city bokeh, munich

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since i bought my first dslr in 2005 i am lusting for a 1.4/85mm lens just to indulge in my passion for shallow dof and fine bokeh. for the minolta a-mount, taken over by sony without modifications, this lens is available in zeiss brand for a zeiss price and used in a variety of minolta makes for less then half the price, but still hefty. just recently i've got permission from my departement of finances, but since then not a single reasonable priced specimen showed up on *bay. the strange thing now is that am not too shure anymore that i really need it. and i learned to get my airy discs by using the existing lenses, which means that i do not have to carry an additional piece of glass, which is not too bad either.

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hiding in the tree

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another find from a stroll with the kids: a wonderful round tree shadow. the only difficulty was the photographer himself. i didn't want to take a self portrait with tree, so after some difficulty i merged my shadow with that of the tree's stem. oh yes, and the rarely used tamron 11-18 again performed well in this shot.

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karlspark tree

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there are shots that belong together (like my moon diptych, but also the landscapist does it, and carl weese recently published shots of a yellow suv/green wall that could be seen as belonging together), and so it's just consistent to frame them together.

trees have been and are a favourite subject of mine, maybe inherited from my father, who knows a lot of them by figure, without having to look at leaves or fruits, and it is astonishing that i still haven't set up a separate keyword or collection for them. well - time to go through the archives again. but now it's time for backup of the latter.

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fallen trees

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trees are a for me a symbol for beeing deeply rooted, constant, connected with this planet. always sad to see them fallen, the more so when snow reveals details that could be assumed as remnants of their struggle.

i am constantly learning to make use of even small slices of time for photographing. the price for this is the weight of a not so small camera bag i am dragging around. but with my preferences for raw files and long or short focal lengths, it would not make sense to go with a point'n-shoot or only one lens when i don't know what will turn up.

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through a glass

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trees and windows are some constantly recurring subjects in my photography, so here is a new combination of both topics. shot during a wedding celebration in dachau palace (beeing not photographer-in-charge those deviations were allowed), i tried to make best use of that soft twilight shortly before sunset.

taken some minutes earlier than the lead shot, the shadows of the trees outside formed beautiful patterns on the facade of the old palace. generally i do love those soft, non-vivid and not at all gaudy colors up to monochromacity in color, but here the contrast between that strong, warm yellow and the (bavarian) blue sky is really pleasing to my eye.

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sigiriya ruins

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late in the day the light was soft and the green regained its power after the blazing sunlight. the combination of the red rocks and the plants was very soothing, calming and inviting for a rest.

this is my first try with the beta of the new bibble5. its region feature allowed to keep the shadows in the center away from pure black while the environment was darkened half an f-stop to compensate the effect of 'exposing to the right'. this way the picture is less noisy an richer in tonalities in comparison to a shot where big parts are in the left half of the histogram.

the old bibble4 id did like because of its speed already, but the lack of region functions meant that selective editing had to be done in gimp afterwards (i am an all-linux guy), and therefore lightzone was the tool of choice for low iso shots - for high iso its denoising algorithms simply are not state of the art.

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tree house

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(pun? what pun?) sometimes the pictures come at you when you just lift your eyes to search for your way. i tried variations of this, some with a small roadside cross as foreground, but in the end the tightly framed plain shadow on the facade was the most convincing shot for me. well - kill the clutter is one of the few advices i try to follow...

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park tree, nanjing

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nanjing is an extremely busy city - 8 lanes roads, skyscrapers, noise and smog. but when you enter one of the parks, by miracle all that negative aspects of city life stay behind and you are in a different world.

chinese garden design is not that renowned here in europe, we usually take japanese, zen style gardens to be sufficient representative for east asian gardening. and of course china was long enough almost inaccessible for travelers, no wonder everybody concentrated on the available japanese examples of this region's garden style.

so when the light went and the park closed, i took one look (and a picture) back to this enclave that had made me forgotten in which busy place i was. the way back to the hotel in a subway with only chinese directives was an adventure for itself.

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lucky charm tree, nanjing

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the trip to china brought +20gb raw files. going through the directories (when shooting in big numbers, i organize my files one folder per day) i still am in day 2 and try to discover the keepers or at least the not so-so ones. the shot above i like - otherwise i wouldn't show it, of course - as it depicts that scenery outside of fu-zi temple in nanjing as a typical chinese urban mixture of young people in western style clothes, but again the temple and the connected philosophy and its symbols as nowadays again appreciated setting.

nanjing as a megacity of 7.5 million inhabitants is as modern and/or western as it can be in the contemporary china, but still using traditional symbols as decoration. even manpower-driven rikshaws are present, in former times deprecated because of the exploitation of the kulis.

