Yesterday the results for the „Best of 2010“ Blog Project were published by Jim and I thought I’d share them here with you, too, like I did last year. Enjoy!

You can find them after the jump Reade More...

Tags: Photo, Project, Best of 2010, Links

Another year has come and gone and it’s time to for another look back at the photos I have taken in the last year. Like last year Jim is doing a Blog Project called „Best of 2010“ in which I want to participate again (My entry last year).

As last year I could not decide on one best photo - especially since I took so many photographs, both at home and during my Roadtrip last summer (for which I still have not wirtten a blog post...). So like last year, I will have several categories in which I will show you my best photos. My favorite for each categorie is larger than the rest - you can see larger versions of all of them by clicking on an image.

Macro

Macro photography has been one of my favorite topics for years now but this year I did not have much time to go to a botanical garden or to spend time shooting in our own garden but still I got some new images I really liked. The thing for me with Macro shots is that I have become very, very picky in my images, since photos can be very similar some times - I’m looking more and more for the unusual than for simple depictions of the flowers.

Insects

Years ago, I wrote a blog post about how hard it is to get a good shot of an insect - it still is but I am getting better and got lots of practice this year with three visits to butterfly gardens.

Animals

I only visited two zoos in 2010, which is almost nothing for me but I got some pretty pictures (I think) - as with the flower Macros I was looking a bit more for the unusual than in the last years.

HDR

Okay, I’ll admit it, I was obsessed with HDRs this year - this was heightened even more with the new versions of Photomatix and HDR Efex Pro, which gives my HDR shots a lot more different looks. I used HDR mainly when I was on vacation, so the photos in this category were taken in the USA (Atlanta, New Orleans, Columbus, MS, Natchez, MS, Vicksburg, MS) and in Germany (Meersburg, Konstanz, Dreieich, Frankfurt). And yes, this is a best of and not all pictures I did take - I just had a hard time deciding, since a lot of memories are connected to these images.

Miscellaneous

These photos did not fit into any one of the categories - either because they are single exposure photos or because I was experimenting at night.



So here they are, my best pictures of 2010. Besides the ones shown, I took a lot of iPhone photos this year (some of which I highlighted in my last post) and started taking photos with a film camera (I got it for christmas, so not much to show yet). So next year there will probably be an even wider range of photo subjects.

Tags: Best of 2010, Photo

Tweet

I took the photo above over 3 years ago - but only published this version on Flickr a few days ago. Why the long wait you ask? Because I decided to re-process it recently. The photo has been one of those that has shown up on my Screen Savers from time to time and I always thought that I need to open it up again and do a different processing, because I never quite liked the original version I did:



It’s one of those photos were you see the potential but when you’ve been editing photos for a while, you also know that it could be way better and jaw-dropping. But with so many new photos taking up my time (I’m still processing those from my summer holiday...), I never went back to this photo. But it was always in the back of my mind, nagging me. So this weekend I decided to search my archive for it and see what I could do with it - it’s not just the fact that my tastes have changed but also that my processing knowledge has grown, as well as the apps I use (at the time I didn’t even know Photomatix existed!).

Like I said, it had been nagging me, so I knew a fair bit about how the final result was supposed to look like (kind of like when sculptures tell you the stone speaks to them or that they have to free that beaver from within that wooden block). I wanted it to be a bit ominous and for both the stone church and the clouds to have more structure to them. For this I knew that an HDR would probably be a great idea - of course I only had the single image but that’s okay, too, at least as long as you have a RAW file (you could do it from a jpg but I wouldn’t advise you to try). For this I fired up HDR Efex Pro, since I also knew that tonemapping was probably not going to be the final touch for the image (though it gave me some great results, too).
In the end I decided on this very dramatic version with some cross-processing applied and a very strong vignette applied, too, so that the clouds would be very dark and oppressing while still being very interesting (to me at least). But it also focusses the attention towards the church, which has a wonderful structured look and seems to almost glow in comparison to the sky.

The learning here is that it pays to go back to your favorite images from a few years ago (I know, you probably won’t like most of them and will cringe while looking at them). Because oftentimes they are worth a second look and a second try at becoming great and one of your all-time favorites!

How about you? Ever went back to an old image and made it something different?

