Ok, that was a narrow escape: handling a camera in the hospital’s waiting room while the best wife of all sits there with a luxated thumb, waiting to get x-rayed, *can* lead to a serious conflict. Lucky man that I am, it didn’t… But this dragon tree (dracaena draco), barely surving the lack of light…
Found in my hometown, where usually naked bottoms don’t get wiped in open public… Photographed in raw, converted in bibble5 with the Andrea plugin set to Tri-X, fine-tuned in gimp as bibble5 currently doesn’t support the perspective correction plugin. Other than that, it’s just having the camera at hand and reasonably pre-set.
Morag Paterson and Ted Leeming recently published an article on Luminous Landscape, titled The Light Fantastic – Capturing the Inner Sense of the Scottish Landscape. The image above is from their website leeming + paterson. This certainly is a special approach to landscape photography, away from what you might now from Charlie Waite or Ian…
I beg your pardon for that abrupt change of topics, let me assure that it’s not done on purpose. It’s just the fate of a family father and hobby photographer, who tries to see and photograph the special things wherever he goes, but cannot always follow his preferences – let’s say for quiet, mystic landscapes.…
Again from Thumsee, the magic place. The water of this lake is cold and very clear even in the summer, and now in the winter time the reflections on the jet black surface are just magical. Just to show you what it is like in the summer. And no, I don’t really suffer from winter’s…
Whilst downtown masquerade is the trend of the moment, only 5km out of town you can find incredibly quiet and almost achingly pure moments, like this ice on Thumsee. I created some more images today, but in my eyes nothing could match this quiet pattern of ice, hoarfrost and water. With this image I send…
With the Schengen treaty, de facto ending border controls for traffic inside the European Union, the advertising at the German-Austrian border for the casinos of Salzburg and other places lost most of its attention factor – no car has to wait here any more. The buildings of the former checkpost as well as this one…
For me the necessary balance for carnival’s blithesomeness. 30 minutes out at the shore of a pond, looking up into the grey clouds and sometimes getting a glimpse of the mountains above is real recreation, alas not a very companionable one. But there is time for every event under heaven, an appointed time…
Talk about secondary benefits: the kids had their fun catching sweets thrown from the windows and the balconies into the crowd, but I was much more interested in some snaps of the disguised figures. So I did, a welcome diversion from the cold landscapes that my photographical interest usually centers on in these days.
Update: I added a screenshot of bibble5 in action on this image. In the top row you find the thumbnail of the unmodified raw just right to the highlighted thumbnail. The effect of the LAB modification is the extreme narrowing of the blue and green values. The tint was achieved by moving the grey point…
My preference for shallow depth of field is well known, but of course it is not suitable for each and every subject. Since some time I am experimenting with means to transport the specific way in which the camera records to the viewer. Shallow depth of field is, as well as bokeh, a concept unknown…
Can’t help it: those fishermen on the ice of the Hintersee (a rare scenery in the Bavarian alps) made me immediately think of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in their famous movie.
The dreamy effect in the image above results from the lens wide open at f2.2. To get enough interesting detail I used the detail slider of lightzone – bibble5 currently offers no such tool. There was no toning necessary as the evening (non-)light with shutter speeds of 10 to 30s provided a natural blue toning.
This was one of the rare occasions where I dug out my summer lens, the venerable 16-80mm zoom. It renders very sharp images, but the slow f-stops from 3.5 to 4.5 make it quite unsuitable during our current short and dark winter days, especially when the sky is overcast. But here I could stop down…
The lake we are heading for in the summer is now a cold, almost lifeless place (besides that one bald coot trying to destroy the reflection). But for a walk it is attractive now, even more so when light snowfall dampens the noise of the cars. Having the tripod with me instead of the fashy…
Other than that, a veil can look magic, sometimes beautiful. I wish there would be a time where I could think more about artistic value than about political/intellectual implications. Oh yes, the image to the right shows the original situation, found in a shop window decorated for winter sale.
Lucky enough not having to drive my car over wintery roads, I got rewarded by the railway system with a perfect winter scenery. They really made my day.
As winter cold works its way towards spring time, the old leaves that survived autumn hanging on the twigs no loose more and more of their structure. The normal brown-black changes again and with the vanishing of parts of the cells brighter layers become visible for a short time. Rain and snow will wash them…
Last weekend was sort of a landmark in the change of the seasons: for the first time we had direct sunlight again in our kitchen since beginning of december last year, as now the sun higher on the horizon again. But the during the week work usually finishes only when it’s already dark again. Learning…
Going through some meagre days regarding the opportunity to photograph, I take what comes along the way. This one is from the music school concerto I was attending to hear my eldest daughter play piano. Well worth the time spent as she and her colleagues, some of them contestants for a state level competition, performed…
As Europe does not know the overly strict ‘No Trespassing’ signs, sometimes you can sneak a peek behind the things without too much risk. This is basically the backside of the hallway leading to the cinema in this post.
Winter in Bavaria was traditionally the time for ‘Stubnmusi’, where farmers and farm hands and maybe the teacher of a village came together to play music – in summer everybody was busy, so there was less occasion for a get-together or (bavarian) ‘Hoagascht’. Blessed with daughters who volunteered to learn instruments, I am a lucky…
Bad Reichenhall, Old Spa Center with concert hall. 42mme and f2.2 are sufficient to blur the background.