Rialto bridge reflected in the roof of a taxi boat

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A quite unique reflection of the Rialto Bridge in Venice

Scaffoldings covered half of Rialto Bridge when I visited Venice. This, of course, was a great disappointment, as I had planned to shoot it. I call it Scaffolding Disease, and I seem to suffer from this disease.

The good thing about such situations is that you are forced to look for alternative compositions. In this case, I had half of the Rialto Bridge to work with, and only from this side. On the other side, houses on both sides were completely covered in scaffoldings too.

I walked around, and suddenly I saw this reflection in the roof. The Taxi boat had been lying there for ages. We had been at Rialto bridge since before the city lights were turned on, and the taxi had been there most of that time, but I hadn’t thought of using it as a reflection surface.

I am not sure I would have shot this shot, had it not been for the search for a unique composition, using only half the bridge. The reflection in the roof is a bonus, but it is the final touch, I think.

The Sun Voyager in Iceland

The Sun Voyager is a fascinating modern sculpture watching over the sea.

You would almost expect the Sun Voyager (or Sólfar as it’s called in Icelandic) to take off while you watch. It sits on the water front of Reykjavik overlooking the fiord leading out to the Atlantic sea.

Photoration X – get a kick out of post-processing

I got a kick out of making this photo. The photos I like the most, is the ones I get a kick out of.

As unreal as it might seem, this is a photo from an underground station in Vienna. And to be honest, I have forgotten which. I usually can reconstruct the details in my mind, of where a photo was shot, but this one, I have simply forgotten this exact location.

About this the making of this photo

This photo I processed in a different way, compared to most of the photos I make. Actually you only see a quarter of the photo, because I mirror it, twice! Let’s have a look at the original:

You can probably easy recognize the lower right hand corner. What’s interesting about this corner is both the light in the floor, and the fact, that almost no people are there.

Why does this work as powerful as it does? There are some lines in the flor, and one of the lines of tiles is even slightly brighter than the others, forming an X when mirrored, first vertically and the horizontally.

The scene is not quite interesting enough, even if the lamps and the circular form of this underground station in Vienna are interesting subjects. I shot this hand held, using my Sony A7R, while I was on the move. I managed to get the perspective right, but it would have required more time and a tripod, to get a really good shot out of this. I tried to proces this in my usual ways, but couldn’t get something really interesting out of it.

Instead I did what I do best. I switched on my problemsolving brain. When put into problemsolving mode, my brain works in mysterious creative ways, with lots of ressources, and this idea of mirroring popped up into my mind. And from there, things went fairly easy.

Gotta Love Venice

Palazzo Ducale or Doge’s Palace in Venice is a huge and incredibly beautiful building.

I really love Venice, even if there are heaps of tourists. The city is something out of the ordinary, and its magic just captures me. We got up early enough, to be able to see Piazza San Marco (almost) without any people (and of course to capture it in the right light). I think we got lucky with the weather.

About this photo

This is a 7 shot HDR, ranging from -4 to +2. I shot it using my Nikon D800 and my Nikkor 16-35mm f/4.

Venice Doge's palace

Why did I shoot from -4? They are almost completely black. One of the hard parts in shooting night shots, or blue hour photos like this one, is that street lamps are incredibly bright, compared to the rest of the photo. And often you end up, having completely blown out lamps. Sometimes, blown up lamps, can look great, at other times, lamps with full details can look great.

By shooting, and making sure, that I have all information, I have the artistic freedom, to choose if I want one or the other. A blown out lamp or a lamp with details. In the case of this photo, I went in the middle.

You could argue, that from -2 to +2 would have been enough, but if I had wanted to do something different when I got home, I couldn’t have changed my mind. So I made sure, when I shot the shot.

Nyhavn Just Before Sunrise

Nyhavn (New Harbor) is a beautiful place in Copenhagen.

On this particular morning, I saw the craziest wild colored sunrise, but I never saw the Sun itself. I saw it shine on the city behind me, but before it got clear of the horizon, it disappeared behind clouds. Really weird. This photo is from Nyhavn in Copenhagen. While Nyhavn means New Harbor, it is an old harbor today, only there used to be an even older harbor.

Today Nyhavn is the place to go, for a cold nice beer and a nice meal on a summers day. Not only tourists go there. If the weather is great, the locals will go there too, for a beer after work, or just to hang out.

Cykelslangen in Copenhagen

Cykelslangen (Cyclists snake) in Copenhagen.

Sometimes, when new constructions are built, you should think that they get built for photographers. This curved bridge is made for cyclists. It is made to prevent cyclists and pedestrians to colide, and not for photographers, however, it is a photographers darling. You can do so many things with it, because of the fantastic snake shape. It located between the Aller House and Fisketorvet shopping mall..

Stars above Saint Mont Michel

Stars and not least spot lights above Mont Saint Michel.

Stars and not least spot lights above Mont Saint Michel. These spotlights are amazing. The top of the bell tower of the monastery at Mont Saint Michel rises about 150m above the sea level, but these spotlights are just lighting up the sky.

This is the second image I have posted of these spotlights, and the first time I posted, someone wrote to me, that Saint Mont Michel did no look that way with the spot lights. I know I like to play with my images, but in this case I did not add the spotlights. This is the original unedited image:

Nikon 28-300, 28mm, F ISO 1250, f/5.6, 25.0 sec.