Tweet
Last year I fell in love with Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro and tried out the Complete Collection of their apps and decided to buy all of them as a Christmas gift to myself. I’ve been using them a lot since then and got really excited when I heard that they were working on an HDR plug-in. Of course, the big question that I asked myself, as I am sure countless others did as well, was: how was it going to compare to Photomatix?
I got an early peek at HDR Efex Pro when Nik offered a webinar showcasing the beta version of the app during the summer. I really liked what I saw, especially since it offers you a huge number of visual presets with a lot more options than Photomatix does. Photomatix is the app you process your HDR in and then go into Photoshop or some other collection of filters to get your final results. This got so out of hand for me in the last few months that I, literally, spent hours perfecting a single photo. Granted, the photo was worth it but when you get home with several hundred photos you like from a summer vacation, there is just no time to spent hours on each individual photo.
Another thing I really got to appreciate is the U Point Technology, which is a faster way for changing settings for just an area in a photo without changing the overall look (similar to masking in Photoshop) - this is especially helpful with an HDR where you are almost bound to have some areas you would like to change a bit (e.g. the clouds).



Something they did not show in the webinar, was their Ghosting Technology and I was therefore really looking forward to seeing what they had done in that area, since I am tired of having to go into Photoshop to somehow rescue people strolling through my images. In the new Photomatix you simply highlight the area you have ghosting to reduce or eliminate it, with HDR Efex you get several options for Ghosting (youtube link) and I was really amazed at the results so far, people really were in one piece and they had a subtle HDR effect applied to them - something you lose with masking in from the original image.


I also enjoy the interface with the presets on the left and all your options on the right. Besides the strength of the tone mapping you also get a drop down with several options for the tonemapping, like sharper details or extra halo reduction, which gives you countless options for the look of your HDR. It also gives you the ability to do some advanced editing like adding a cross-processed look to the photo or going B&W in the app. You can even add a vignette in there (which I think is super handy).



I processed several photos these last few days with the new app, simply to get a feel for the options and I really, really enjoy using it. It’s very different from Photomatix but I like the added options and the ease of use of HDR Efex. I’m suddenly plowing through edits again after spending hours to get a similar result before, which is really great for the number of photos I tend to take.


If you want to try it yourself, there is a 15 day trial available for Aperture, Photoshop CS 5 and Lightroom.

(As always, click any photo to see a larger version)

Tags: Photo, HDR Efex Pro, HDR, Processing

Tweet As many of you are probably aware, yesterday night the Perseiden Meteor Shower was visible. Of course I had to go out and try to catch a meteor on a photo. Unfortunately, I didn’t but still I got several beautiful images of the night sky above our house and wanted to share some different images taken with different shutter speeds to show how much the shutter speed changes the lighting in a longtime exposure shot (and the ISO, too).

First of, the different in ISO on the lighting of the sky (please view the large versions to get a real impression of the differences). The first photo was taken at ISO 400, the second at 250 and the third one at ISO 100, as you can see the higher the Iso the more details and light you have in the photo (the 250 is a bit misleading because the camera was positioned slightly more to the right were there are street lamps). But with increasing the ISO you also increase the noise in the image, something that you will have even at a low ISo when you are taking long time exposure photos). Because of that I decided to try the bulb mode on my camera and do even longer exposures.


Bulb mode is the name for photos you want to take at even longer exposures than 30 seconds. With my camera, the Canon 7D, there is an entry for it on the mode dial like there is for shutter priority and aperture priority. When you choose that you simply decide on the aperture, which I set at f4 and then you simply hold down the shutter button for as long as you like. This is best done if you have a remote shutter release, which will usually have the option to secure it so you don’t have to hold down the button the whole time.
With that mode the following four photos were made. The ISO was set at 320 because I felt that gave me a good middle ground between noise and light sensitivity and the shutter speed fluctuated due to my holding down the shutter longer or shorter, since I didn’t time myself, I simply went by feeling. The first photo has a shutter time of 64 seconds, the second is 51 seconds, the third 77 seconds and the fourth 19 seconds.
As you can see, the difference in light and especially ambient light, something I cannot get rid of living in a small city and relatively close to the big airport in Frankfurt (half of our sky is almost invisible to the east due to the light pollution from the airport). I think the 60 seconds is a pretty good middle ground for my area, since the sky is still relatively dark and bluish (all of the shots here haven’t been processed or edited) but you see lots of stars and even a whole lot of small stars you cannot see with your eye from the ground.



One last tip if you go out for such shots: be sure to check your settings and take the lens cap of before you go out into the night.... I went out twice to take photos, the second time I forgot to take the lens cap of for the first shot - had I taken it off, I would have a photo with a meteor in it
Tweet

Tags: Photo, Exposure, Adivce

Yesterday I made a small photo excursion to my home town castle ruins because we have some big festivities there at the moment. The weather was faboulos, so i decided to do some HDRs, including some of our old carousel that is being put up for the week. Due to the number of people (and quirks of photomatix) I had to do a lot of work after making the HDR, that I thought might be interesting for beginners in the HDR area.

