TomFear » night

The blue hours of Bergen

admin — Thu, 10 Jul 2014 17:28:32 +0000

Normaly you have one blue hour after the sunset. But not so here up in the north, where the blue hour is going on the half night.
This is good, because you have a lot of time to take nice nightshots of th cities but for nightshots with a starry sky is this the wrong location, during the summer.
But even when you you can’t take starscapes, there are a lot of other beautiful objects you can shoot, like the city of Bergen at night.

Sunlight in the winter night

admin — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 19:08:30 +0000

Yes you read correctly, sunlight. The bright spot on the right border is the rising moon and the time is about 22:40. Why sunlight you ask? Didn’t you know that the moon is only large dirt ball and all the light you see is the reflected sunlight? Okay we call it moonlight, but technically it’s sunlight. This is a fantastic thing, if you think the sun is so bright that a ball of dirt can reflect so much light to see the whole landscape at night. I mean this is really awesome, much more than thinking the moon is glowing, imho.
I made this image from 8 shots to reduce the noise. And forgot to take an image for the bright lights so I can’t bring back the burned out parts.

A starry sky in the wood

admin — Sat, 15 Feb 2014 17:49:38 +0000

After starting to hike up the hill, the sky was getting clearer and clearer. So we had no choice to stop in the middle of the wood to take some photos. It was also a good opportunity to try something new. Because of the missing moon, it was very dark in the forrest and you saw only the border of the trees. So I took my super bright flashlight and lighten the trees up. For me it looks better than only a black outline of the trees.

Biting cold in Tschappina

admin — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 22:31:45 +0000

You know, Tschappina, the place who didn’t wants to get on an image. Before my second journey I checked the whole day the weather forecast and the webcams. And it looks good, very good. Not any cloud at the sky and the moon was also not in sight. Okay, I thought, go for it! Packed my gear and drove 2 hours up to the place of my desire. I parked my car watched the sky, perfect. It was damn cold, under -20°C, but hey no risk no fun. Packpack up and walked the steep hill upside. And you don’t believe, I was sweating, it was really steep. Then as I thought I’m high enough, I walked more to the east, to get a spot over the hill down to the valley. But what was that? FOG! The whole valley was full of FOG! NO, not again!
Sigh, the only view,without fog, I had was to a near Mountain. Okay, take some pictures and go home, frustrated…

Fog over the lake

admin — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 19:50:05 +0000

For another test journey, two of my friends and I were going to the Kloental. For this event I organized a Canon 5DmkII and rented some Lenses to test what I can expect from more expensive gear than my Canon 60D with the Tokina 11-22mm f/2.8. This shot was taken by the 5DmkII with the Canon 24mm f/1.4 by 800ISO and 4s 8 times. Short before I took this image, the fog was so thick, we couldn’t see the lake and suddenly the fog disappeared and the bright full moon set the valley in this moody atmosphere.
After this test shooting I ordered a Canon 5DmkII and a 16-35mm f/2.8 which I still use.

The great wagon

admin — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 22:13:05 +0000

This is another image of my picture series of the Togggenburg region. You can see mount Saentis with the large antenna, which is no more vertical because of the strong wide angle lens at 16mm I used. And the bright light behind the clouds on the right side, is not the sun, it’s the moon. But the most impressive part, how I think, is the star sonstellations ‘great wagon’. You can see it in the center of the image. Mostly you won’t see star constellations on nightshots, because of all the stars which you can’t see by eyes. But luckily there is a thin cloud which gives the brighter stars a glow and you can recognize the wagen.
I took this image by 8 shots for noise reduction, but I used for the sky part only one image for clearer clouds, else the clouds would be more blurred.