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inviting for a rest

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kind of a retro mood for soft and unobtrusive colors caught me today. maybe one of the reasons are paul butzi's post what makes you a photographer and paul lester's the beauty of the everyday. for a balanced, full life, savouring the very moment without peering for the abnormal, extraordinary is a warranty for success. and to cherish these feelings, to appreciate those unspectacular moments, one of the best things to do that i know is taking a walk in the pre-alpine hills. even 15 minutes can suffice like in sunday's visit to the hospital, where the nanny of our daughters is recovering after serious heart problems.

the light was soft, but i wanted to have an even softer impression so i carefully desaturated the reds of the roofs and only very minimally intensified the foreground grass a little bit. the picture meets the mood of this walk very well.

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toned tree

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sometimes 30 minutes can be sufficient: a walk alone in grey, wet weather at the borders of a lake, a short view in the woods and the silhouette of an old strong tree. Of course it was dark in there and so i was glad for my tripod. the polarizer had to help avoid too bright reflections from the leaves. the final imaged showed an intense green, but not in as many variations as i had hoped for a strong picture, so i took my chance in the conversion to b&w and some toning.

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poppy flowers in a barley field

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getting up early to catch the first light was definitely the right thing to do today, as the sky became overcast before noon and stayed like this until the evening. i finally got over my feeling of inertia which quite often strucks me after my missions to sri lanka: so many contradicting emotions overwhelm me, compassion with the suffering people not the smallest, that it takes time afterwards to get up and go again, searching for harmony, beauty (not daring to use the word art). but when i was there i was just delving into that feeling of seeing, beeing there, experimenting, framing, that i completeley loosened up and this way really relaxed.

so it was really worth getting up early.

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wild cherry trees

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rainy day, subdued light, so the Father's day was not a overly buoyant affair. still the walk with my nephew and his hour-long talk about the playstation and the possible hacks (oh how far away am i from a boy's hobbies - my toys are much more expensive at least) were some fun. he silently carried my tripod and never complained when i was stopping for a picture.
the different kinds of green and the white of the cherries make up for a great scenery. this image again did teach me that close framing helps to concentrate what i really want to show. i was negligent when shooting, so i had to to re-compose through cropping.

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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.

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north face over schwarzbach

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easter monday i got some free time and went to an alpine meadow near the 'queralpenstrasse' (alpine transversal road) just 20min far from home. under the north face of Reiteralm there was still a lot of snow, and from time to time avalanches broke free high above our heads. the woods here have suffered a lot from the storms, weakened as they are by the air pollution they toppled over hectar wise. but on the north side there is still hope that a natural mixed forest will grow up again as the density of deer and roe is not as high as in the opposing south faces, where they feed every spring on the buds of the young trees to devastating effects. the young protection forest does not grow up but ends as extremely expensive mash for future trophies on the chimney wall of a hunter.

the second picture is an alpine hut there on the meadows. the cows used to graze right in the woods - with obvious consequences for the young trees - but the administration tries to buy out now those old rights.

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parking tickets

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the old sycamore tree with its expressive figure and cortex iuxtaposes nicely the oh so mundane 'parking tickets' signboard.

lightzone again proved to be a valuable tool to darken the background a little bit and except it from the sharpening algorithms.

the second shot is the shadow of St. Ägidius church here in Bad Reichenhall. i love the sharp silhouette of the branches against the soft shadow of the clocktower.

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hoarfrost woods on Högl

walked the new camera yesterday, or better tried to sneak off from christmas shopping for some photo opportunities. weather was almost grey in grey with only some holes in the fog, bitter cold and the car a real homy place. and usable as a support too, for example for this shot with 300mme focal lenght which always is a defiance for my not too steady hands.

the new camera is as good as I hoped that id would be, the high resolution just amazing, but the faster and less condition-dependent autofocus the real plus for me. i hope that i can train it to take good pictures by itself as the 7D did, up to then i will try to do my best.

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ship approaching weggis/lake lucerne

taken earlier this year in switzerland. the scenery was difficult for a digital sensor to capture due to the extreme bright light, but i think the camera (minolta 7D/maxxum 7) did amazingly well.

re-processed the raw file with lightzone for linux and tweaked the saturation of the flag with a mask. Other than that just standard tone curve adaption and sharpening

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