I started out with these three images (shot handheld):

Like you would expect, the sky is the best in the -2 shot, he people and the ruins in the background look best in the normal exposure photo and the details of the carousel look best in the +2 shot since they are in the shadow due to the roof of the carousel.
Since I had handheld the shots, I decided to use the HDR function of Photoshop 3, which I mainly use for overlaying the images and then used the Photomatix Tone Mapping plugin on the image Photoshop supplied. The result looked like this:

There was A LOT of ghosting since people were moving around and one part of the carousel revolves around itself, so that had been in movement, too - and the noise in the carousel was awful as well, so I decided to do some cleaning of the photo using the lighter two exposures. I added them as layers in Photoshop and aligned them with the tonemapped image so that I could paint in parts of those layers using layer masks. Since I knew I needed several areas of each photo, I decided to keep the original layers untouched and simply duplicate them for the cloning. This has the bonus that you don’t have to mess with your old layer mask when adding a new layer.
As a first step, I decided to get rid of the ghosting of the people in the foreground (all the moving parts etc. are referred to as ghosting) so I duplicated the normal exposure layer and added a black layer mask and used a soft edge brush to reveal the parts of the layer I wanted to use for the people. The result looked like this:

Unfortunately the stone ground lost some of its texture but the people look ley they are supposed to and the foreground looks way less busy, even though there are sill a ton of people. If you look closely, you can see that there were people moving in the carousel as well, so those had to be replaced, too. For this I decided to use the +2 layer, since I wanted the people (and even more the paintings) to be visible. So I duplicated that layer and worked with a layer mask again to paint in the non-moving people, which improves the picture again:

Since you can’t really see it from the zoomed out photo, I did a zoom into the area where most people were standing & moving. This is after cleaning up this part of the image.

As you can see, the people are clearly visible now but the paint job looks like it has been out in the weather for decades because the noise is soo bad. This is mainly due to Photomatix, which introduced a lot of noise into your photo. So you should sometimes clean up very dark or very light areas to get a more even look - and less noise. For this I used the +2 layer, too, since that one had the most details for the paintings.

I think the difference in the zoomed in images speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Here is how it looks like zoomed out:

A lot more details are visible now in the paint job but the trimming on the roof was too dark, so i painted it in from the normal exposure photo to get an even look and, since it is its own layer, I was able to increase the brightness a bit of just that layer to match the overall brightness of the carousel.


As a last step, I cleaned up the lower floor and the horses on it, using the normal exposure photo to get to the final image:
(Links to Flickr where you can find a larger size)

Here is also a look at the different layers I ended up with for the final image): The Cleanup took longer than I usually take the time for my images but I think the results are clearly worth it. I hope this little guide helped you see how some little cleaning up can improve a HDR image. If you have questions - hit the comments!

Tags: Photo, Photoshop, Processing, HDR

Some of you might read the headline/question and immediately think: No way or not with good results. I’m going to try and show you that it is indeed possible and that the results look okay, too.

The HDR image I am going to show you in this post actually happened by necessity: I wanted to capture the sunrise over a snow covered field and was sitting in my car with only my iPhone at hand. I knew that the iPhone could never give me the dynamic range needed for such a shot - not by a long shot - but I also knew that I can influence the exposure through the autofocus system they introduced with the iPhone 3GS. With the new iPhone, you tap on anything on the display and it will focus on that spot and also adjust the exposure to be ideal in that part of the image. With that in mind, I decided to do three different shots with the focus on different parts of the picture: 1) the sun, 2) the sky, 3) the snow. In that minute I wasn’t even thinking of an HDR, just to get a good individual photo (I should add that I was standing at a red light while taking the photos, so I had to be quick).
Here are the three individual photos:


As you can see, this is close to being a row of different exposures you would take with the AEB feature (if I had had the time, I would have added an even brighter one). So what’s next you ask? Well, I know that there are „HDR“ apps for the iPhone but I’m very skeptical of these, so I decided to do all the editing on my Mac. I decided to do the HDR with Photomatix but the differences in alignment were to severe to get good results from Photomatix, so I opened up Photoshop and used its HDR feature to align the images, which did it perfectly. Then I used the tonemapping plugin of Photomatix to do the tonemap of the photo. The results really blew me away!



