Swans in a Rush
As I mentioned on Sunday’s post Schlei close to Ulsnis was full of birds – shelducks, all kind of waders and one cormorant, seen with opened wings in the photo to the right.
I used the geese and swans that were passing by to practise some panning. The light was fading and allowed for some longer shutter speeds to follow the birds in their movement. The result were a lot of photos for the trash, but two of them actually worked (not bad for being the first time, I’d say). The first one is at the top of this post, the second one is shown here.
The photo was taken at 1/40 second, with f16 and ISO 400 on a tripod. The title photo has the same settings, with a slightly more open aperture at f11.
More from the Beach
I ran some more of the weekend’s photos through vignette, my favourite camera app for my android phone. Vignette is by far the best camera app for Android that I’ve found so far. A lot of effects and no functions I’m missing (so far).
Winter in the Moor
As promised, here comes the second part of my winter walk from two weeks ago (ahh the time…). I love several of the shots in the moor. A place that I’ll definitely revisit. I didn’t know it before, even though it is not that far away from here.
Here is the slide show, enjoy!
Winter Forest Way
Before the snow masses came Winter showed his friendly side last Saturday, covering the area in beautiful white frost. I went for a walk on a forest way and through a moor close to here. This is what I saw in the forest (the moor photos will follow soon):
Overlooked Beauty
There are times when you get surprised by your surroundings. Such was the case when Vanessa and me where on one of our spontaneous trips to go “somewhere” lately. We ended in a beautiful natural area just some 30 minutes north from here.
Since long we wanted to go to the lake Treßsee, which is giving birth to one of the three big rivers in northern Schleswig-Holstein, the Treene (the other two are Sorge and Eider, Schleswig-Holsteins longest river).
View Treßsee in a larger map
It was already evening when we arrived, but still some time until the sun would set. We wanted to see the lake, so we went straight in it’s direction, until these fellows changed our plan:
With their looks they didn’t really win our trust, even less as they had a little calf in their group. These cows live relatively freely in a big area, which is surrounded by a fence. It is allowed and possible to pass, but on your own responsibility, as they state on the signs. So, we were heading to some hills instead to get a better view.
The view was really good, we could see the whole valley of the lake (but not the lake itself), and were surrounded by some beautiful flowers.
As we were sitting on the little bench on top of one of the hills (Van) or crawling through the grass around that bench (me) we got a visitor. A small deer (roe, German Reh) was munching it’s path through the fields, until it was less than 10 meters away from us. I barely dared to take photos of it, not to scare it with the shutter sound. It noticed us, watched at us and continued, until eventually it got suspicious and got further away from us again.
Those are the moments I love when being out in the nature.
And it kept getting better: The eastern sky was filled with dark clouds, while the low sun appeared between the clouds in the west, painting the hills in beautiful dramatic light, and even a rainbow appeared.
The next highlight was the insect life in the high grass. We found a wonderful blue butterfly, which was posing as a model for minutes, we already feared it was dead until it flew away.
Grasshoppers and damselflies were around as well and stayed calm long enough to be captured.
Now the sun was about to set, which led to some moody photos in beautiful purple-ish colors. We could watch a second deer from the top of a higher hill, or maybe it was the same one? It would have had to surround us then, though.
This is not the Treßsee, by the way, but a smaller one beside. We never got to see the Treßsee, though… this one offered some spectacular reflections:
After surrounding the whole are by car we could take a last look from the same point where
I had taken the panorama on top just some hours ago. What a dramatic difference!
A place we will visit many more times, I’m sure! We will already try this weekend – last Saturday I saw the hills from far, and they were shining in purple, covered by heath plants.
From idea to finish: Grass in the wind
A good image does not always present itself immediately. On the contrary, often enough it is the result of approaching a subject that seems to have some interest, trying different angles and crops and finishing the image in post-processing. In this series I want to show my thought-process from the first glimpse to the final image. I don’t plan to publish articles in this series on a regular schedule, but when I have a bunch of photos that are good examples of this process I will discuss it here.
When I was out on a photo walk through a nearby forest and the surrounding fields I saw this grass growing between the way and a field with cut grass. The light breeze made some of the stalks move, while some stronger ones remained relatively steady.
The first try can be called nothing more than a snap-shot. Initially, I was taking photos of the scene behind it. The focal lenght (95mm) and the high aperture value (f22) don’t concentrate the eye on what matters: the grass moving in the wind. The high aperture value was needed to make the movement visible with 2 seconds of exposure time (at ISO 100).
The first obvious improvement to make was getting closer. Keeping the tripod on the same place I zoomed all the way in to 200mm, concentrating the eye more to the grass. Being closer, I could chose a shorter shutter speed to show movement.
But still there are several things wrong here: I chose a 1 second exposure. In situations like this it is a matter of trying until the balance between movement and sharpness. Here 1 second is too long. Everything is moving, which is not what I had envisioned. The aperture value of f18 is still too high, leaving the image too dark and the background too sharp at the same time.
Another thing: Even if I am closer to the grass, I am not close enough. There is too much going on in the lower part of the image, distracting the eye from the moving heads I wanted to show.
To find my final crop I moved the tripod a bit closer and lower, thus having the darker part of the field as a background for the brighter grass. This one is getting quite close to what I wanted. The focus is on the moving grass.
Still – it could be better: I opened the aperture (f10) to blur the background more, but still it is quite present. At 0.3 seconds the exposure is a bit too dark. The other “issue” is that there is too much grass in movement – even if I like how that movement is captured, I miss something to rest the eye.
This is what I came up with in the end. I opened the aperture to f8, while keeping the exposure time at 0.3 seconds, and waited for a moment with less wind. The grass in the foreground is almost still, while there is movement going on in the back. The image shows dynamics. Plus, the field in the background is reasonably out of focus. I am quite happy with the image.
When watching it on the computer I liked the subtle green colors, but wanted to concentrate more on the movement and contrast of dark and bright areas going on here. In Lightroom I converted the photo to black and white and increased both Exposure and Blacks quite a lot to pronounce highlights and shadows. Watching the image in color now would be eye-blinding (I tried). But in black&white it is just right for me. I added a sublte split toning with yellowish highlights and blueish shadows to increase the contrast a bit more, using the settings seen at the left.
The result is the image seen at the top of this post.
While I am discussing here in quite a detailed form what led me to the final result, these are mostly thoughts that came while watching the images and analyzing why I liked the last one more than the others. When I am outside shooting my thoughts are more like “Nah.” or “Hm, quite nice. Let’s try another one.” (or the German equivalents). It is more about feeling, and for me it was interesting to see why I felt about the photos the way I did.
