Colorado landscapes: Aspen (no, not the city... ;-) )

 

Hey, I’m back. A busy travel schedule during the last couple weeks kept me away from any photography work. I still like to show you a few more photos from our trip to Colorado in September.

We were a little early for the peak of the autumn colors, the aspens just started turning yellow. But we kept our eyes open for locations with some color and good texture in the timber. As soon the light touches a scene like this you have your shot, a photo that tells the story of the changing season in the Rocky Mountains.

Another interesting subject for a nature photographer can be the tall and mostly straight stems of the aspens. Their light color in combination with a subtle light and a dark background always appealed to me. I like the graphic impact of the staggered arrangement and the rich texture of the bark and grass in the foreground.

While making the photo I already had a black and white image in mind. As always when it comes to black and white, the post processing was done with NIK Silver Efex Pro.

Friday night "conclusions" ;-)

 

What do have these two photos in common? Not much, they weren’t even made the same day, except they were taken from the same vantage point. But, let me explain…

The first photo was made right before take off at the Chicago O’Hare Airport last Tuesday. The sky was gray, except for a few small blue slivers. While looking out the window I could see this composition coming just a second before. I made the click and I like it. All the lines lead the eye to the airplane. The clouds, the terminal building in the background, and of course the painted lines on the concrete. However, the overcast made the image look “blaahhh”. Some local saturation and overall contrast improvements in Adobe Lightroom and NIK Color Efex Pro 4, plus adding a “glamour glow” effect, and a slight vignette spawned the final result.

The second photo was made Thursday on my way back from Los Angeles to Chicago. It doesn’t happen very often but I had exactly the same seat in a Boeing 737-800 as two days before. It wasn’t exact the same airplane but the window was as dirty as on the way to LA. As I said, same vantage point… ;-)

But what a difference, the light was great and coming from behind the plane as we flew east. There were some beautiful storm clouds to the south. This is nothing extraordinarily but the key for this shot was again composition. The eye may wander between the puffy clouds in the foreground and the AA-logo with the reflection on the wing but it will always return to the interesting cloud formation that was illuminated by the setting sun.

No, it doesn’t need a big camera and lens. You can make a similar image with the camera you probably have always with you, your phone. You can’t change your position much, the pilot takes care for that, but watching the scene, the light, and the lines that unfold in front of your eye will lead you to the photo you may have always envisioned…

Great music, good time, a little bit photography...

 

My blog says “Nature Photography” but I enjoy walking off my own beaten path sometime. I do this more often than you may think but I don’t publish much outside of this genre. Yesterday we went to “Dubuque… and All That Jazz”, a Friday night concert series that takes place ones a month during the summer in downtown Dubuque. 10 of Soul was the the band last night and they played some great soul, funk, r&b, and blues music. I didn’t take my photography efforts too serious, just enjoyed the music, food, and beer, but made a few clicks during the evening. 10 of Soul has a great rhythm section, a four-piece horn section, and some very good vocalists. The two female vocalists got the best light (sorry guys!) and so most of their shots were sharp enough to be shown here.

I used my favorite Photoshop plug-in NIK Silver Efex Pro 2 to do the B&W post processing. A KODAK Tri-X 400TX Pro film preset was my starting point, just because I like the look of this film for these shots, but I fine tuned it to my personal taste. A selenium toning was applied and I also lowered the grade of the film grain a little. I hope you enjoy!

IT'S A 59

 

Some people wrote me they liked my last photo and this made working on another one from yesterday's car event. This 1959 Chevrolet Corvette is a beauty and was parked in front of a bar, which made for a  better background than many of the other buildings in East Dubuque. I gave it a different vintage look, like Grandpa took it just out of the dusty shoe box with the old pictures in it... ;-) Have a wonderful weekend!

Vintage look

 

What have wildlife photography and shooting at a car show in common? Well, I don't really know but in both instances dealing with background issues would be on top of my list. But let me start with the event first. During the summer the owners of vintage cars meet ones a week over in East Dubuque across the Mississippi to show their cars and socialize with their friends and other car enthusiasts. The road going through the little downtown area is blocked for any other traffic and the cars are lined up on both sides of the street.

I have been there before and always wander slowly along the cars, look for the light, and for cars that are parked in front of buildings that make for a more natural setting and background. Quite often the car owners sit in their lawn chairs right behind the cars and this is usually a NO-NO for me. If the sun is out, the West side of the road is almost completely in the shade of the buildings and this is usually my preferred side to look for car details. For understandable reasons this is also the side where most people sit behind their cars.

All of the cars displayed in East Dubuque have  probably been photographed to death and I'm sure many pictures are technically perfect and good for any catalog, book, or brochure about vintage cars. That's good, because I don't have to walk in the same foot steps and ad another technically perfect image to the bunch out there ;-) .

Seriously, I thought giving the image of this old Plymouth a little bit of a vintage look would be worth the effort. I used NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 to produce a high dynamic range image, made from four exposures. As always with HDR images I'm staying on the more subtle side, keeping in mind the vintage look. The image got finished with a slight vignette and the usual spot cleaning and sharpening. I hope you like it. I may show a couple more sometimes soon, so please stay tuned...