This is the tonemapped image, which I edited a bit further in photoshop, by cleaning up the stripes in the sky with one of the three original images and by reducing the noise in the image (since it really, really brightened up some of the black parts).

So yes, you really can do a real HDR with an iPhone! Crazy, isn’t it?

(Btw, sorry that comments are currently not working, I’ll try to find a solution soon - the old comment system isn’t free anymore)

Tags: Photo, Photoshop, HDR, Processing, iPhone

i swear, I'll try to increase my update schedule to more than once a month! I really need to try harder, I've been slacking

Today, I have several small things for you:

Some weeks/months ago I spent a day playing tourist guide to friends in Frankfurt. It was also my first chance to test the Sigma 10-20mm lens I bought two days earlier (yes that trip made me buy sooner). I shared one photo with you but never the whole gallery.

While we are on the topic of Frankfurt, I also spent a day in the local botanical garden in September and took lots of flower macros *yay*. Due to the number of photos, there are two galleries: Flowers and a separate one for Dahlias.

I live in a fairly old town with a real castle ruin and each year we have a fair there, which is always great fun but most years it conflicts with another engagement. But not so this year I got two galleries for you from that: Some photos from the fair using my Lensbaby and at night they had a Keltic Fire Show, which I got some great photos from (if i may say so myself ).

On we go: I spent a long weekend in Prague, Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad) and Marianske Lanske (Marienbad) in September. Truly spectacular cities with tons to see & do and just a dream for photographers. Almost all of the photos in the three galleries I have put online are HDRs from three exposures. I'm in a total HDR phase right now. The galleries are divided by location: Prague, Karlovy Vary, and Marianske Lankse. We spent three days in Prague and then an afternoon in Karlovy Vary and a morning in Mariankse Lankse and i mainly used my new Sigma Wideangle Lens.

Last but not least, I spent a Saturday at a small zoo that specialises in reptiles - you know how much me and my Macro lens love reptiles Here are my best shots in a gallery.

Sorry for dumping so many photos on you - I definitely need to update the blog way more often...

As a last side note (to german readers): Ich "darf" jetzt auch für die Arbeit bloggen und habe nach einer Diskussion über die Qualitätsunterschiede in den Aufnahmen mit einem iPhone und einem Blackberry einen Blogeintrag über das Thema geschrieben auf der Basis der grundlegenden Technik, die solche Unterschiede ausmacht. Für viele Leser hier sicherlich nichts neues, ich wollte es aber trotzdem erwähnen (Die Webseite selbst wird übrigens bald im neuen Design erscheinen).

Tags: Photo, Gallery, Trips, Prague, Frankfurt, Macro, Reptiles

One of my favorite bloggers, Brian Auer, is doing another Photo Project. He asked users to send him photos they would be willing to share for another "Edit my Photo" contest. I wanted to participate in this part of the project - but of course, I forgot about it... But I did remember to vote on which photo should be used for the editing part of the project (You can find all entries here).


The winning entry by John Huson

I really liked the photo that got chosen, because I was drawn to the structure in the wall. I really wanted to focus on the wall for my entry for the project because I think it has a higher draw to it than the person pictured. Brian supplied me with the RAW version of the photo so I had a whole range of options at my disposal to play with the photo.

I started out by opening the photo in Photoshop CS3 and the Camera RAW editior. Next I tried the different outputs for changing the white balance. I decided to go with the results from the tungsten light, which gave the whole photo a nice blue tint.


The photo with white balance set to tungsten light

Next I decided to use a Lomo action for Photoshop I had downloaded some time ago and had gotten really great results from in the past (You can find this photoshop action here).


The photo with the Lomo action applied

I really liked the direction this was going and also how that yellow thingy on the ground was standing out of the photo but the guy in the photo had become too dark and the texture in the wall did not jump out at you, either. Due to this, I decided to keep playing with the photo.
My next idea was to make a new layer with the original photo on top of the lomo-rized version and try different blending modes. The one I decided on was "overlay"

The guy in the photo is looking even worse but the wall had gotten a really nice texture. Now that I liked the wall, I decided to see what I could do to bring the guy in the picture back to a look where you can see his face. For this I made two additional layers on top with the original photo. In the lower one I used the masking tool and only left his face visible and used the blending mode "Lighten", which brought back the details in his face but he still did not have enough contrast in comparison to the rest of the photo, so I selected the whole of him in the next layer and masked this and used Overlay again. This increase the contrasts in his clothes and his skin a lot. Lastly, I decided to use a curves adjustment layer and played around with it until I was satisfied. The result of this I liked to much, that I decided to enter it as my entry into the project:

