Lights

Stars above swedish cottage

In the autumn we went to Karlskrona in Sweden with some of our friends. At night the clouds cleared and with no moon I took a few shots at the sky.

What did I learn?
I learned that when it is so dark, you can’t really focus. You have set the lens to manual focus mode, and then learn by heart where the focus ring must be positioned.

About the processing
The photo consists of 9 HDR photos, but the sky comes from only one shot. The reason for that, is that the stars actually move surprisingly fast. An exposure of more than 15 seconds, will show stars moving. It’s really fascinating.

Harbour Bridge Roskilde

Not exactly a big great harbour bridge, but nevertheless I do like it. It connects the Museum Island, part of the Viking Museum here in Roskilde.

The photo is a 5 shot HDR shot before sunrise.

EXIF: 21mm, f/10, 5.0 sec. It was my aim to get the longest exposure to be a maximum of 30 seconds (which is the limit of the camera on automatic). I had to raise the ISO to 400, to keep the f/10 at a reasonable small value (higher number). I want the keep the f-stop low, to keep the foreground sharp as well.

The North

In the heart of Copenhagen lies the Fountain of the Storck. This is from the day that iPhone 5 was released in Denmark. All around the edges of this square people where standing in line with purple umbrellas and raincoats from Telia.

About the photo itself. I have taken this with my Nikkor 14-24mm in rain at 14mm. This is very wide on a full frame camera (Nikon D800), but the objective was to make the fountain seem almost as large as the big building in the back.

Processing wise I had some really nasty areas on the photo from the raindrops and I have had a lot of pain removing them. It is an HDR based on 5 images, but it is a fairly straight forward HDR. Being 14mm photo taken upwards, I had some pretty bad tilting lines, that I have work much on to straighten up.

University of Copenhagen

This is the main building of the University from 1836. The University has fostered a few known people, one of the more famous is Hans Christian Oersted, who discovered elektro magnitism in 1820. This particular photo I took on 22nd of December 2012. I have been waiting to take it, but the square in front is always crowded with people, busses, cars etc. But this day, only one single car was there.

It’s a single RAW file that I have tonemapped to achieve this result.

Viking ship lit in the Winter

Here’s one more from the local viking ship, the Sea Stallion (Søhingsten). From this angle it’s easier to see, that it’s the worlds largest. More than 60 modern vikings are used to row and steer the ship.
Taken in the evening. I used 5 shots and processed it in Photomatix and mixed layers in Photoshop and did the final adjustments in Lightroom.
Happy New Year everyone 🙂

Desolate Central Station

I rarely come by a central station that is as empty as this station, even at night time. I haven’t cloned anybody out or used multiple exposures to get rid of people or even waited for people to get out of the way. It just was empty – except for one single person (if you can find him).
This is a 5 shot HDR taken with a small tripod handheld on the rails of the stairs. There are way too many bicycles to get room with a real tripod. Denmark is a bicycle nation, only surpassed by Holland, I think.

Misty Cathedral

The cathedral of Roskilde lies in my hometown and contains the bones of 21 kings and 18 queens, including the famous viking Harald Bluetooth. The first king of Denmark to become a Christian. The technology of the modern age called Bluetooth is actually named after him – how about that!
Jack the Ripper just went around the corner, and the bat mobile also came by, while I was shooting. Unfortunately due to the long exposures, they kind of disappeared. Next time they come around, I’ll be sure to use a faster shutter speed! I used 7 exposures for this one. Then I used Photomatix and photoshop to merge layers to the final result.

Christmas Viking Ship

This is the Sea Stallion, which is the worlds largest reconstruction of a viking ship. It’s in Roskilde, Denmark. This year they have decided to make a Christmas tree out of it, while it sits on land for the winter.
I first did a colored version as a ‘middle product’ I got this version, where I have taken out blue and aqua colors. I have ended up liking this one much better than the full colored version.

Travelling in HDR

Sydney Grand Harbour View seen from Hotel Shangri La. Taken on the day I arrived tired to the Hotel. I’m glad that I took the photos the first night, because for various reasons none of the next three nights were as great as this night.
Sydney is a great city, that I would have loved to spend more time in.

Caught In Pixels