Foggy Tension

On a foggy winter morning i made this spontaneous composition. I love the fog, as a big photographic "simplifier" - here the tree in the middle of the image gave the i-point to the composition. I am shure, that this composition was much more trivial without fog.

Bottleshot

In my Flickr-group "creative landscapes" we have a bunch of relatively crazy photographers as members, who are showing a lot of inspiring images there, made in several different styles and with all kind of equipment. We have f.e. free hand long time exposures (Jon Brown called them eye twinkling "nopods", = no tripods) and all kind of artistic manipulations, shots, made by lens babies or tilt&shift lenses etc.
I thought, what would happen, if i'd use a drink bottle as filter?
Here you see the result - a landscape trough a drink bottle. I call it "bottleshot".

I swear, it was water - not a Vodka bottle... ;-)

Cloud Eclipse

I cannot say, that i live in a beautiful region. By no means. I live in the northern part of Germany, where the landscape looks more like the landscape of the Netherlands or Denmark: Everything flat und relatively boring. We do not have hills and our farmers are mostly not interested in an ecologically form of agriculture. They prefer the "industrial" way of agriculture and so our landscape becomes more and more the look of a "Teletubbie-Land", without trees and bushes, without wild animals and free nature. Very sad development.
So the landscape photographers have to be creative and tricky, to get interesting shots. I always call it a "challenge" for the landscape photographer, to make the best of the bad conditions, of the boring man made desert, the so called "cultural landscape"...
The good thing is: They cannot destroy the sky (yet), and such an interesting sky is very helpful for the composition.
And sometimes we are lucky and have good weather conditions like fresh snow, fog etc. - today it was one single cloud, which was darkening the sun for a few minutes. This was my chance for this composition and here you see the result:

Compact Camera

Usually i prefer to work with digital slrs, because of the low noise and the good DOF (= small). In spite of the technical predominance of dslr-systems there are some situations, when a compact camera is better: When you do not want to carry too much weight with you, when you need a discrete cam or when you do not want to use too expensive gear.
Modern compact cameras have reached a good noise level in the meantime - i especially like the Canon G-series. They have a popup Liveview, which is great for using spectacular perspectives. And the image quality is really astonishing. I once started in 2002 with a Canon G2 with my serious digital photography and still like the new G11, though i probable will not buy a new compact camera any more. I feel fine with my old G2 - it is a bit nostalgic for me, to go out and shoot with the G2 or the G6.
This shot here was also made with the G6 in 2005 - the users of the german Fotocommunity gave a so called gallery star to this image and i must say, i still like this image and my post processing work. My original title was "Aus Grimms Märchenwelt", which is translated "From Grimm's Fairytales" - and it is really a beautiful magical place, where i made this image.
For sidewalks and sujet-based compositions a good compact cam is in many cases good enough, at least if you have enough light. Because of the light weight there is bit a bigger danger of camera shake and you may get relatively easy an uneven horizon. But on the other hand it is a good feeling, to carry a feather weight cam instead of a big and heavy camera bag. So it can be freedom, to shoot with a compact cam, especially in the city, when big cams are not discrete enough for shooting people.
My dear friend Rui Palha loved in the past years his Olympus Camedia 5050 very much, though he uses in the meantime other cameras more often. But the results of the "Oly" were absolutely amazing, Rui loves the feeling of this cam - and many other street photographers are preferring compact cameras for their work. It is obviously the small size, that counts for street photographers.
Ricoh has a new gx-series with modules and its image quality is very close to a dslr.
A good compact cam can produce absolutely great results in the hand of a good photographer - and the good news is: There is no need to invest a fortune in a Leica M9! :-) Of course such a camera is on a marvellous technical level, but the right location, the right light of the sujet or the decisive moment is NOT built in - not even in a Leica. ;-) And this is, what's decisive for a good shot: Not the pure technical quality, but the composition and what's shown on the picture.
The easy use and the discrete look of a Leica M-cam once were the main reasons for many famous photographers, to use this cam. In the meantime ordinary compact cams are offering the same (and more) features for less money. There is - of course - a special magic in the feeling of a Leica M cam, and this is maybe inspiring the photographer. But i am convinced, that you can shoot amazing shots with a compact camera like the G11, good enough for prints even in magazines.