My final edit

If you want to partcipate in the project, you can do so until October 16th

Tags: Photo, Photoshop, Project, Entry

As you might know, I really like to work with HDR files from time to time and I always prefer to keep them pretty close to natural looking (just with a higher dynamic range). Some time ago I spent a day playing tourist guide to friends in Frankfurt, which was kinda fun since you never look at cities you consider your home the same way as tourists would (in fact, this was the first time I had my camera with me in Frankfurt). During that photo shoot, I took almost exclusively three RAW files of every file to be able to make HDRs since the sky was super blue and I didn’t have an ND filter with me.

One subject was especially suited to HDR: a dark gate under an overhanging on which the sun was shining.

This is how it would have looked as a normal photo (totally unprocessed)


It’s really not too bad but the gate does not really pop and you can’t really see all the details in the structure. Therefore I took three shots with the AEB automation with exposure of +/- 2 to get extreme differences in exposure.


As I said, I had taken a lot of shots for HDR processing that day, so I decided to do a batch processing in Photomatix, which is pretty great, even though I can’t do much more with my Mac while this is running. I always let it do three versions of the photo (the two options you find under tonemapping and the fusion option with automatic lighting). The best version was this one:

As you can see, it is pretty close to the originall, just the gate itself is a lot lighter and the reflections in the glass are more pronounced. There is also more contrast in the stones. But I wasn’t totally satisfied with it, so I tried a few more ideas:
The first was a version for which I made the HDR in Photoshop CS3 and then used the tonemapping plugin of Photomatix in Photoshop. The result can be seen below and while I liked this version, the details in the gate do not come out at all, in fact, I have a lot of artifacts in the darker areas (remember, click any photo to see a large version).


Then I decided to try Hydra, a HDR app for Macs (I am still using the first version, though), which has pretty good results sometimes, too. This was the result from Hydra:

I didn’t really like this result because it did none of the things I wanted to accomplish, so I decided to fire up Photomatix once again and do a manual processing with it of the photo. I also decided to play a bit more with the levers in Photomatix than I usually do to get a bit more extreme results than usually. This is the version I finally decided on:


As you can see, its a much more moody picture than any of the other versions and the details look like they are supposed to look! It’s really amazing how different you can process an HDR and how different the results can look.

What do you think, did I decide on the right version?

Tags: HDR, Photo, Processing

Sorry for being so quiet for so long - but somehow I am fresh out of ideas on what to write currently. But I was out taking photos several times in the last few weeks and I added a link to the photo galleries with those photos in my photo album overview.

The galleries include:
Two galleries of visits to the Atlanta Botanical Garden. One with a normal Macro lens and one with my Lensbaby.
One gallery with photos from a visit to the Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta.
One gallery with photos from a special rose exhibit in the Palmengarten in Frankfurt.
One gallery with photos from a trip to the Opelzoo near Frankfurt.

Enjoy!

Tags: Photo

No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you, I am talking about my christmas present, which I tried out last week for the first time (don’t even ask....). For Christmas I got a Lensbaby Muse. If you don’t know what a Lensbaby is, it is a special lens that you can use with an SLR camera that has a special optics in it, so that you can take photos in a way that only part of the photo are in sharp focus. An example would be a focussed middle section with everything blurred out towards the edges. The great thing with this lens is that you can have the sharp part anywhere in the frame that you want to have it, you just have to tilt the lens in that direction.

I first wanted to get a Lensbaby Composer, which is the newest version of the Lensbaby lenses and allows you to lock the lens once you have decided on a sweet spot and has a regular ring for shifting focus. But the problem was that the Composer is a lot more expensive (even though Lensbaby lenses are far less expensive than your regular DSLR lenses) and that no shop in Germany had them in stock and I needed to get it before I went back to the US the week after Christmas. So I went for the Muse, which is the classic version of their lens and a lot of fun to work with. The hardest parts are that you need to shift your sweet spot with your hands and by doing so you also focus the lens. As you can imagine, I am getting a lot of out of focus photos at the moment
The Lensbaby lenses are very much manual - its not just that you have to focus the lens, but you also have to use the lens in manual mode or Aperture Priority mode, since you have to set the Aperture into the lens with your hand. You get 5 or 6 different aperture rings with the lens and can buy additional ones that you can cut to your liking (for example using a star shape instead of a circle). Depending on the aperture you will get a different level of blurring from the sides.
In addition I also got the Macro kit for it, which is a fancy way of saying that I got two close-up filters They are specifically made for the lensbaby and get screwed onto the top of the lensbaby, like they would on a normal lens. With my obsession with flowers I had to have them


