than one shot with different exposure times while leaving the other settings unchanged (bracketing)
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Lens-Artists Challenge #90 – Distance
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 Photo Challenge #89: A river runs through it
This week, it’s Amy’s turn at Lens-Artists photo challenge and she challenges us with “a river runs through it“.
this image is from 2010 when I was visiting Praha and the river Vltava.
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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #72 – Waiting
Another week of Lens-Artists Photo Challenge. This week’s topic is “waiting” and Tina wrote a few paragraphs to explain her idea.
Here is my story:
Back in the 1980s when I had my first car I persuaded my younger brother to go with me to France for a photo trip along the river Loire and visiting all the famous chateaus. For the end of that trip, a visit to medieval town Mt. St. Michel was planned. Mt. St. Michel is built on an island near the coast between Brittany and Normandy. At that time I had my first job and a car. My younger brother was still at school but he was able to speak french. So, without him, I wouldn’t be able to travel to France. At that time, the French were considered to only speak French and nothing else. I don’t know the reason anymore, why we canceled that trip. But, later I was sure of never seeing Mt St. Michel.
In January 2009 I joined a group of photographers. Each first Saturday of a month we’re meeting for photography trips in our area. Although we’re living distributed over nearly half of our state, we’re able to meet. The organization and planning are done via the internet.
Over time some friendships grew among some of us. We even organized some trips to locations a bit further away and for quite longer durations than one afternoon a month. In 2011 we used a public holiday (a Thursday) for a trip to Brittany. While planning the week, I came up with my long-time dream of visiting Mt. St. Michel. I even was able to persuade the others, despite the quite long distance from our vacation home at the Côte d’Emeraude. We were traveling with 2 private cars. Unfortunately, two of us were unable to start with the other on the same day and stay the full week. Instead, they started on Wednesday after work and arrived late that evening, while we others already had 4 days of driving around and seeing some parts of that area, including Rennes.
When they arrived, they told us about the fantastic sky at sunset and that they were near Mt. St. Michel when the sky turned red for sunset. So, they decided to take a photo stop at Mt. St. Michel 😢 I felt terrible when they told us about this. Mt. St. Michel was so near to me and the chance for canceling the planned visit was increasing rapidly. But, the previews on their camera displays made the other eager to want to go to Mt. St. Michel, too. Tides are turning 😀
Finally, the next day we headed to Saint-Malo first and later that day to Mt. St. Michel. Walking up the hill was a fantastic experience. I felt like thrown back in the medieval age. Unfortunately, the town was very, very crowded.
In the end, I was able to get this image (and a few more – but I love this one most). I have printed it and it’s hanging in our living room. At the same time, the others were in a pop-up theatre attending the opera Madame Butterfly right at the foot of the hill. When we arrived they were persuaded by a sales agent to use that night for a once-in-a-lifetime experience watching the Puccini opera in an open-air opera near that centuries-old town. I refused to accomplish them. My plan was very different and you know, why. 😀
It was kind of hard, to find a spot where the pop-up theater won’t ruin my image.
But, I found one 😀
You see, I had to wait about 25 years to see this iconic town.
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Throwback Thursday: Bodelschwingh Mansion
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Throwback Thursday: Lisbon
This time, three years ago, I was in Lisbon. Time to remember. There are still many undeveloped images on my disk. I have an enormous backlog 😦
Carnival is a huge event in our region. I guess, I mentioned this fact several times here in my blog. With a few friends, I flee these days as often as possible. Most times, we head to the warmer south.
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Throwback Thursday: Room with a view
DX 18mm (~27mm) 1/50s, f/3.5, ISO 800
11/05/2011
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Throwback Thursday: Dresden Frauenkirche
FX, 22mm, f16, 6s, ISO 100
Once Dresden was the capital of the Saxon kingdom. The last king had to resign in fall 1918.
At the end of WWII huge parts of Dresden were destroyed by the allied air-force bombs, but after the war they were rebuild and reconstructed. The last reconstructed building was the Frauenkirche from 1994 – 2005. The reconstruction costed about 180 million Euro. Donators collected 115 million Euro, while the city government and the state government covered the remaining 65 million Euro.
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Throwback Thursday: tram station
2012, May 16th
HDR / DRI by tone mapping 3 images -1, 0 an +1 EV
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Throwback Thursday: good night
Jan. 5th, 2009 16:31h
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