Hiking in Saxon Switzerland National Park

 

Just want to say hi to all friends and followers of my blog. I’m still in Germany and had for the first time a chance to make some clicks in good light. My son Andre and I went on a hiking trip into the mountains and rocks of Saxon Switzerland (German: Sächsische Schweiz), one of the most beautiful areas in Germany and only an hour and a half away from my hometown Bautzen. The picture shows one of the most iconic rock formations “Bastei”. Between my shooting location and the rocks on the other side, down in the valley, lies the Elbe River that flows towards Dresden, the capitol of our state of Saxony. A big part of this area belongs to the only National Park in the State of Saxony, Nationalpark Sächsische Schweiz. I hope you enjoy.

Let the details tell the visual story

 

We all get overwhelmed sometimes by the great “postcard views” or focus only on the iconic elements a particular shooting location has to offer. It is easy to overlook the details that surround a great place. Sometimes the light that hits those details has a  particular quality that makes them stand out and tell a visual story.

We have visited many of the lobster wharfs along the Maine coast. Beside eating there fresh lobster big time, we found countless opportunities to make the click. The detail shots I show you today are from different locations and different times of the day. There are some early morning and late evening shots and a couple were made completely in the shade. But they all got some quality light that brings the colors to life or pronounces the shape and suddenly a rough working place like a lobster wharf reveals a lot of beauty…

Fall colors 2013 - last call

 

Last weekend was probably the last chance to make some images that tell the story about fall and its colors here in Eastern Iowa. Despite some night frost many Sugar Maples had still a few leaves left but they came down quickly as the wind blew quite a bit this weekend.

As I wrote a couple weeks ago, I try to isolate the leaves from the background to make the colors pop and draw the eye right to the subject. Exposure compensation by about one stop helps to suppress elements in the picture that would otherwise just take the attention away. There is no reason that every crack in the rocks or rotten leave on the ground needs to have detail. Yes, I know, high dynamic range is ubiquitous but I believe this type of image just needs the opposite. Even if you just use Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW, leave the shadow slider in it’s parking position or maybe even darken the shadows. Here I applied in addition a dark vignette in Adobe Lightroom to keep the eye away from the edges of the photo.

Taking time and looking around while wandering along the edge of the timber leads to more interesting subjects that can be photographed only in fall in their particular state. This Common Milkweed had opened and exposed its many overlapping seeds, each with a tuft of silky hairs. I hope you enjoy.

Pemaquid Point Lighthouse - a job for the graduated ND filter

 

I wrote in my post from October 16, 2013 that I may show more from Pemaquid Point Lighthouse in Maine. It is such a magic place that allows to shoot from many different angles during sunrise and sunset. Joan and I had the place well inspected the evening before and so I knew exactly where I wanted to place my tripod for this image the next morning. Maine is in clear weather every day the first state that is hit by the morning sun in the United States. Not that it really matters but it was kind of interesting to think about that everybody at home in Iowa was still in the dark of the night, while we enjoyed the warmth of the first sun rays touching the continent. The layered rocks in the foreground are a wonderful mix of metamorphic and igneous rocks, with veins of quartz, and slabs of schist and gneiss.

I used a 3-stop graduated neutral density filter for the photo. This allows me to keep your eye on the lighthouse or maybe let it wander over the rocks in the foreground. The Schneider Optic 77 mm ND.9 SE filter became a very useful accessory during our journey along the Maine coast. I like the optical quality of this piece of glass much better than my older Cokin ND filters. They are made out of resin, which is not a problem, but I always had the feeling that they also shift the colors slightly. Finally, very little adjustments had to be made in Camera RAW for this image and this is how I want to go with my landscape and wildlife photography.

Back to the only stormy day

 

I like to come back to the only stormy day we had up in Maine at Acadia National Park. The rocky coast between Otter Cliff and Thunder Hole is a great place to watch the surf on a day like this. I used my polarizer in front of the lens and closed down the aperture to f/16 in order to extend the exposure time to 1/3 s. I know, you can make the water even more silky by using a neutral density filter but I just liked to keep some of the dynamic in the movement of the waves. I do have several ND filters in my bag but I was happy with the results and in particular with this image. It was actually the last shot I made after almost two hours of having a blast on these cliffs. It was gray most of the time but the light just picked up some quality for a few minutes at the end of the day. I hope you enjoy.

Great subject for overcast day

 

We drove by several times at the Arched Bridge in Somesville on Desert Island, Maine. It is a busy place because most tourists like to visit and snap a picture. We chose to stop there on the only "bad weather day". This was actually a good decision. First the light on this wonderful bridge and the little museum was very soft because of the heavy overcast, and second, there were a lot less people than we have seen on other days. With other words, it wasn't so difficult to make an image without someone in the frame. The small village of Somesville is a National Historic District and the bridge is not the only interesting structure there. Overall we saw very few houses in Maine that were not in good shape. If you go there, don't miss to have a look in the little museum. It is a nice display of the local history.

The top image needs actually a little more head room above the roof. I have a few more photos of the bridge without that little flaw, but really liked the reflections on the water in this one the best. Walking around and working the subject a little more led finally to photos two and three. They leave no doubt about what time of the season we visited this nice piece of architecture, and I can tell you, I didn't miss the sun a bit this day...