Now, my first try with the lens... I decided to take the lens with me for a trip to the Botanical Garden here in Atlanta. It was very different and strange at first because I hadn’t tried the lens much before this but I soon got into it and found out how to take photos I liked. Even though I had a „What now?“ moment in there, as well: Somehow I thought I couldn’t find a focussed sweet spot with the lens, so I thought that the wheel for adjusting for your eyesight had been somehow gotten changed, which happens to me from time to time. So I started changing the wheel - until I thought about it and realized I did not have any Autofocus-able lens with me... What to do? I tied to take photos that I thought were sharp and then checked them at a zoom level on my display till I felt that the sharpness was okay in the photos. Took me a while....

Overall, I really, really liked my first experience with my new lensbaby and have, in fact, already gone out again for a second try with it - to the Georgia Aquarium. I think, I am getting addicted to it....

Tags: Hardware, Lens, Lensbaby, Photo

Another blog project: This time the project initiator, Phil Price, asks participants to edit his photo, which you see pictured here, and to submit their results to him. In this post you’ll find most of my edited versions of this photo, including what I did and what I liked and disliked about each one. Of course, at the end of the post you’ll also find the photo I am submitting to his projectReade More...

Tags: Photo, Photoshop, Processing, Project

A lot of people are playing with their photos and textures to give their photos a slightly different feel. I always wanted to try this but for whatever reasons, I never did. After downloading a few textures last week, I decided to finally try it on one of my photos from last year.

The photo is an HDR of a church in the Smoky Mountain National Park and is very moody due to the heavy clouds with the light coming through. It’s a prime example for a photo that pratically begs to be made look like it was taken 100 years ago. There are several ways to achieve this but I decided to go with some dark, grungy texture and giving both the photo and the texture a sepia color overlay. Additionally, I lowered the opacity and the fill of the texture to make it look more natural.

In addition to that I also cropped the photo so that the cars are not visible in the photo since they would not fit with the mood of the photo. After I had done that I felt that something was still missing from the photo, so I decided to add some old-looking frame to it, which makes it feel more natural and lets the texture seem more like a natural part of the photo.

What do you think of my first try at textures? It definitely was easier than I thought it would be - so if you haven’t be sure to try it

Tags: Photo, Photoshop, Textures, Processing

Now that the year is over, it is time to look back at all the photos I have taken in the last year and figure out my favorite ones. As many of you know, this is not easy since there are a lot of really good photos in the time of a year, so I have decided to go with a Top 10 of sorts and some honorable mentions. Additionally, Jim Goldstein is doing a Blog project on his great site JMG-Galleries, in which he is asking his blog readers for their favorite photos of the year and I want to participate in this. I also participated in this project last year with my favorite photo of 2007 (on my old blog).

Some honorable mentions (all of them are linked to Flickr so you can see them in a larger version and leave comments on individual photos if you want to do so):
A church in the Smoky Mountains

Some palm leaves in the Atlanta Botanical Garden

Details of a butterfly in my garden

A close up of a rattle-snake

A sleeping gecko

A snail house in the Desert House in Vienna

A lux licking his paw in the Opelzoo


And now on to my Top 10 for 2008 - since I have a really hard time putting them in a definite order, I’ll post 10 to 2 in an unorganized fashion. Only my favorite photo of the year is distinguished from the rest for the year.
The outside of the Palmhouse in Vienna - my first real try at an HDR

A swimming turtle in the Zoo in Berlin, the lighting was just amazing for this shot that has not been edited at all.

A heavily edited flower in the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Usually I go for less editing but I love the contrasts in this photo.

A Poladroid of a rose in the Atlanta Botanical Garden - so much nicer than the original image

The old carrousel in my home town

I absolutely love to photograph reptiles, they are always striking poses for me. Gotta love it!

A water lily in the botanical garden in Frankfurt - I love the colors and perspectives of this one

This snail house was in the same exhibit as the one in the honorable mentions and I absolutely fell in love with its colors. I was so glad I had my macro lens with me that day

This photo was taken in the zoo in Berlin - the tiger was putting on a real show of showing his strenght and I was able to get some great photos of him in the process.



Last but not least, my favorite photo for the year:

It was taken during a roadtrip over thanksgiving break and I absolutely love the colors and the depth in the photo. It has been my wallpaper ever since I processed the photo (link to my blog post on the processing).

