Winter in Eastern Iowa, part 2

 

I come back today with a few pictures from yesterday's hiking and driving around trips.

Snow and ice are wonderful elements to reveal the beauty that can lay in a landscape. Look at this image to see what I mean. Without the snow cover and the broken ice floes in the river the muddy walls of the river bed would just blend into the color of the harvested fields at this time of the year. The snow and ice gives the river and the fields in the background some structure and creates depth in the photograph.

This old church near the little town of Graf is built from lime stones that were probably quarried locally. Their color was pronounced by the evening sun and made for a nice color contrast to the blue sky and the snow in the foreground. The German inscription above the church door tells the story about who attended the service in the old days.

Earlier in the day I went to lock and dam #10 in Guttenberg, Iowa again. I worked on a picture of an eagle in a tree but I thought this image of a returning fisherman, who had a hard time to get his boat back to shore, was much more story telling about the conditions on the Mississippi yesterday. These ice floes below the dam were jammed against the old, solid ice on the river and the water was just freezing over again.

Laziness never pays in photography. Instead of walking over to the car and get a lens capable for good landscape photography out of the bag I just used the short end of the Sigma 50-500 for this view across the river. It was mounted to the camera for the eagles but as you can see the photo lacks detail, especially in the background, and it was therefor not a good choice. Well, next time... ;-)

I hope you enjoy my impressions about the Iowa winter. It's supposed to snow 8 - 10 inches (20 -25 cm) tonight again...

Indoors with 32-BIT High Dynamic Range (HDR)

 

I like to share another image that I created with the same technical means I have described yesterday here in the blog. Indoor pictures with great architecture can really benefit from HDR, with or without ton mapping, as you can see in this photograph I made inside the St. Vitus's Cathedral in Prague, Czech Republic. There is just no way that you can catch the details in the sculptures without blowing out the highlights in the stained glass windows with a single exposure. You sacrifice one part for the other if you only make one click. By blending a series of exposures (here I used 4) into one 32-BIT image I was able to expand the dynamic range and the result is much closer to what our eyes have really seen in this wonderful cathedral. This image is part of a special project I'm working on at the moment and that I will come out with hopefully soon. So please stay tuned...

Clouds, finally!

The summer can be very hot and humid in Iowa and I can tell you, we had our share already this year. The humidity makes it very hazy and landscape photography sucks. It really sucks in July and August here! But some days are different, like everywhere, and today was one of them. There were great cumulus clouds in the sky and although it was still very warm, it wasn't as hazy as the weeks before. I had to go out and remember some of the places I always wanted to shoot with some nice clouds in the background. Like this little church in the countryside of Eastern Iowa, between corn fields and the road.