spring2life take2

It’s still way too warm for the season. Last week it was like an experiment of snowfall, but it ended after three hours with barely noticable sludge on the streets. But the light is grey and tints the remaining leaves and fruits during the day.

Only at night, when the Christmas decoration starts to scintillate, some more warm tones mix into the de-energizing grey and pale blue. But there still remains beauty to be discovered, and new details get revealed to be savoured. Sometimes feeling chilly I enjoy the days.

More leaves, less words. These pictures seem to become more interesting the more time I spend editing and closely looking at them. And not only on the main subject, the leaves, but also on the way they interact with their environment. Can’t help it – I really like those images.

Despite of the frost the bramble leaves have kept a marvellous deep red, so deep that indeed I decided to turn down the saturation a bit in order to avoid an artificial ‘vivid’ look that was significantly enhanced by the warm sunrise light. The birch leaves did not need such treatment, their thick and meanwhile dry material does not glow to the same extent as the bramble’s do.

The Stihl sound is quite different from the steel guitar sound, despite of similar sounds of the words. The first one is giving these days an almoust continous concerto. It’s end is not yet foreseeable as the trees still have good stock of leaves to distribute.

Oh, and if you wont to see wonderful portrait of a single leaf, hurry to head over to the Capture this blog of Laurie Jackson. Definitely worth a look!

Not related to today’s historical date, these maple leaves grabbed my attention because of their graphical complementarity.

Maybe I am overdoing it with my faible for low DoF, but then I find the autumn leaves in that context really wonderful – beauty not in a grain of sand but in a single leaf, alone or against just the idea of a background, blurred to an extend where the colors only signal the wonders of an autumnal forest.

are the leaves for all the house managers and municipal workers – at least it seems so. Only hours after heavy gusts of wind had poured down all the fruits from beeches and chestnuts, together with some leaves, the leaf blowers/suckers started a concerto grosso, underpinned by the diesel growl of the road sweeping vehicle. Autumn music that is.

A lazy day at the lake and not much to photograph until I saw the wind play with the leaves of that japanese maple tree (acer japonica). Here in Europe they are quite popular in the gardens because of that wonderful red of their leaves even in the midst of summer.

The image alone I found not interesting enough, but that development from the static leaves, suddenly showing their bright underside in a gust of wind and heavily shaking when the wind becomes still stronger, that was it for me.

since i bought my first dslr in 2005 i am lusting for a 1.4/85mm lens just to indulge in my passion for shallow dof and fine bokeh. for the minolta a-mount, taken over by sony without modifications, this lens is available in zeiss brand for a zeiss price and used in a variety of minolta makes for less then half the price, but still hefty. just recently i’ve got permission from my departement of finances, but since then not a single reasonable priced specimen showed up on *bay. the strange thing now is that am not too shure anymore that i really need it. and i learned to get my airy discs by using the existing lenses, which means that i do not have to carry an additional piece of glass, which is not too bad either.

sorry, i simply had to use this pun now. the light at the moment is gorgeous, especially if the sky is scattered with clouds and the backlight is less pungent and more revealing. even the lens flaws (my not-often-enough-used tamron 11-18) and the raw conversion problems don’t stop me to include the direct sun in the picture. f22 makes up for a nice star effect even without any criss-cross-filter – i do well remember the hype around those in the 80th of last century.

the animals enjoy the fresh pasture, too. this white stallion grazes at schleicherhof, subject of yesterday’s post, and enjoys its charity. with probably 30 years (24 according to the horse trader, but popular wisdom here in germany recommends to never believe a horse trader) there is no work any more, maybe a bit posing for the kids and the tourists, not to forget the photographer.

kind of a retro mood for soft and unobtrusive colors caught me today. maybe one of the reasons are paul butzi’s post what makes you a photographer and paul lester’s the beauty of the everyday. for a balanced, full life, savouring the very moment without peering for the abnormal, extraordinary is a warranty for success. and to cherish these feelings, to appreciate those unspectacular moments, one of the best things to do that i know is taking a walk in the pre-alpine hills. even 15 minutes can suffice like in sunday’s visit to the hospital, where the nanny of our daughters is recovering after serious heart problems.

the light was soft, but i wanted to have an even softer impression so i carefully desaturated the reds of the roofs and only very minimally intensified the foreground grass a little bit. the picture meets the mood of this walk very well.

after winter came back into our valley for three days and brought some fresh snow, i used some free hours to go back to weissbach canyon to look for water and ice. those layers above covered several square meters of rocks. in the end they stopped my exploring of the canyon as they were impossible to cross, but the made a really good subject for a picture. this one is in fact a combination of four single shots in helicon focus to achieve overall sharpness. some massaging in lightzone helped to guide the eye a bit.

the image to the right was taken at the same spot. the forms of the frozen leaves and the harsh shadows remind me of some long forgotten letters.

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after the storm has been ebbing, i dared to go out again without having to fear flying branches or roof tiles. winds were still fierce so I captured the moving leaves.

a second try where the shaking spring snowflakes here. So my new tripod proved to be a stable support for the camera even in such windy situations. the strange thing is that nobody of my friends shares my joy about the tripod. everbody tries to avoid using one whenever possible. but my impression is that some shots i would have never gotten without one, some shots come out a lot sharper, and, the most important thing: it slows me down! i take more time to think and afterwards to chimp and check the composition on the display and i got the feeling that overall it’s sometimes worth the hazzle.

a firewall in petting, a small village on the shore of lake waging. exposed to north west and getting sun only late in the afternoon, the virginia creeper showed all colors from deep green over blue to red and yellow.

postprocessing this image, i did not touch the saturation but only adjusted brightness and contrast and added a small amount of local contrast enhancement plus refocus sharpening in digikam.