Tags: Photo, Best of 2008

In November I did a one-week road trip starting in Atlanta, going to Gatlinburg, Charlotte, Charleston and Savannah. As you probably can imagine, I took a ton of photos on the trip. The hardest thing for photographing was the weather: pure sunshine with no clouds. This meant that the dynamic range was too much for my sensor, so I decided to use HDRs a lot of times. In the past I have used Hydra for this but sometimes Hydra does not give me the results I would like to have. Since I had a ton of photos on my Mac with three different exposures, I decided to try out Photomatix again. This was mainly because one photo didn’t come out in Hydra like I wanted it to look.
This were the three starting photos:


As you can see the middle exposure is not as popping as it could be (remember to click on an image to see a larger version). So I decided to try Hydra on it. This are the two results I liked best:

The first one is a simple overlay of the images and the second one it tone-mapped - although it is a bit too saturated for my taste. But somehow neither picture really resonated with me (especially since I was looking for the best look for the mountains in the background. So I decided to try Photomatix. If you have ever tried it, Photomatix has a lot more options for customizing the results of your HDR, which is a good thing but also makes it more complicated to use. Because of the many options, among others I got these results:

Neither one is really perfect... I decided to also try Photoshop CS3 but I haven’t saved that one because it didn’t look at all like what I wanted to have for my photo So I decided to try Photomatix again after I had decided to buy Photomatix to have more options for my HDR projects. The final result I came up with:

Just a quick FYI, I added a photo gallery with the best photos from my trip to the botanical garden last week. I hope you like them

Tags: Photo, Gallery

This week I was able to go out and photograph for the first time in over a month. It was an incredible feeling to be „out there“ again and being totally „in the zone“. I went to the Botanical Garden here in Atlanta. As always, i took lots of photos and I’ll publish a slideshow one of the next days but today I want to focus on something I realized once again when I was shooting inside the giant houses of the botanical garden: Flash changes a lot about your picture!
I was shooting handheld (I didn’t take my tripod to Atlanta with me), so I had to use the flash for some shots to get a sharp image. There is always a difference in picture between the two but I had one instance where the difference was truly astounding to me.
Here you have two photos that show exactly the same subject and perspective. The first one without flash, only natural light, and the second one with the flash of my 40D. Notice the difference in details but also in shading. A subtle difference is also the unfocussed part in the background. Notice the ground in the upper left area, it is much more pronounced in the picture with the flash.


I guess, what I am trying to say is that you should always try to be aware of the effects your flash will have on the look of your photo. It can make or break your shot if you aren’t aware of the effects. (Instant review on the display is a great way to ensure that it does not break your shot).

Tags: Flash, Hardware, Photo

Sorry, I haven’t posted in way to long but I have been pretty busy with school But nevertheless, I want to show you my Flickr Favorites from the last three weeks. Most of these pictures are from my contacts on flickr - two especially, whose photos I really love: yappingjak and BigCatLover. Both take very different photos - yappingjak has an incredible distinc stlye for Macro flower pictures and BigCatLover does what his name implies: he takes absolutely stunning pictures of Big Cats.
As always, my short disclaimer: The photos belong to the artists who have posted them on Flickr and if you like one of the pics be so kind and visit their pics on flickr and comment on the pics or even fave them, too.
Enjoy






Following this stunning pictures are my uploads to Flickr in the last few weeks:

Tags: Flickr Favorites, Photo

Summary: Here they are once again: my new favorites from Flickr for this week. A total of 14 new favorites this week and my new shots this week, too.
-----Pictures after the jump-----Reade More...

Tags: Flickr Favorites, Photo

Summary: A post on how I took this picture and made it look a lot better using selective coloring and cropping. Additionally, the picutre exampes will give you a good example of how the composition of a photo will have an impact on the overall impression you get from the picture.Reade More...

Tags: Photo, Processing, Comparison

Summary: I’m back again. So here they are : my new favorites from Flickr for the last two weeks. A total of 14 new favorites and my new shots, too.
-----Pictures after the jump-----Reade More...

Tags: Photo, Flickr Favorites

Summary: It’s Wednesday again. So here they are once again: my new favorites from Flickr for this week. A total of 23 new favorites this week and my new shots this week, too.
-----Pictures after the jump-----Reade More...

Tags: Photo, Flickr Favorites

Summary: It’s Wednesday again. So here they are once again: my new favorites from Flickr for this week. A total of 25 new favorites this week and my new shots this week, too.
-----Pictures after the jump-----Reade More...

