It’s mid of May. So, we’re in the middle of spring. To be honest, usually, spring starts in March over here outdoors, sometimes even in late February. First trees getting their leaves, spring flowers are blooming, temperatures are rising, and blue skies replace the grey blanket above our heads.
This year, we have spring flowers, but quite late and the trees are getting their leaves, but the temperature won’t rise. We still have temperatures between 10°C and zero. The sky is merely still grey without any structure and it’s drizzling very often. Not much rain, but enough to annoy us, while nature does not benefit because the amount is too small.
In German, we have a weather rule “Der April weiß nicht, was er will” (April does not know what he wants). This describes the overall fast-changing weather conditions we experience in April. Even snow and ice are still possible and could possibly remain for a few hours. But, the overall statistics say, April 2023 was colder and wetter in comparison with the average since the beginning of weather recording more the 100 years ago.
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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What a spectacular sight. While raining, the sun was able to shine through a hole in the clouds. Upfront, fog-like conditions because of the dense rain combined with the bright light of the sun. I’ve never seen such conditions before.
In March 2010 I was in Frankfurt again. Again, I was there for a training and again I brought my tripod and my camera for taking some night shots in the city. But, this time I went along the river instead of heading between the skyscrapers.
I’m presenting the images here although they are not so good to visualize certain mistakes I did at that time.
The time of the day was right and the horizon is balanced. But, the verticals near the sides are not vertical. They are leaning to the center of the image. That’s because of the wide-angle lens. The images are taken with a camera having an APS-C sensor and an 18-105 mm zoom lens at 18mm. Because of the height of the buildings I had to tilt the lens upwards on the tripod which results in this ugly appearance. At that time I didn’t have the tools and the knowledge to correct it in post-processing.
The next problem here is the nearly burnt-out highlights. As I wrote in my last post on night-photography in Frankfurt, I should have made more than one image of each setting with slightly different aperture times while leaving all other settings untouched. My camera at that time already had the ability to use bracketing for such images, but I wasn’t aware of it. Thanks for using raw instead of JPG, I was at least able to recover a little bit, but for the price of some noise (especially in the last one, which is also taken too late).
APS-C 24mm (~37mm), ISO 200, f16, 4s
APS-C 18mm (~27mm), ISO 200, f16, 13s
APS-C 18mm (~27mm), ISO 200, f16, 4s
APS-C 18mm (~27mm), ISO 200, f16, 13s
APS-C 58mm (~87mm), ISO 200, f16, 4s
So, when looking from today at these images, I have to say, I should return to Frankfurt and redo the job! In this post you can see (no, it’s not Frankfurt but some other night shots) how these images should look like when having done the job properly. I also explain the necessary technic in more detail over there.
Did you ever have such a review on old images of yours? Not only looking at them but reviewing and analyzing them with your current knowledge. It can help you a lot to make some progress. Do so with some distance. Keep out any memories (sweet or bad) and all emotions. Look at the lights, the darks, the horizon, and the overall composition. Be critical and name all the things you either made good or bad. Compare your images with similar images you can find online i.e. at Flickr. Ask yourself, could I do better in comparison with the other images? What could I do better? What are the reasons for the differences?
In case, you want to have an independent review, you can book me for an hour or so and we can discuss your images during an online session.
We got this quite often, while driving around on the Isle of Skye. Fortunately, we only get soaking wet once and were able to do every trip we had planned.
Hands up for the weekend! Half of the weekend is over. So it’s time for the Lens-Artists photo challenge and Patti challenges us with the Letter “A”.
adolescent
astonishing
art
artist
above
art
alone
action
awakening
Advent
aurora
arriving
apple
astro
This was a very hard one, at least for me as a non-native speaker. Many things popped up in my mind, but none of them was an English word beginning with the letter “A”.
For this week’s challenge, Tina really challenged at least me. In her text she explained, we should use this challenge to show something of us to share with the community that is describing a part of us not that well-known to the audience. This is harder than expected.
Finally, I’ve chosen this image taken more than 10 years ago at a funfair in one of our neighboring towns.
I still love this image. I love the movement surrounding my main subject. I also love changing conditions while photographing: light, movement, ambient. I guess that’s why I love photographing outdoors, wildlife, or moving water.
I filed this image to a competition and won the 3rd prize: being part of an exhibition and money to spend on a certain big and important funfair in our region.
This image is taken with my first DSLR, a very slow working camera, and shot in JPG. I wasn’t happy with that camera and its limitations. I owned it on that day for only about a month. I kept it for less than half a year. It had an APS-C sensor and came with 2 kit lenses: 18-55 and 55-200. The whole kit was lightweight and slow (AF as well as the power-on process). Even the saving process lasted quite long. My old film SLR was using 35mm file. So, you would call it full-frame nowadays. For my film SLR, I owned 3 lenses for that camera: 28-70, 70-210, and a 60mm macro lens. When converting the focal lenses of the DSLR, you would result in 24-82 and 82-300. I’m using an SLR camera since 1984. Some of my first own earned money went into it.
It’s time for The Lens-Artists Photo Challenge again. Our host this week is Ann-Christine and she asks for things we can found in our neighbourhood. On one hand, this is an easy topic. But, on the other hand, I’d like to have known this theme in advance to prepare some images for you. So, I have to pick them from my archive.
You know, we’re in a lockdown light here. Therefore, our photographers roundtable last Saturday also switched to online and I could now simply show the images from that post again.
All these images are taken in a area max 5 km away from my home. Some of them are even taken in our front- or backyard. Despite the lockdown rules, it would ne possible to visit each of these places now.
For Lens-Artists Photo challenge our guest host Ana of Anvica’s Gallery is asking for images showing positivity after the dark. Here we have a saying “the sun will shine again after the rain.” Many people are complaining about rainy days. But, they forget without rain nothing would grow. When nothing is growing, we wouldn’t exist. So, the rain is as necessary as the sun. The cold is as important as warmth and death has the same importance as birth.
10 years ago, overnight we got a lot of snow. About half a meter in just a couple of hours. For years we didn’t get that much of snow. Since then, we got some snow, but not that much and not in that short amount of time. When I’m remembering correctly, there were even years without any snow. In a past post, I wrote a bit more about the environmental conditions for my region. You can find it here.
The landscape looks very nice when covered with (freshly fallen) snow, but on the streets, the snow is very dangerous. I makes the streets slippery, so you can fall down easily and the stopping distance of vehicles becomes much longer.
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