Blog // Page 224 // Markus Spring Photography

Church of Anger, dominating the Village

bavaria still is one of the roman-catholic heartlands. no politician will stand a chance opposing the church – the green party at the moment has to learn this the hard way, it seems. this domination was in former times even a physical one, as you can see in this picture: the church really towering over a village of maybe 10² houses.

This image needed some more postprocessing: removing CA with gimp, adding saturation to the not so blue sky, incrementing local contrast etc. i am still amazed about the performance of this budget/lightweight/small tamron lens.

more barley and poppy flowers

that excursion last saturday was extremely satisfying in terms of both the process and the outcomes. so here are two more poppy flower vs. barley shots. never before i had used the macro capabilities of my new tele zoom, but here, for the shallow depth of field, it is really indispensable. in a severe attack…

poppy flowers in a barley field

getting up early to catch the first light was definitely the right thing to do today, as the sky became overcast before noon and stayed like this until the evening. i finally got over my feeling of inertia which quite often strucks me after my missions to sri lanka: so many contradicting emotions overwhelm me,…

“no damage here after tsunami”

“no damage here after the tsunami”. i was astonished, as this area was flat, not far from the beach, but our companion from the municipal administration repeated it. so i started asking for explanations and after some minutes it turned out: people here had been poor before the tsunami, the loss of their huts didn’t…

tsunami traces III

since the tsunami of december 2004 those women live with their families in temporary shelters: that means huts with corrugated tin sheets as roof, maybe one and a half rooms, cooking outside, toilets and washing facilites shared with a big number of other families. while this may look bearable under warm and sunny conditions, in…

Tsunami Traces II

the tsunami devastated Sri Lanka more than 3.5 years ago. it’s traces can still be seen in the faces of the people. that man to the right, probably 15 years younger than me, lives and works next to the place he lost his family, barely 50m away from the shoreline. conversation was difficult, so he…

kalmunai fishermen

first post after 17 days. not that i had given up photography or was just lazy. no, i was simply without network connect – thanks to my administration which didn’t bother to come up with a gprs connection for my mobile (only applied for it 5 months ago) – in eastern sri lanka on a…

three graces

taken during our holidays in croatia. whilst the color version is interesting in its own, i do like the graphical effect of the black and white here even more as it leads the eye more to the curve of the heads. this abstract portrait i love for the patterns and shadows and clear areas. i…

lammeröfen

flare obviously is a weak spot of the tamron 11-18, on the other hands the situation present was pretty extreme and the front lens not completely clean. oh yeah, there is something to learn from every shot… the rock formation down there is really gorgeous and i decided to come back in june to get…

more tulips

White tulips in the spa gardens, Bad Reichenhall

untypical for tulips, these are white. my favourite raw editor lightzone, which is now available as a commercial and supported product for linux – thanks lightcrafts – proved to be an excellent tool to just enhance the local contrast in the one focused tulip. the shot was taken with a more than 20 year old…

wild cherry trees

rainy day, subdued light, so the Father’s day was not a overly buoyant affair. still the walk with my nephew and his hour-long talk about the playstation and the possible hacks (oh how far away am i from a boy’s hobbies – my toys are much more expensive at least) were some fun. he silently carried my tripod and never complained when i was stopping for a picture.
the different kinds of green and the white of the cherries make up for a great scenery. this image again did teach me that close framing helps to concentrate what i really want to show. i was negligent when shooting, so i had to to re-compose through cropping.

think pink

think pink was a mountaineering related slogan some 20 years ago, connecting environment awareness with fashion and style. searching the web turned out that it still exists in both senses, however i could not find statement about it’s importance nowadays (again in both senses…) here this title is to take literally, thanks to the tulips…

willow over weissbach

what a wonderful world: convinced my wife and the kids to walk along the whole weissbach canyon. ok, there was a wholesome goal, mauthäusl inn, with a terasse overlooking part of the canyon, and the prospect of an icecream worked more than accelerative. and we had a break in the canyon, which offered the opportunity…

evening sky

one of the rare occasions i did more to a picture than dodgin/burning/sharpening aka. their equivalents in lightzone. the red light on top of the antenna mast was there, but not as prominent as it is now. in the the evening light and so much out-of-focus, it is a mere glow in the raw file.…

wing tsun

the first time i made really use of the blue hour and the my old zoom. focused to close distance, wide open, the bokeh really becomes great. which is no wonder at the other hand as there are no diaphragm blades involved. again, anti-shake saved my day as handholding 320mm effective focal length at 1/20s…

it’s raining again

ok, so what do you expect from april. but this weather definitely has its photographic merits, too. technically i feel a bit suspended in mid-air at the moment. my favourite raw editor, lightzone is available for linux only as a time limited public beta at the moment. only 5 days left and still no official…

spring in the city II

yesterday was commuting day. spring in the city is so different and, at least for me, partially depressing when the songs of the birds mingle with the traffic noise. but optically it has it’s merits, translating trees into patterns, creating trompe l’oeil like bird silhouettes, bending straight lines, mixing coating colors of the glass with…

guilty

i confess, i confess, i confess: i too am guilty of the inevitable spring flower macros, encroaching the photographic websites from all directions now. ok, flickr has always high times for flower shots, and a lot of people turn up their nose on this. but even andreas manessinger already found himself seduced by flowers again……

chasing the biker

as it is brighter now when i leave the office, more photogenic sceneries show up. waiting for the bus, large numbers of bikers, ringing their bells, chased the waiting passengers from the bike lane. across the street, the scenery was different – the biker graffiti seemed to get chased by the cars. spring in the…

Weißbach flowing

recently i had discussions with colleagues of the local photo group about moving water in photography. there are obviously two fractions: flow haters aka. freeze lovers and soft flow lovers. whilst the latter enjoy the extension to the human eye in form of the camera’s ability to show the movement of the water, the first…

snow and fence

a lesson in ‘learning to see’. i had a bland image on my monitor, taken when i was quite tired at the end of an excursion with the family. i remembered that i had taken it because of the beautiful curve of the fence posts and the shadow curves of the fence’s wire, but there…

north face over schwarzbach

easter monday i got some free time and went to an alpine meadow near the ‘queralpenstrasse’ (alpine transversal road) just 20min far from home. under the north face of Reiteralm there was still a lot of snow, and from time to time avalanches broke free high above our heads. the woods here have suffered a…

Now tell me, is this easter?

it started to snow on good friday, but the climax was today: 20cm of fresh snow everywhere. ok, not that i would mourn the fate of the pollen that already caused me heavy allergic coryza, but still…

salzburg from mönchsberg

back to salzburg after a long time, and for the first time on the mönchsberg. the weather was fine for a short time and the sun already low at 3:00 pm which caused fine shadows and a great plasticity in the structures below. my favourite is this jumble of roofs and chimneys, lined up along…

parking tickets

the old sycamore tree with its expressive figure and cortex iuxtaposes nicely the oh so mundane ‘parking tickets’ signboard. lightzone again proved to be a valuable tool to darken the background a little bit and except it from the sharpening algorithms. the second shot is the shadow of St. Ägidius church here in Bad Reichenhall.…