Tag: sun

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

Throwback Thursday: working on my backlog

solaner

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!

 

photography, summer, travel, world

Throwback Thursday: nightfall in the Etosha pan

solaner

Even at night, the water hole attracts wild animals: elephants, giraffes, rhinos, and others are coming to get their share of water. Live isn’t possible without water. When visiting such dry areas, you can learn how valuable water is and that dystopias from the 1970 and 1980 where wars are started to get access to water might become reality very soon. 

Take care!

 

abstract, landscape, photo-of-the-day, photography, plants, seasons, winter, world

Monochrome Monday 8-47

solaner

I took this image two weeks ago. The trees were still without any leaves. So, the sunlight was able to reach the ground and paint interesting patterns on the ground. You can enlarge it, when clicking on the image, as usual.

 

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It’s sometimes hard to find images fitting to a certain challenge. For these tasks, I’m using the help of Excire Foto. I told the software where my image library is located and it starts analyzing the images. It recognizes the main colors in the images as well as the contents (what is in the images) and tags them automatically. Later, I can use the user interface to search for images with certain tags. Currently, you can save a few bucks when ordering Excire Foto, because it’s on sale. With coupon Code SPRING-30 you can save 30%.

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Take care!

landscape, nature, photography, travel, world

Who bit in the cookie or is it Pacman?

solaner

No, it’s Solar eclipse 2021 in the middle of Germany!

This time with good weather and perfect sight, compared to 2015 or 1999. Unfortunately, it’s only a partial eclipse like in 2015.

My first solar eclipse was in 1999 when the moon covered the whole sun and only left a small bright ring. It took place in August, but the weather conditions were not good. But, it was still impressive. It became noticeable colder and darker and birds stopped singing.

This time, we only had a small coverage as you can see in the image. It’s taken at the moment when the eclipse was at its maximum. Thus, the effects were not noticeable. Without a special solar filter, this eclipse was not noticeable at all.

Btw. I’m currently running a raffle. You can win a license of Excire Foto. Check it out!

Take care!

art, culture, photo-of-the-day, photography

Lens-Artists Photo Challange 126: Letter “A”

solaner

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”.

Take care!

 

art, culture, photo-of-the-day, photography

Lens-Artists Photo Challange 125: “You pick it”

solaner

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.

Take care!

 

art, culture, photo-of-the-day, photography

Lens-Artists Photo Challange 123: “found in the neighbourhood”

solaner

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.

Take care!

 

nature, photo-of-the-day, travel, Uncategorized, world

Throwback Thursday: another photographers roundtable during lockdown

solaner

You know as a regular reader, I’m part of a monthly photographers roundtable. We’re meeting each first Saturday of a month for a photowalk in our region. Under the current condition and rules, although we don’t have a complete lockdown as we had in spring, that’s not possible. So we had a Zoom meeting combined with an exercise to be done during the week before the meeting.

This time I picked a theme for all of us instead of selecting a card from the Inspiracle card deck. Each of has can show up to 5 images wherein a maximum of 2 is allowed to be taken from the archive. We’re in November and in the northern hemisphere, this month is considered dark, unfriendly, and depressing. In Germany, we have a couple of memorial days during November dedicate to the death. When now the Mexican “Día de los Muertos” comes to your mind, you’re completely wrong. Check the link above to learn a bit more about these memorial days. Because of this background, it came to my mind the give us “fading, transient, transience” as a theme for the exercise.

Here are my results:

only the skeleton remains a bit longer

 

make fading sounds visible

 

the flame of a match doesn’t exist for a long time

 

this icy decoration will not stand the rising sun

 

morning fog in its beauty down by the river

 

vanishing smoke

 

the amazing beauty of an aurora changes fast

The first 4 images are taken for the exercise, while the others are from my archive.

Take care!

art, culture, photo-of-the-day, photography

Lens-Artists Photo Challange 122: “The Sun will come out Tomorrow”

solaner

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.

Take care!