Morning by the river and some HDR

Taking up photography again has had some interesting side-effects on me. One of them is that it gives me a motivation for getting up very early in the morning – on my days off! So yesterday I did it again, got up early had me some breakfast and filled my thermos with coffee. We’ve had some really nice Easter weather here in Norway and I  had hoped to get some rays of morning sunshine caught in the little  shallow river-valley here close by where we live. But of course, the weather does as it damn well pleases, and by the time I had gotten my gear together and headed out, the clouds started to gather. The picture above was just as I left home.

So when I reached the river the light was all flat and there’s really no telling what time of day it is. But getting out and walking in the fresh air is a nice thing to do anyway. Taking pictures can be a little like fishing I think, getting out and doing it is the main thing. If I “catch” anything that’s nice, but I find the pleasure of the process itself to be the main purpose. Walking about in a semi-trance like state of mind like I do when I get “in the zone” is what drives me. No additional stimulants needed (but some coffee tastes nice of course ;-))

There will always be views, patterns, symbols or whatever that draws my attention when strolling about like this. The great thing about learning how to shoot pictures is that it now becomes possible to experience them not only as an act of observation, but also to create some kind expression out of it. Many of these charged moments of attention will remain in my own universe. But should I occasionally be able to create a picture that can touch a nerve outside of my own space, that would mean…something.  That I’ve taken a good picture perhaps 🙂

Everybody’s a photographer these days with our mobile cameras always at hand, and all kinds of possible ways to publish our snaps for all to see. One technique that is often used to create images that attempts to stand out from the crowd is by HDR (High Dynamic Range). That means merging two or more pictures taken of  the same view and with different exposures. The point is to overcome the cameras limitation of  its possible dynamic range taken in one exposure. In simple terms; the camera cannot make images with very dark areas and very light areas in the same picture without some of the information getting lost. But by combining images in post production taken with different exposures we can overcome this limitation.

A typical situation is when taking a picture of a sunrise (2 days ago) like here. With a single exposure I wouldn’t be able to make out both the details on the clouds closest to the sun (very light) and the bark on the trees in the suns shadow (very dark). This would be beyond the dynamic range of the camera’s sensor. But by merging pictures that are over- and under-exposed we can make this happen. In this case I’ve merged 5 pictures. They were all taken with aperture f 5.6 and ISO 400. But the shutter speeds varied from 1/640 sec (underexposed) to 1/100 sec (overexposed).

Making HDR pictures people tend to go overboard making all sorts of ghastly effects. It’s a matter of taste of course, but you very rarely see professional photographers doing this. To add an effect to picture it should have some artistic purpose IMO.

I shot this funny little bridge as I walked up the river yesterday. To do a little experimentation I shot some series of 5 pictures to try to merge into HDR.

This is a merge of the series that the first picture was taken from. Here I removed the colors and pulled up the shadows a little bit.

This is a merge of another series where ramped up the color information from the different exposures. Still pretty moderate as HDR images go.

In this baby however, I used the possible effects HDR imagery can provide and pumped out some details information that you normally cannot do from a single exposure. But that is the kind of expression I wanted here as I think it suits the motive of the picture.

So, maybe not a great catch today, but still a good walk and as always an opportunity to experiment and learn something new.

Early morning, light and mist

It looked like it would be a clear winter morning here. I had set the alarm clock to 5 to see if I could capture some good light. And also try out my new Cotton Carrier vest. Always on the lookout for good solutions on how to carry the gear around with minimum effort. More on that in some later post.

I wasn’t the only early bird today. These guys are serious about their ice-fishing. I see them going out and staying the whole day out on the fjord outside Kalvøya near by where I live.

As I was strolling around looking for shots I noticed the morning fog creeping in, pulling a grey blanket over the coast. It looked like I would miss out on that special morning light today. Not that I minded too much, there are always good landscape photo opportunities, one just have to adjust to what Mother Earth dishes up.

I saw that the areas higher up were still bathed in winter morning light, so after a little while i decided I would make a detour on my way home and see if i could get me some of that. i packed my gear and drove up to Tanum church. It’s a lovely old building dating all the way back to somewhere around 1100-1130.

It was rebuilt and expanded around 1700. Both the exterior and interior have been popular motives for various artists. The area around here is also known for several iron age burial mounds and it is said that the church itself is built on an ancient ritual place.

As I was just getting out of the car and starting to shoot i saw that the fog was catching up with me.

It seemed this would be a day for misty pictures so i headed out on a field along ski tracks that goes deeper in to the forest.

The mist was getting thicker by the minute.

Until it grayed out all contours and painted the the landscape in soft soft light.

But just as fast as it had descended it started to clear up again. I wasn’t given much time to grab this, and also I had to keep to the ski track. I tried walking out on the field to get some shots from another angle and immediately sunk to my thighs in rotten snow.

And then it cleared up as I headed back to the car after a good photo-morning here in the freezy North.

BTW, it has been a specially cold spring this year. A colleague at work told me yesterday that it had been 21 C degrees warm on that day exactly one year ago.

Hvalstrand

Another sunny day here up North as we’re going into Easter holiday. I had an hour to kill before picking Elsie up at work and decided to grab my gear and take a little walk on Hvalstrand (Literally “Whale beach”). It’s a popular place in the summer, at least it used to be when I was a kid. I still remember the terror the first time I jumped from the tower  🙂

The restaurant on the beach is a quite interesting piece of functionalism architecture. I have taken some pictures of it previously, but I will come back some day – maybe in the morning light – and see if I can take some better shots of it.

The action today was not so much on the beach as out on the fjord. The ice is still pretty thick this late in the season because of the cold winter.

As I headed back to the car I turned around (always a good thing to do when shooting pictures) and spotted a couple who had climbed up in the tower. Her shoes where really lightening up the scene, and I grabbed this shot with my  telephoto lens:

An hour on the beach, quite enjoyable even in the winter. It’s interesting to be able to “walk on water” and grab shots of well known places from the unusual off-shore perspective.