Fall colors 2013

 

I like to interrupt my stories about Maine for the results of some actual photography. We are able to postpone all kind of events but we can't keep the progress of the season on hold. It was obviously that here in Eastern Iowa the fall colors are at their peak. We don't know if there will be any leaf left next weekend but I still hope so. If we "camera owners" wanted to catch the essence of the season we had to go out and shoot this weekend, no matter how bad the weather was. It was actually not too bad, a little too much gray in the sky, but the colors of autumn have definitely been there. Because there are too many trees that are bare already, the key for success was to extract the colors optically from the surrounding area and the background.

I went to the White Pine Hollow State Preserve, a nature area only a few miles west from our home, to give it a try. This is as good as a National Park. You have to walk in, there is no road going through, and I haven't met a single soul all afternoon there. If you walk down the path from the parking lot on the East side, you end up in a canyon that has been carved by a river. It is wild, there is a lot of dead wood, but if you open your eyes you may find the colors of fall in front of a good background.

While checking out a ravine that leads to the bottom of the canyon, I found this wonderful looking mushroom growing on a tree. I removed a few dead leaves for this shot and mounted the best lens for detail shots in my bag, the Carl Zeiss Distagon T*, 35mm / f2 ZF, to the Nikon D300s. It is a lens with manual focus but I love its color rendition and unbeatable sharpness.

It is easy to look just for the big color contrast in the fall between a real blue sky and the reds, oranges, and yellows of the leaves, but if there is no blue sky we need to work with the elements that are available. I hope you enjoy...

Bass Harbor Lighthouse

 

This is Bass Harbor Lighthouse in Maine and this is an image I really, really wanted to make. Joan and I scouted the place three days earlier in the evening. There is only one spot between the rocks where you can make the click with the lighthouse and its reflection in the tide pool. I arrived almost an hour before sunrise but it took me some time to climb down in the dark to the slippery rock platform where I wanted to set up the tripod. I started shooting at 5:56AM and I may post an image from the blue hour sometime here.

The inspiration came again from Moose Peterson, who had published a very detailed article about photography in Maine in his own BT Journal. The Bass Harbor Lighthouse is on the cover and since I saw this picture the first time I wanted to go to this magic place. In the iPad version of the BT Journal is another photo of the lighthouse that has a lobster boat coming into the scene. I always thought, how lucky can someone be, having this awesome morning light and in addition a boat bringing some life into the scene. As you can imagine I was really happy when the same thing happened to me. It is actually not so uncommon as I thought, because the little harbors of Bernard and Bass Harbor are right around the corner, and at this time of the day the lobster boats leave for their daily tour.

Talking about Acadia National Park and more stormy days...

 

It sounds silly, but I wished we would have had a couple more stormy days during our time in Maine. We had only one day that made watching the surf real fun. A great place to photograph into the surf is the Southeast shore of Mount Desert Island in Acadia National Park. It is supposed to be the best part of the park to photograph classic rocky coastal scenes and dramatic seascapes. I just like to confirm the above statement I read in the book "The Photographer's Guide to the Maine Coast" by David Middleton and Bruce H. Morrison. This is by the way a very useful book if you go to Maine and try to find the best locations for photography.

Speaking of Acadia National Park, while we have been there it was officially closed because of the governmental shutdown. As you can imagine, this was not very popular among the people that have been up there at this time. Even the most conservative redneck that I met didn't like what the congressmen and women of his party tried to accomplish...

Acadia National Park has access from many different directions, unlike Yellowstone or Grand Tetons National Park. People took advantage of it, parked their cars outside of the park, and walked into the park wherever they wanted to. The park rangers (I saw only three of them within five days) tolerated the fact and obviously only persecuted those who ignored the road blocks with their cars.

OK, let's talk about photography. I have never photographed the surf along a shore intensively and so I tried a lot of different things, made many clicks, and finally deleted quite a few images after reviewing them in the safe harbor of our home...  It was actually a very gray day and the whole time, while the waves were rolling in, I was thinking about black and white as the format for the final image. But there were these brief moments when the sun would throw a little more light through the clouds and suddenly a color image wasn't a bad idea anymore...

I hope you enjoy.

Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund

 

There is an old German saying, "Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund", which means about "Morning hour has gold in its mouth". This has probably to be your mindset if you are a lobsterman. As a photographer you have to get up way before sunrise if you like to see the lobster boats leaving the little harbors. If you do, and you choose a harbor that faces to the East, like New Harbor on the Pemaquid Penninsula, you may get rewarded with some awesome light. This was what we were looking for one morning when we climbed out of our sleeping bags very early and headed for New Harbor, not far from our campsite.

We asked very polite one of the young men, who helped to load the boats with barrels of bait fish for the lobster traps, if we could shoot some images from the dock of their lobster wharf, and I promised we would stay out of their way while doing so. He smiled and replied, "Oh yes, go ahead, you are actually the first one who is asking for permission this year...". We thought this was a funny reply because it was already late in the year...

We started shooting about half an hour before sunrise. A tripod is of course essential. The first image here was made about two minutes before sunrise. Many lobster boats had already left the harbor and the one in the background just drove into a golden morning.

The following minutes were just great for story telling photography. It was fascinating to see how one lobster boat after another got prepared, loaded with bait fish, plastic trays for the lobsters, or new lobster traps. A lot of inspiration for this trip to the coast of Maine came from an article by Moose Peterson, a photographer that I really admire, but what we found in Maine exceeded my expectations by far. I can't rave enough about the quality of this early morning light we had at New Harbor this morning...