japanese landscape, bavaria

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japanese layered mountains were my immediate association when i saw the clouds moving up on mt. predigtstuhl, seen from the middle of my hometown bad reichenhall. in fact this shot was quite extreme with a 450mme tele lens, so i had to massage the raw file quite a bit in lightzone to bring out those tufts of the clouds moving in and out, obscuring and revealing.

last week our city council voted against the construction of a statue of lord jesus on the top of predigtstuhl. it seemed a bit to be 'adabei' (bavarian slang for someone who's pretending to create to participate in public attention) and even the churches objected because the feeling was only too overwhelming, that this was just an imitation of rio de janeiro's statue and only for economical reasons.

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evening clouds, krk

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one thing that irritated me throughout all my stays in (sub-)tropical places was the extreme short dusk and dawn periods you experience there. sometimes i had the feeling that sunrise is only a 15 minutes affair, and sunset the same with only a short grace period until night falls in.

so i learned to cherish european twilight times even more, this wonderful transit from a warm, energetic sunlight into fainter illumination where only the clouds still hint to the power of the sun until it becomes darker and first illumination and later on the stars become visible. so i enjoyed the long holiday sunsets, even the more so as they left enough time to properly set up the tripod.

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stormy weather

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a photographers dilemma: securing the tent or getting the shot. in the end i (barely) managed to do both, very much to the contentment of the slightly upset wife. the storm was as heavy as the clouds dramatic, the latter visible as shown after some treatment in lightzone.

this kind of clouds i already knew from baroque paintings and i was more then astonished to see that postprocessing algorithms based on pure mathematics calculate similar enhancement as master painters already did hundreds of years ago. back home i will do some investigations for images with a similar sky.

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steinhögl sky on fire

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first monday of all months of the adult evening classes semester is a meeting of the local photography group. as it was raining that specific monday the month before, we decided to have another try for an excursion, this time to steinhögl, a 612 m high hill 20 driving minutes from our hometown. we left at overcast sky and rather dull light, but half an hour after our arrival the sun came out again and made us a present with a gorgeous sunset.

i was happy to have my new bought cokin nd grad filter with me as these contrasts make exposure difficult enough even without the nd grad. maybe a reverse nd grad would have been even better, but i found only one seller who is asking 'snake oil' (quote d. kilpatrick) prices. so the lightzone regions came in handy to extract that colorful clouds in the sky and create an image as i remember it, quite different from the raw file you see here.

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clearing storm over St. Pankraz

St. Pankraz church is built on one of the oldest inhabitated places in the valley of Bad Reichenhall. Accessible through only a narrow footpath, this location was safe from attacks from below and must have been an old ritual place, too. One of my best christmas experiences is connected with this church: walking 1 hour through the snow, with a pitch-torch in the hand, and then attending midnight mass.

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evening quiescence

vacancies in rainy weather do not include too many activities.

even though the evening quiescence on the campground, when all kids were in their respective sleeping bags and only very little people walked along the tiny stretch of beach was really recreative - only some minutes for myself made up for the whole day of bad weather.

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