Toggenburg

Posted on Januar 29th, 2014

At a nice spring evening I was near this region and I thought why not take a rode deeper into the Toggenburg and shoot from a higher position an image with all this mountains at the background. What should I say, I did it :).
Unfortunately I was a bit to late to see all the peaks glowing by the deep standing sun. But look at this beatiful landscape with the awesome lightning. It was definitly worth it to run up this hill to get a picture.

The barrier lake

Posted on Januar 26th, 2014

This is one of maybe one hundert barrier lakes in Switzerland. I shoot this photo in april after a long winter, not like this winter. And you can see at the border of the lake the broken ice. Each time when they used the water in the barrier lake to generate electricity, the water surface sunk a bit deeper and crushed the ice at the shore. Good to have so many mountain valleys to get clean power, more or less.

The enchanted castle

Posted on Januar 25th, 2014

There were rumors about a castle, deep in the wood, nobody knows exactly about it. Good reason to pack my gear and my boots for a hike thru the spinney. Armed with our tripods, we fighted against thick brushwood until we saw deep in the wood this beautiful castle. It was an especially night were you could see Venus, Jupiter and the Moon near together. It seems they were shining down to this enchanted place to set the castle in the right light.
For this image I needed 12 images with different shutterspeed over 6EV.

Schloss Belvedere

Posted on Januar 21st, 2014

Still in Vienna, it was a cloudy cold day were we watching the sightseeings of the city. It’s not easy to take images if the sky is only a white nothing. But if you take braketing series and go dark enough you can see the clouds in sky. This image looks much better with a structured sky than with a white background like the normal images will look like, without HDR. So I tell you, shoot everytime a bracketing series, you never know when you need some extra dynamic in your photos.

Ducks on the lake

Posted on Januar 21st, 2014

It was one of the first spring days in the year, as I was walking around the lake. On this picture I used the first time a new technique to eliminate ghosts in a HDR image. It is a 3 shot bracket series and although it was less than a second to take all pictures, the ducks moved. And after the HDR processing you’ve got ducks with multible heads like hydras. To fix this, go to photoshop or a similar programm, lay the hdr image and a second image, which fits best in brigthness, behind it. Take a layer mask and rubber it through. After that correct the brightness with a brightness layer until you can’t see a difference at the borders e voilà a perfect hdr image without any ghosts.

Grindelwald

Posted on Januar 12th, 2014

Yesterday I showed you a nightshot of the Eiger. On this image, I shoot next day afternoon, you can see down to the village of Grindelwald. On the left border you can see a path trailing up, somewhere there I was the night before and shoot the Eiger. On th right side you see the large shadow of the Eiger but you can’t see the mountain. This is maybe a normal tourist photo if you are walking from the Männlichen to the ‘Kleine Scheidegg’. It’s an easy afternoon walk and if you stay in Grindelwald or Wengen, don’t miss it.

HDR panorama of Manhattan

Posted on Januar 9th, 2014

It tooks me a lot of works to do this. If you want to make some panoramas then you shoot several images with an overlapping range and stich it together with a panorama software. And if you want it more complex, then you shoot a bracket series for each image. Make an HDR of each series and stich it together.
But my HDR workflow ist different. Because after I used an HDR software I’m manually fix all the ugly parts with pieces from the original images. But hell, the stiching software are made every panorama different, they are no more congruent. So I have first to make 3 hdr images with manual corrections and stich it together at the end. But then you’ll have no more clean intersections. It was a bunch of work and I’m not really happy with the finish… btw. watch it in FULL resolution!

The stave church of Heddal

Posted on Januar 8th, 2014

This is one of the oldest still existing stave church in norway. It was probably built in the 13. century, there is no exactly date when it was built. Of the 750 documented stave churches existing in the medieval are only 28 left until now. These fully wooden buildings constructions are an interpretation of the viking ship constructions and not a copy of other european stone churches.
I used a 5 image bracket series three times for this picture, to eliminate the moving people inside.

Weinheim at sunset

Posted on Januar 7th, 2014

One year ago, me and my wife were invited to a wedding in the beautiful small town, called Weinheim near Frankfurt in Germany. Of course I was photographing this event :). At the day before, after our arrival, I saw this nice alley with the restaurant and I couldn’t resist to take a photo of it. The sun was allready deep in the sky and send her colorful light to this scenery.
I took a bracked series of 3 images with 2EV steps, for this hdr shot.