the old castle

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at the moment those late afternoon hours seem to be really rewarding for me. i had tried to portray gruttenstein castle, only 10 min away from our house, on quite some occasions, but all i got were mere reproductions. today's image is different: the old trees (another found-again partiality) do not reveal much of the castle, but create a mood maybe a bit out of a fairy tale. that's what i enjoy in here, and it still is quite 'straight' photography, not much massaging the raw file.

this photo on flickr

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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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evening sky

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one of the rare occasions i did more to a picture than dodgin/burning/sharpening aka. their equivalents in lightzone. the red light on top of the antenna mast was there, but not as prominent as it is now. in the the evening light and so much out-of-focus, it is a mere glow in the raw file. lightzone's regionized saturation and blur tools helped me to make it better visible and in this way to create the visual descant i regarded necessary in this picture.

in retrospective, last week's 13min. wait for the bus were a really creative time slice. 4 images that i regarded worth showing taken in a really short timeframe...

and i am lucky, too, that i still have them: having no cardreader at hand, late in the night i moved them from the cf card to my fathers computer's /tmp directory in order to transfer them over the network to my laptop. too tired to think i shut down his computer immediately after moving, and linux clears the /tmp space at that occasion. bummer! but: search engines to the rescue, in this case Aurélien’s room - it is no problem to recover deleted files from a vfat file system. so i did not loose a single raw file.

this photo on flickr.

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faint evening light

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i tried to get a japanese painter for this scenery. found none, so i did it my way.

this kind of layered landscape fascinates me since i can think, so i try it again and again in spite of the danger to get stuck in a cliché

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molten in leaf

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the sunlight had selectively warmed this leaf so it sunk into the ice over the days. the low evening light then created this almost surreal look with the dark black borders.

it was the first time that one of my twin daughters, now six years old, came with me shooting. fortunately she did not get bored, but i had to explain several times that during exposure she was not allowed to move in order to avoid vibrations in the cassata-style soil.

this photo on flickr.

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evening light over chiemsee, bavaria

This is no b&w picture... The evening light was incredibly soft, showing only faint layers of the mountains in the slight fog. In the lower right corner you see Fraueninsel with the clocktower of the monastery's church. Taken from a public transport boat to Chieming on the east coast of Chiemsee.

The original contrast range was around 3 f-stops. I used lightzone for linux to restore the original impression of the situation.

this photo on flickr.

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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.

this photo on flickr.

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