Waltzing

Landscape photography in my hometown means to make the best of the conditions, that we find on location. We do not have hills and mountains, we have only one nature protection zone, our wonderful Buelter Sea. But this sea is inside a moor in a nature protection zone, and i do not want to disturb the animals too often, so i search inside our woods for motives, which is a bit difficult. We do have mostly pure plantation forests there, where each tree is looking equal - big oaks and beech trees are getting more and more a very rare view, especially since the oil price is high and the people need firewood for their chimneys. Very sad, what they are doing to nature in my hometown, really. :-(
But i have to make the best of it, and the more ugly and monotone the location is, the bigger is the challenge for us photographers. Am i right?! ;-)
So what can we do, in case the landscape around us is ugly?
First of all, we can try to shoot in the right light. Almost everything can look good in the right light. Fog is also a wonderful "beautifier" for every landscape, and if you have a good sky (a big dramatic sky), this is very helpful either. We also can play with our camera, with long time exposures (in the last time i tried such shots free hand (inspired by my british colleagues at Flickr!), or with open aperture. Tele focal length is helpful to crop unwanted elements out of the composition.
Sometimes it is even an advantage to shoot in a coniferous wood, because you get good vertical lines (wherever man has "designed" something, you find these artificial clean even lines - that is the reason, that i like Friedensreich Hundertwasser that much... ;-)
In some cases you can use the ugly surrounding for melancholic shots or as background for posed model shootings in a special atmosphere. Or you shoot it as a documentary image as ugly as it is, for later comparisons, when it will look probable even more ugly then. If you don't think, that this is possible: Come to my hometown Heerstedt, and you will see, that this is part of the sad development, that i have to face each day, when i am out in the fields.
So it is possible to use the ugliness in a photographic way - but i would like it much better, if our people would not do such a big damage to our "Feldmark", as we call the countryside in german.

Captured By Winter

We currently have here in Northern Germany a relatively cold and long winter, a challenge to each photographer. You need good warm clothes if you go out and the batteries of your camera could get problems, if you don't protect it against the cold. Many new problems has the winter photographer to solve, before he is ready to shoot, that the summer photographer does not know.
On the other hand the winter offers us good motives like ice and snow. The best snow is the fresh snow - it is whiter than the old one, and if you are lucky, you have sunshine or fog, or both.
But even on a dark, grey afternoon ("evenoon", cause the sun goes down so early) you can find interesting structures, when the snow is underlining the branches of a tree, like you can see it here in this image. I also made several other abstract shots and it is always a good exercise for the eye, to find motives like this one in the chaotic textures of the winter wood.

Windows

Yesterday i found this image on my harddisk and played a bit with photoshop, (dodging and burning), to darken the parts (mainly upper right side), that were distracting the view and i was astonished, how much stronger the image looks, with "less" elements on it.
I really enjoyed the Flickr-comments about this work - and i am sure, that all readers know this feeling well from their own images: We see the photo, and we like it - but... Something is wrong and prevents the "wow effect". Too much saturation? Too much contrast (or not enough)? The wrong crop? The wrong format (4:3, 16:9, 20:9)?
Sometimes it just needs one simple action, and the image looks much better. But it is not so easy to find out, what it is, that the image is missing. Not in all cases can others help us, because they don't know our personal vision.
So i recommend every photographer a folder "unsolved cases" on his harddisk, it can be really fun to solve such "open problems", sometimes it needs just a bit time to find the solution.

X

I already showed this shot in my german blog, but i think, it could be also interesting for my international friends. It is hopefully a good example of "less is more" but i have to admit, that the b&w transition was really important for the image effect here.