Because Mont Saint Michel has so many spotlights at night, and the night itself was pitch dark, it is impossible to capture all light in one shot. The shot above is the brightest shot, and the monastery itself is completely blown out while the stars are nice. I shot from -2 to +4, 7 shots all together.

Chateau Queyras sitting on the top of the World

Chateau Queras in the French Alps.

Sitting on top of the world, or so it seems. Like so many other castles and fortresses in mountain areas, Chateau Queyras sits overlooking a pass for protection. While Chateau Queyras might not be the most famous castle in the world, it certainly is picturesque. I shot this photo, as I was coming down from the mountain, after having shot this one:

Long exposure photo of Chateau Queyras.

I shot these shots while attending a photo workshop by Duncan MacArthur. One of the advantages of going on a photo workshop is, that you get the photo locations served right in front you.

About the processing of the first photo

The top photo is a combination of an HDR photo and long exposures. Cars don’t come by very often, and I had to wait for at least 5 minutes, after having shot my HDR series. I think the light trails adds a nice touch to the photo, and it fills an empty space area in the lower left corner. If you are interested in my general HDR workflow, you can find it here.

I did a lot of cloning in this photo. As a Fine Art photographer, I see myself as an artist I am not trying to portray reality in any way. I am bridging between reality and surrealism, and I do to photos what I like, and what I find fun. And actually I sometimes find it a great sport, to see how much you can remove from a photo, and still not notice, without scrutinizing it.

In the case of the top first photo of this post, I removed a fence and a phone booth.

In this case I found it a great sport to remove in particular the phone booth. I end up feeling like a painter.

I use a combination of the Healing Brush Tool and the Clone tool. The Clone tool makes an exact match, while the Healing Brush Tool does some magic, to match both lights and tones. And to be honest, it quite often fails in doing a good job.

In this image I used the Clone tool a lot, to get exact match texture control. This resulted in a too bright piece of wood (see #2 below). This area is more in the dark, than the areas above, I used to clone from. To fix that, I added an Exposure layer mask, set the exposure to approx -1.27 stop, inverted my mask (CTRL+I or on a Mac CMD+I). My adjustment layer is now hidden, but I can paint it in using the brug tools. And by doing this with a 30% opacity I can dark areas I want to darken.

I ended up darkening the two areas #1 and #2 (se image above). The first area was just ‘too bright’, as a result from the HDR tone mapping and it attracted too much attention, to my liking. But #2 was a real problem, because it was obvious it was faked.

Artistic Choices can change a Photo

The Elephant Gate (Elefantporten) in the old Carlsberg brewing facility.

On my way home from a speech on photography I gave, for a photo club, I drove by the old Carlsberg brewing facility. I knew of the existence of this Elephant Gate, but I had never seen it. I turned the car around and went up there. Despite a light drizzle, I got out and shot some shots.

About the processing

When I post-processed this HDR photo, the Elephants didn’t become as prominent as I had hoped. The lights from the gate it self has a yellowish glow to it, and the elephants, even though they were wet, also had a slight yellow glow to it.

I wasn’t quite happy with the photo, and then I did what I often do with a photo, that I feel, hasn’t met it’s potential yet. I leave it. Then I go back a week, a month or even longer, and see if my creativity sparkles. In this case I waited a fortnight, and then I got the idea of increasing the exposure and removing all color from the elephants, and the balcony above them. This way, they get a much stronger role to play in the photo, and I felt that the potential was met, and I was happy.

One of the exposures completely unprocessed.

As you can see in the image above, the gate in the far end is completely white (blown out). This is because the camera can not capture all light in one exposure. There is too much difference between the light areas and the dark areas in the photo. It is quite dark from where I am shooting while the yard inside the gates in lit up. Because the camera can’t have it in one shot, I did 5 shots and merged them together into a High Dynamic Range photo (HDR), using my HDR workflow (read about it right here).

These are my 5 original unprocessed shots:

Notice how the gate is in the first image is perfectly exposed while the elephants are completely black. And in the last image, it is the elephants that are perfectly exposed. Combining them, gives an image that is perfectly exposed all over.

I as good as always use Photomatix to merge my photos into one. Photomatix does a ‘tone mapping’, which also applies some effect on the photo. And in this case, I took the output of Photomatix and used that as input, and then did a double tone mapped image. There is a button in Photomatix for this. You can read about doing double tone mapped images in this post. The trick is not to overdo anything. The double tone mapped image, will be way too wild and crazy. Do NOT use it straight out of Photomatix. Instead, blending it gently in Photoshop or Gimp, with the original exposures and the single tone mapped image, and you can get a nice effect, as I have on the bricks in this photo.

Tail of Clouds in Mölle Sweden

I have seen such a tail of clouds a couple of times, along the coast line in Sweden.

In Sweden, there is a peninsula called Kullen. It’s a big chunk of cliff on the western coast, not too far from Denmark. We went there to stay at “The Grand Hotel” in Mölle. The hotel is amazing. It sits high on the cliff like a Queen and has a fabulous view of the ocean and small harbor of Mölle, from where this photo is shot.

In 1908-9 The Grand Hotel was built as one of the first bathing hotels. People went there and bathed (shamelessly I might add) in striped long legged bathing suits. This shameless bathing caused photographers to go there and shoot photos of almost naked people (doh!), something that later turned into a valuable historic source of information about the early 20th century.

This photo is from the harbor in Mölle and you see Kullen on the right hand side. The light you see on the coast line is Ellens Cafe – a cafe worth a visit!

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