Mornings can be hard; The unread paper in one hand, the camera in the other, eyes still tired, brain slow - the night was just too short. Only 1 minute left until the train leaves. Fumblin' with numb fingers at the f-stop dial, knowing that some DoF is needed. 06:06 - just getting two shots.
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if you think 'what a antagonism, yesterday traditional costumes and today such a urban scenery' then you are right. but life in bavaria can be like this. my hometown with 18.000 inhabitants is just 2 train hours away from munich with its 1.3 millions, of which 30% have a migration background.
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family holidays in krk mean spending quite some time on the beach, often without the camera. but when i finally took it with me and dug out my 11-18 lens, it was quite nice to make a wide beach scenery out of a nice small spot. guess it should qualify for the mindful eye's assignment of complimentary colors.
again bibble5's region feature helped to emphasize the sky in addition to the polarizing filter. if you are not already determined on "your" raw converter, bibble5 is definitely worth more than a try. it is now even faster then the old version was and scales well with multicore cpus.
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maybe it's local patriotism only, but we bavarians are convinced that the sky over bavaria is something special, and so we do have the colors blue and white in our flag. a late winter evening, with the air on the brink of carrying the scent of rich soil, still not able to do so because of the partial snow cover, and with the winds having carried away the smoke and fog, suddenly can add a certain transparency (i lack a better word for this) and the sky develops that rich and warm blue, dotted with some feather like clouds just to make the blue and whites glow even more. and then one can forget for a moment being in a chatting crowd, just savoring these wonderful seconds.
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speaking about time constraints, just imagine the following situation: you leave the house to catch the bus (2 days a week i work away from home in munich), the bus is early and leaves you waiting 10 min at -8°c, which is 18°f and not really comfortable. to make the best out of it you start shooting, notice the moon, notice the lamp post and try to figure out something reasonable, cropping loose, cropping tight and so on. finally you see the next bus approaching, pack away your gear when suddenly the streetlights switch off and the scenery changes. get the camera again, frame the shot hastily now as the bus is almost there, press the shutter and run for the bus, glad to get into the warm interior....
now that really was tight...
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another take on minimalism and a fond remembrance of the holidays. here in bavaria the mornings are already cold with 12° C, but there are good chances for a nice indian summer. the good habit of getting up early and do some photography i have kept alive, but in the moment the 'creative juices' are not flowing that well. but there is sufficient work on the raw files left, and sometimes the one or other image with potential turns up.
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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.
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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.
this photo on flickr.
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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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yesterday was commuting day. spring in the city is so different and, at least for me, partially depressing when the songs of the birds mingle with the traffic noise. but optically it has it's merits, translating trees into patterns, creating trompe l'oeil like bird silhouettes, bending straight lines, mixing coating colors of the glass with the most wonderful blue of the sky (bavaria, you may know, is very proud of its skies)
unfortunately. especially for my kids.
this photo on flickr.
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this was the last remembrance of summer we got this autumn. the light was in an astonishing way similar to springtime, coming through an already thin roof of leaves high above us. it's not very often that i dare to include the sun in a picture i take with my 11-18 mm zoom, as this lens is quite prone to flares. but here it worked out very nicely.
this photo on flickr.
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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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