Self

Here is a self that i made with "old" equipment, a 6 MP Canon 300D.
The 300D was my first digital slr and my first step to serious digital photography.
In the meantime people seem to think, that it not a real camera, if it has less than 12 MP, Canon offers a new 7D with 18MP and i am sure, that in a few years all consumer dslrs will have more than 20 MP.
But nobody really need's it. :-) 4 MP is in my eyes almost enough for most of the users. And many users are obviously forgetting, that it is not just the number of pixels, but its "quality". On the market of compact cameras we already learned, that a 12 MP cam has in many cases less image quality then the previous model with 8 or 6 MP, because the level of noise is rising with the number of pixels, especially on a small sensor.
So the number of pixels is absolutely not the only factor for a sharp image.
You can f.e. raise the quality of your pixels with the use of a tripod. (I would say, that you can increase the image quality of a 6MP dslr to "felt" 8MP, only by the use of a tripod.) If you are searching for the best possible quality, you should not use the open aperture, or a very small aperture - most lenses have the best quality at f 4 or 5.6 - and you can "increase" the quality by using a fixed focal length lens. No zoom lens can reach the quality of such a lens.
Last not least you should use good filters, f.e. a polarization filter and shoot in the RAW-format under good light conditions.
You see: If you are working carefully, you can present excellent results even with an "old" camera like the 300D. A good image idea/composition is always much more important for a good image result, than the pure resolution of the camera sensor.
And the data files are wonderful small, a 4GB CF-Card in a 20D or 300D allows many hundrets of shots in RAW-format, so there is no reason to bann the elder cameras from your camera bag... ;-)

I left Art Limited

Well, i tried it - but in the end i decided, not to stay longer at Art Limited. Why?
It is not very different to the FC, where everythings works because of vanity and comments, not because of the photographic quality. Okay, Art Limited has members on a much higher photographic level than the snapshooter-community FC - but you get most of your Art Limited comments as a replica to a former made comment and this costs a lot of time, to "feature" your photos by making contacts and writing comments. I don't need that any more, and i also deleted a lot of shots at Flickr. I will leave at Flickr a gallery with some placative shots, so that my friends can find some images in the web, but i concentrate myself more on real photography, and it leads to nothing, to spend too much time with the web communities generally.
I also erased my Fotolia images - i don't want to sell my images in this way. Maybe i will make a second try at Fotolia, but for now it is just a huge flood of images, and all i have got there were a few clicks and a lot of wasted time. I don't need that. ;-)

Between the Meadows

These two trees here are looking wonderful, especially in the evening light - but generally we lost (and still loose) many trees, which is a pity in my eyes. Some farmers (not all) have no sense for trees, they use the chainsaw and "redesign" their meadows to a kind of green desert, without bushes and trees. This does not only look very ugly, it is also a big sin against the nature. So i hope, that they come to their senses again: Nature does not need man - man needs nature!

Light On A Pyramid

Found in Fishery Harbour of Bremerhaven...

Still Alive - still attractive?! ;-)

I just got a Mail from the Flickr-Team, that someone has put my image "Still Alive" in his gallery. I appreciate the new attention for this relatively old image and thought, that this is a good reason to show it again on my blog... ;-)


By the way: The gallery function is new at Flickr. You can build a gallery with images of other members and your own photos and give it a name or a topic. So this function is something in between the well known fave-function and forming a group. With a little more time i will check this out by myself.

Branches

It is not so easy, to discover and show interesting shapes in nature and present them in one frame. The chaos of the forest disturbes such a shot usually with unwanted elements - but from time to time i am successful. I think this shot is such an example.

TYZ

I must say, i like to be under the Autobahn. You can stay dry there when it rains and you hear the pulsing sound of traffic, like blood runs through the veins of a body.
It is a special place in the landscape, to a certain degree more untouched and not so ugly, as it seems at the first sight. You also can find a lot of Graffiti there, so you even can view art there... ;-)
Here i captured one for this blog: