Merry Christmas
Posted on Dezember 24th, 2013
How was this photo created? Neither is it a photomontage nor is behind me a street or a village. I took this image at the Sämtisersee in the Alpstein. To reach this place I had to walk a steep path up to this high plateau and there was also no tree where I can photograph, no no. I had to take the tree, the lamps and all the decorations with me. After I was there I build up the tree and waited for the right light, when it’s dark enough to see the lamps and the landscape still bright enough to see it and the sky has a beautiful sunset touch.
You know my motto: Nothing is to far to get a good image!
I wish you a merry Christmas for you and yours and a relaxing time!
A mountain jackdaw
Posted on Dezember 23rd, 2013
I was marveling the mountain panorama, as a mountain jackdaw came down and sitting near me on the balustrade. As a photographer I am, I was delighted about the model and hold on it. Nice bird with a nice background.
But beware, they are very dangerous! When you are sitting outside, enjoying the nature and you hear the scream of a mountain jackdaw… Then it’s maybe to late. Your jacket, your head or more worse your eye is full of the white sauce out of the sky! Trust me, I know what I’m talking about…
The harbor of Bergen
Posted on Dezember 22nd, 2013
As you know, I like the night for photowalks. So I tooked the opportunity at my stay in Bergen to shoot some pictures. I walked along the Bryggen houses, you can see on the left side until I reached a place with a good sight to the harbor and the old part of the town. To get best image I shoot several bracket series with different exposures and f-stops. At the end I took more than only three images. For the sea I used the longest shot, for the smoothest surface I can get. And for the next time, when I am shooting some images with water, I will use the bulb mode to get longer exposer time than only 30 seconds for a much smoother surface than on this image.
Watching the full moon
Posted on Dezember 21st, 2013
Another image of my early night shooting phase. We spend a weekend in Arosa, a ski resort in Switzerland, before the big snow was falling and ski season starts. At the day I was walking with my dear buddy bubu, you know him and watching where I could get some nice starscapes in the night. Because this was in my testing phase and my wife wouldn’t be amused, when I stay the whole night outside the hotel room, I was looking for a place where I could drive by car and don’t need walking to far.
This place I could reach by a half hour of walking, but there was another limitation. In the city of Arosa you can’t driving car after midnight, it is forbidden. So I was a bit under pressure to get back early enough.
This image is the result of 8 shots in series for noise reduction and 3 shots for HDR. And you have to excuse my strange facial expression. I had to sit there without any movement for about one minute, watching directly into to the full moon 
Shoot in RAW
Posted on Dezember 20th, 2013
Were you ever disappointed by the result of a shoot with your camera? You know exactly, you saw by your eyes this beautiful colors of a sunset and then at home looking on your image and what is this? It looks so boring, no colors bad contrast and so on, although you are using a modern DSLR?
Maybe you should shoot RAW!
Watch at the image above, do you think I shoot this image because the sky was looking grey in grey? No, but after I watched the image, it looks like this. It’s the original shot without any changes. But good for me, I shoot in RAW, okay better I had shoot a bracket series in RAW but this was in the beginning of my DSLR career, now I knows it better.
But back to this image; it’s RAW and this means you can develope it, like in the early days of photography you had to develope the film.
And why should you do this? You need to know how digital images works, same like your monitor you are reading this article. Every image point, called pixel, is a tripple of the three main colors: red, green and blue. And each of it has 8 Bit for luminance. So you can build 256 shades of red, green or blue and in combination you got the immens count of more than 16 millions possible colors!
Hey that sounds great! But no, not really. Watch the sky, there are mainly blue colors and how many blue shades you’ve got? Only 256 and this is not enough to build up the high dynamic range of the real world!
But you are lucky, cause there is RAW! In a RAW-image you’ve got not 8-bit colors, you’ve got 14-bit colors. Hmm you think, that’s not alot more than 8-bit – uh you are wrong! 8-bit means 256 shades but 14-bit means 16384 shades, per color! And this gives you a total of 4’398’046’511’104 possible colors! Now you can say: WOW, THIS ARE A LOT OF COLORS!
Unfortunately, neither your monitor nor your printer can show this bunch of colors and shades. But with the help of modern software like Lightroom, you can trim the shades in the visible part and you can bring back all the structures and colors you have missed in your photos, IF you shoot in RAW!
If you have any questions, feel free to ask me, I know this is a complex issue.
The Eiger’s neighbour
Posted on Dezember 19th, 2013
The mountain you can see here, is the neighbour of the famous Eiger. If you would watch to the right, you could see the mighty Eiger Northface. But on this image we see the nearly 3000m high ridge of the Hörnli, I can not translate this very swisslike name. Anyway, I like this image as a combination of forest, alp and high mountains.
Like the most of my images, it is an HDR of 3 shots with 2EV steps.
Wild strawberry
Posted on Dezember 18th, 2013
Yet another photo for the cold winter. And think of it: in 90 days it’s spring again!
I found this tiny little wild strawberry at the edge of the forest. It was so small that I needed the macro lens, only 4mm in diameter. Because the of the evening light, I used f2.8, but I had so a small DOF, only the front of the berry was in focus. Good I had allready heard of a technique called “focus stacking”. I was lying in the grass and tried to hold the camera as calm as possible, cause you know: when you need a tripod, you don’t have one. And I made six or seven shots while i turned slowly at the focus ring to set the focal point bit by bit away from me.
Back at home, I processed the images with the Zerene Stacker and é voila; a strawberry in focus from near to far. This is cool, isn’t it? I like the modern time with digital imaging. You’ve got so much geeky stuff
Peterskirche in Wien
Posted on Dezember 17th, 2013
On our trip to Vienna, we visited the Peter’s Church near the Stephansdom, maybe you saw my image of the dome some weeks ago. In contrast to the dome, this church is heavy loaded with gold and paintings in the baroque style. So I think in this case I can use a lot of colors and contrast to underlining the baroque style.
I made this image from three bracket series of three images each. I used this technique for emptying the church of the tourists. Put your cam on a tripod, shoot the first series and wait, until the people has moved. At the end you can rubber out the people and you have an empty church.
Pimp up the foggy winter
Posted on Dezember 16th, 2013
After several days of fog and the interesting color combination of grey in grey, I need more vivid colors in my life. These flowers are for all of us to bring some pleasure in our life and maybe it makes this week more colorful and diverting.
Rainbow over Jontunheimen
Posted on Dezember 15th, 2013
We had not to much luck on our last journey through norway. The most time it was cloudy and often rainy too. We were allready on our way back down from middle of norway to the south. On this day it rains like hell. It was so strong, that 10m to the car with an umbrella, was enough to sucked me full of water. And I also get wet feets, which I hates especially. So I was driving the car in my socks, that my shoes can dry, hmpf. It was raining and raining and more raining. At the most planned stops, we didn’t halt, because it was to wet outside the car. But then after a narrow curve, we had a beautiful sight over a plateau and the sun came through the clouds and showed us a spectacular vista.
This shot was taken by a bracked series of 3 images with 2EV space. Maybe the post processing is a bit overdosed, but it hits the mood better.