Vintage cars, great subject for having some fun...

 

Are you tired of seeing wildlife photos? Well, I'll never be but I still like to work other subjects in my photography ones in a while. Yesterday I crossed the bridge over the Mississippi into Illinois. During the summer every Thursday the owners and drivers of cars, built before 1972, meet in East Dubuque and enjoy to display their cars and socialize with each other.

I have a strong technical background and may understand most of the technical talk I heard yesterday but the reason I'm drawn into an event like this is the sheer beauty of some of the old cars on display. I enjoy watching people that have passion for the things they do and that was definitely the case yesterday evening.

Nobody complained about the bare blue sky and sun, except for the photographer. ;-) Our vision can differentiate, according to a Stanford study, up to 15 stops of light in one glance but most digital cameras are only able to handle a five-stop-range. My friend Dave Updegraff has a Nikon D4 and this great camera is able to handle six f-stops. Well, no matter what digital camera you hold in your hands, it  doesn't solve the light challenge we were facing yesterday evening. How can we handle it and bring some images home that look halfway decent? I looked for the cars that were parked on the westside of Main Street in the shade of the buildings and just tried to keep the sky out of the frame for my detail shots. The third image is an HDR, made from five different exposures that were merged in NIK HDR Efex Pro. Two different ways to go but even if I'm not a big fan of HDR processing, (mostly useless in wildlife photography), I do not exclude it from my tool box and see it as a valid tool for light situations that are hard to overcome.

As I said, I do stuff like this only occasionally, ones in a while, but my photography friend Brian over in Germany has a "led sled" that would be allowed to park in an event like yesterday without any doubt. In addition he is a very talented photographer who has some great car images in his blog. Check it out HERE!

'The Bean' without people

 

Anytime I have been in Downtown Chicago during the last few years I made a visit to The Cloud Gate, aka 'The Bean', in Millenium Park. Never ever I thought it would be possible to make a picture of this great piece of art without any people in the frame. Well, last Saturday during the St. Patricks Day parade the plaza around the sculpture was blocked for the public. I don't know why this restriction was in place but here was my chance to make the click.

Because of the really dull and gray sky the image needed some enhancement. I'm testing some new software, the OnOne Perfect Photo Suite 7, in my post process work flow at the moment. So far I'm quite impressed what it can do for my photography. I really like how subtle some of the effects can be applied to an image and I believe after driving through the learning curve it can become a big time saver in my post process. Right now I'm just at the beginning of a free trial period and more testing needs to be done before I may come to a final conclusion. I still like and use the NIK Software plug-ins, especially Color Efex Pro 4.0 and Silver Efex Pro 2.0, but as many others I wonder if there is any future for these great plug-ins after Google bought NIK. Hard to believe but only time will tell...

Winter in Eastern Iowa at its best

 

As we drove out of this valley this evening, not far from home, I had to stop and make the click. I knew the final image would have something to do with lines and shadows in the landscape, and would hopefully tell the story about how a wonderful winter day in Eastern Iowa comes to an end.

Talking about clouds

 

One of my favorite subjects to shoot is clouds. Not any ordinary ones, I'm talking about clouds that create some drama or an interesting pattern. Last Saturday I was cutting some wood behind the house when I saw a line of flame-like clouds showing up behind the trees that surround our neck of the woods. I dropped the axe immediately and ran inside to get the camera. We had a nice blue sky but color didn't give me the drama I saw in the shapes the clouds were producing. I knew I was shooting for a final Black & White.

Nobody wants to see their house on fire but I thought it looked quite dramatic. The clouds were moving fast and after ten minutes the sky was completely covered with a thin layer of clouds, which of course didn't hold any drama anymore.

A few words about the post processing. As always the RAW files get imported into Adobe Lightroom, where I usually do just the RAW sharpening and some noise removal if necessary. From there I kick out a tif-file and move over to NIK's Silver Efex Pro 2. Since I had done some other B&W images with clouds recently I created a preset that I can now use as a starting point. The next step is to open a copy of the file in Photoshop where I use pre-recorded action sets that do the downsizing and final sharpening for the web. Presets and action sets can be a big time saver sometimes if you go for the same effect. However, I never just apply them and walk away. I always do some fine tuning and tweaking of a particular slider if it improves the image.

Playing with water

 

We had a good amount of much needed rain this weekend. I used the time for several photography related projects (see my post from yesterday) and finally thought it is a good time to post some "water pictures" from our recent trip to the Rocky Mountains.

The first shot was taken above the Copeland Falls in the Southeast corner of the National Park. I made quite a few clicks, knowing that each picture would look differently by using a variety of different exposures from 1/20 to 1 second . The creek was in the shade of trees and the absence of bold colors made me process the image in B&W. It was the pattern, created by air bubbles in the flowing water and revealed by the long exposure, that I was after and 0.7s at f/16 created a desirable result for me. As always, NIK Silver Efex Pro2 is my software of choice for processing a B&W image.

The second image was taken after a hike higher up to Ouzel Falls. Despite a heavy overcast and even some rain sprinkles some light was left and revealed the colors of the surrounding rocks. I liked this one better than a B&W version I made and I want to share with you.

I wish all of you a great week.