Tags: Photo, Flickr Favorites

Link to this image on Flickr
I spent the whole of yesterday evening processing and editing the pictures I had taken during the day. My workflow usually consists of looking at all pictures while the rest is still importing to get a first overview over what pictures I have and about the average quality of the pictures. Afterwards I go thorugh the pictures a second time and give ratings to the pictures I like best - 5 stars to those that are pretty perfect in every regard, 4 for quality pics that are sharp and everything but somehow are missing „something“ and 3 stars for pictures I like but do not love. The rest does not get a rating, indicationg that they are not worth publishing but not so bad as to delete them. This time I decided to do the processing while I was rating the pictures which took me a pretty long time even though I only edited pics that got a rating and only did very basic editing on most of them. But after a few hours I was finished and this morning I decided to split the pictures into two slideshows: one with pictures that got 4 or 5 stars and one with pictures that got a rating (so all with 3, 4, or 5 stars).

You can find the shorter slideshow (even that has 140 pic or so) by clicking here.

The long version can be accessed via this link.

I hope you ejoy the pictures and feel free to leave me a comment here in the blog post or via email I will also upload the best pictures to Flickr in the next weeks.

Tags: Photo, Organizational, slideshow

Just a small teaser photo. I spent the day in the botanical garden in Frankfurt and took loads of photos (over 750). I have already gone thorugh them and edited a lot of the and I am left with 345 I want to show off - but I am still debating the best way to do that, so it’ll be a few days till I do post a slideshow (or several).

Tags: Photo, Organizational

On my old site I had a photo album containing pictures already resized for the use as wallpapers on the iPhone that I had created for my personal use and then decided to share with other users. This post on the german photosite photoappar.at reminded me that I wanted to update my selection and also post them on this site, since I will not be updating the old site.
So now you can find some of my favorite photos in portrait orientation in a separate photo gallery, already resized for the use as a background on the iphone. You can download them for free but all rights remain with me - that’s also why I added a little watermark to them but that is very discreet, so it won’t get in the way of viewing the picture. In total there are 58 pictures, so a lot to choose from. I hope you’ll enjoy them.
Additionally, you can download all of them from here.

Tags: Photo, iPhone

Summary: It’s Wednesday again. So here they are once again: my new favorites from Flickr for this week. A total of 58 new favorites this week and my new shots this week, too.
-----Pictures after the jump-----Reade More...

Tags: Photo, Flickr Favorites

Summary: A short exploration into the reasons why sometimes selective coloring will give you better results and also an explanation on how you can use this simple technique. Be sure to check it out to see the full before and after shots.Reade More...

Tags: Photo, Processing, Photoshop

Berlin Cathedral
Flickr link

Summary: Do you know those awesome architectural pictures you have - which would be really awesome if it weren’t for some object taking away from their beauty? Sounds familiar, right? But what to do about them? You can’t just go to the people using the crane and ask them to remove the crane for a minute... (if you DO go out and try it, please tell me about your results ).
I don’t know how you got rid of them during the film days but I do know how you can get rid of them in the digital age.Reade More...

Tags: Photo, Aperture, Processing, Editing, Retouching

Close up of an Orang-Utan
Flickr Link

Summary: In my last post I shortly mentioned that I was in Berlin for a two-day trip last week. One of these two days was pent in the Berlin Zoo, which is has the most types of different animals in the world (according to their website) and is the oldest zoo in Germany. Find out more about my trip and the pictures I took by clicking „Read More“.Reade More...

Tags: Photo, Zoo, Berlin

Colorexplosion
Flickr Link

Summary: Today I just want to do a short post about a picture I uploaded to Flickr in the last week that’s been very popular. Get to know a bit more about what kind of shell it is and where I took it plus pics of two other shells. Enjoy!Reade More...

Tags: Photo

A bug on a rose petal
Link to this photo on Flickr

Summary: For my birthday I got three extension tubes for my camera. Here you’ll find a post on my first experiences with it including some first observations as well as three pictures I took using extension tubes. Feel free to check out the whole article by either clicking on „Read More“ below or the title of the blog entry Reade More...

Tags: ExtensionTubes, Photo, Hardware

HDR of the ruins of Burg Hayn in my hometown
Flickr link

Summary: One of my first real experiences with HDR. I highlight what a HDR is and what app I used to create the photo above. Additionally, the photos I used to create this HDR are shown. So go and check it out Reade More...

Tags: Photo, HDR, Hydra, Comparison