Tag: clouds

nature, photography, world

Lens-Artists Challenge #250: cloudscapes

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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.

fall, landscape, long exposure, nature, photography, travel, world

Throwback Thursday: working on my backlog

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For a couple of months, I work to reduce my backlog of undeveloped images whenever I have some spare time. Over the years, some (many) folders of undeveloped images found their way only to my external disk The oldest folder is dated from 2009 😲. In general, these folders contain quite often only images of flowers, birds, cats or so and nothing from more important trips. But, also a couple of trips are among these, just like the one, I’m talking about today.

Back in October 2014, I was in Flandern at the Belgium coast. A few images were already developed, but the majority were still waiting.

When looking at the image files, I remembered at once, why they were still waiting for development. Especially in the upper parts of the images, the sensor captured a lot of dust spots. I haven’t counted them, but I guess, each image had more than a hundred of these spots to be removed. Fortunately, I took those images raw, so that the removal didn’t cause any quality problems and the raw development software is so well developed to remove these spots in general without any glitches.

Although having dust spots is not that uncommon, the enormous number of them, I was faced with, is. You have to clean your sensor when photographing with a camera with interchangeable lenses regularly. Back in film days, you did this each time when putting a new film in. Now, having a digital sensor, the sensor has to be cleaned regularly. In case, you’re not familiar with this, drop me a comment below.

As I said, having dust spots is annoying but not uncommon. But, the camera I was using at that time, had a huge problem. Those spots were not only dust. In addition, each shutter release distributed a tiny amount of machine oil being used for the mechanical part of the shutter over the sensor. Fortunately, this issue was accepted by the manufacturer and a portion of this camera model based on a certain range of serial numbers was called back for repair. Also, I would have been glad, if the call back was much earlier.

Take care!

 

landscape, nature, photo-of-the-day, photography, spring, travel, world

Travel Tuesday: Drama!!

solaner

 

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Take care!

 

landscape, leisure, nature, photo-of-the-day, photography, review

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge 187: “water”

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This week, Anne is our host for LAPC. Her topic is water, a topic I wished for so long and would be mine, in case I were asked for a topic.

Without water, life on earth were impossible. At least, that kind of life, we know. But, water is extremely flexible. You can find it nearly everywhere and in many different appearances. When asking a physicist , she will tell you, water has 3 different appearances: solid, liquid, and gaseous. Thus, I try to show you all of them.

Ice, solid as a rock.

 

Water as a surface and above the surface: the sea, the rain, and the clouds.

 

Hot water releases steam.

 

 

Steam climbs up in higher regions and forms clouds.

 

When there is enough water in the air, it starts falling down: rain!

 

 

Some have fun in the rain.

Others have fun with snow, also a kind of solid water.

 

And rivers bring the water back to the sea.

Although some (many?) humans tend to complain about the rain, this is what it would look like without water:

Take care!

 

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architecture, art, culture, landscape, nature, photography, travel, world

Monochrome Madness 5-13 / 219

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Another image from Scotland. Eilean Donan Castle located in Loch Duich, next to the Skye-Bridge connecting the Isle of Skye to the Scottish main-land.

This is my contribution to Monochrome Madness organized by Leanne Cole.

“Monochrome Madness” is now in its fifth year of existence. Look at Leanne’s site on Wednesday (Australian time), to see many more monochrome images created by many other talented photographers from all over the world.

I’d also encourage you to participate. The conditions are  published in each of her Monochrome Madness posts.

Take care!