mibreit's photostream

Today I invested some time going through the archives of 2011 and found some photos from a trip to St. Peter Ording last Summer. I had nearly forgotten those and didn't process one shot from the trip. Well the weather was bad most of the time but on this morning I had a short clearling in the sky and a decent sunrise.

The tide was low and so I could get a nice structured foreground here. When there is storm the area around the stilthouse is completely flooded.

I used a lee 0.6 hard grad here + a polarizer turned for max reflection.

Have a nice evening!

Two weeks ago I was in saxony switzerland again. When I had planned the trip some time back I was hoping for snowy landscapes. What I got was rain, rain and a little more rain. I still wanted to take my camera out so I went hiking along some canyons to a little waterfall. I tried to take some detail shots using a polarizer to get good colors. Here's one view of the Amselfall I shot.

It's cool that with the 5D Mark ii only one shot was needed for the whole dynamic range. Even the cave shows some detail. With my 40D bracketing would have been needed.

I'm still waiting for some big landscapes to shoot with the 5D, but not for long :-) stay tuned

cheers

We were getting a great display of light that morning in saxony switzerland. No clouds in the sky as I had liked and thus the results are not as dramatic as some other shots. But instead the photos I took from the little Winterberg radiate great calmness and deliver a peacefull feeling I think. In retrospective the clear sky was the best what could happen this morning, it just all fit together!

With this photo I concentrated on the far hills and the light filtering through. I had to go for a panoramic shot to get in the whole scene with my tele lense.

Processing this shot was a real pain. My pc is just to slow for that big an image. And then there are all those little gradients going on which had the color and luminance in the sky break in some parts even as I was working in 16 bit. The solution to this is either to work in LAB mode, which didn't help here or to add some fine grain to those areas. I applied "add noise" with the smallest value to the sky and gone where those little steps in the gradient. Still you don't see this noise it's just a technique to even out those gradients

hope you like it!

cheers

From the same morning as my last upload. This photo was the first one I took. It's a combination of a long 2 minute exposure and a shorter one. As I took the long exposure I recognized some ducks swimming into the frame. As the expsure was done I quickly switched to a higher ISO and an open apperture to fire a short exposure. This way I got the ducks sharp in the frame and could later blend the two images to the final result here.

Hope you had a nice christmas!

cheers

Last sunday I was in heaven :-) No not really but close, at least photographer's heaven. I woke up 4am in the morning and drove 3 hours to the german alps not knowing if the sky would clear up a bit for sunrise and let in some magic light. The last days it had been just rain and grey skies. But I just had to go and give it a try. After all it was the first time since weeks I really had a complete day for photography.

So I needed a good location which I found on google earth. It's just fantastic what google earth combined with some photos you find on flickr or other photography networks provides in case of scouting. I could literally see the mountains with the river sweeping in on my pc and could compare it with a photo from that area I had found in the internet, with just a rough outline of where it was taken. So google earth gave me the spot to shoot from.

I arrived 7am and the show was already starting. What the heck, one hour before sunrise, I haven't seen such a dawn display for a long long time. The colors in the sky were fantastic, constantly changing and the shot you see above is the last one I took that morning.

I'm glad I didn't screw it, since it was the first real shooting with my new 5D mark ii. Manual focusing needs to be on the right spot and I had just done basic tests beforehand. But it seems I got it right and so I can show you a winterly image from the Staffelsee in the german alps.

Enjoy!

some Tech: Hoya HD Polarizer, Lee 0.6 soft GND, Lee 0.6 hard GND + 2 exposures blended

cheers