Sunset on Halvmånen Beach, Landskrona

Took a little walk with my camera and favourite nifty fifty lens yesterday evening.

Olympus E-M5 Mll & M.Zuiko 12-40mm f2.8 PRO - Low Light Test

I normally never bother with the Black Friday sales as mostly here in Europe they are not such great value. However an ad popped up on the BBC news website with a deal I could not pass up, an Olympus E-M5 Mll and M.Zuiko 12-40mm f2.8 PRO combo at about half normal price! I have been contemplating a mirrorless camera for some time now and so I jumped in feet first. After fiddling with the rather special menu system for a few days I finally got it set up the way I wanted so today I headed out into town to give it a whirl.

There are a few things I really like about the E-M5, starting with the rather diminutive size. It is tiny compared to the Nikons I have been used to for so many years, but they still manage to squeeze in more external controls than I realistically will ever need. The second thing I like is the viewfinder, it is big, bright and great for chimping on the move. The preview of what the pic is shaping up to look like is fantastic.

Landskrona Citadel

It's an oldie but I liked it so much I decided to post it again.

John Scotts restaurant in Göteborg

Moving Tram After Sunset.

In Göteborg, Sweden.

Sunset over the Öresund

I took this photograph from the crest of a hill overlooking the Öresund between Sweden and Denmark with the island of Ven between the two on the left side of the photograph. Below is a picture taken with my cell phone camera of the camera on a tripod and my bicycle waiting patiently for me to get finished and take it back home.

Fireworks over Landskrona's Harbour Area

Another one from New Years Eve where the slow shutter speed and steady prevailing breeze caused the fireworks to streak into interesting shapes.

Landskrona Watertower at Night

Taken at 22.50 on a warm Swedish summer night there is still plenty of light in the sky to provide a really lovely blue. Trapped in the depths of winter, as we are now, I look forward to late night cycle rides with my camera and tripod once again!

Landskrona Citadel in Winter

Nikon D300s and Nikkor 18-105mm lens, tripod, Aperture Priority, f/11, 20s, ISO 200, at 18mm, triggered off camera via Phottix Strato, basic RAW editing in DxO and fine tuned in Corel PSP. All while freezing my butt off at 16.55 on a Swedish winter afternoon. Worth it. :-)

Taking Photos in Freezing Scandinavian Weather

This evening I went out to take some winter style photos near the Landskrona Citadel and after a while I was almost regretting my decision because of the ice cold wild and fine sleet. Despite having gloves, woolly hat, insulated winter boots and a very thick jacket it didn't take too long before I was desperately cold. On a positive note the D300s kept shooting in those horrible conditions without skipping a beat, but the battery was dropping charge somewhat faster than normal.

Once I got home and looked at the photographs on my computer screen (and I was warmer) it certainly seemed worth the minor inconvenience so I suppose I'll get out there again soon! :-)

Scandinavian Sunrise over Landskrona - a Panorama

This morning we were treated to a spectacular Scandinavian sunrise which I rushed to capture for posterity. Sunsets and sunrises may be cliché, but somehow we never get tired of their beauty!

Hand held 5 shot panorama from my D300s and the wonderful 18-105mm plastic fantastic kit lens, stitched in Microsoft ICE.

Firework Photography over Landskrona Harbour at New Years Eve

Firework photography is really easy if you have patience, a tripod and a firm grasp of your camera's manual controls. The settings for this photograph were: f5.6, 2.5s and ISO 200.

2.5 seconds was more than enough to capture the fireworks but not so long as to create too much blur as the fireworks drifted sideways in the breeze.

4 Steps to Improve your Christmas Light Photography

At this time of the year many towns have beautiful Christmas light displays and as photographers we naturally want to capture these as best we can. However, because the light is low it is not always possible to just go and shoot away on auto because the camera never gets the scene to look quite the way we really remember it at the time because human eyes are light years ahead of camera sensors and so what we see and what the camera captures is often less than satisfactory.

A lot of people will shoot bracketed shots and blend them in software to increase the range, but very often HDR images look really unnatural to me and not pleasing to the eye. There is also the problem of people walking around in the shot and causing multiple "ghosting". So what to do?

Well, the picture above was a single shot photograph and by following a few simple steps I managed to get the scene exactly the way I wanted.

1.) Be patient and wait for the light. Photography should never be rushed anyway, but it becomes even more important when we want to capture the light perfectly. I generally do not like to go out on a shoot together with anyone else because I always feel obligated and pressured to keep to a schedule when I am in a group. Photography is not a team sport! Wait until the light from the sky is balanced as closely as possible to the electric lights on the street in front of you for the best results. I normally find that I get the light I'm after about 20-30 minutes or so after sunset.

2.) Always use a tripod. As steady as you think you can handhold your camera, and as wonderful as your systems image stabilisation may be, you still cannot beat a tripod. Most folks just pump up the ISO and hand hold anyway, but even the best modern cameras will show noise of some sort or the other at even moderate settings. The best performance will always be at base ISO so why not go for the best? While you are at it you may as well get a decent sturdy tripod that will not shake in the wind.

3.) Shoot in RAW. The cameras RAW files always contain a LOT more information than shooting in jpeg and hoping for the best. Don't listen to the "internet experts" who claim that real photographers "get the settings right in camera" and therefore don't need to shoot RAW. I have news for them, real photographers do shoot RAW and for good reason. The dynamic range of light captured when using RAW is much greater than any jpeg can capture. Shoot RAW, you'll never be sorry that you did!

4.) Hone your post processing skills. In the days of film we would shoot away and then hand over our film to an expert at the processing lab who would do all the important stuff behind the scenes for us. In the digital age we have to become expert at every aspect of the photographic process unless we have the budget to hire someone to do the post processing for us. I generally recommend purchasing a decent program like DxO Optics Pro or Adobe Lightroom as they offer great options to extract the best from your RAW file and produce the kind of results that professionals the world over would be satisfied with. Then practice, practice, practice... and then practice some more. Maybe take a course, even an on-line course. Then practice some more. Decent post processing skills will take your photographs a large step further.

I hope that this short bit of advice will help you when you step out to capture all the pretty lights down town during this holiday season.

Here's wishing you great light, and a wonderful 2014!

Lanthus

Spectacular Scandinavian Sunset

With so many people all over the world raving on about African sunsets and how wonderful they are we tend to forget that other parts of the world also have beautiful sunsets. I am currently living in Southern Sweden and in the now almost two years that I have been here I can tell you that even these northern climes produce awesomely beautiful sunsets, maybe just not as regularly. Take the photo below for instance, taken in a small town called Lomma at the river right by the start of the harbour just where the bridge crosses over with some shiny new apartment blocks on the other side. Scandinavian light can be wonderfully soft and pastel like, and lasts for a whole lot longer than the beautiful but abrupt African sunsets from my home country.

Moral of the story is that you don't need to travel all the way to Africa, or some other exotic location, to photograph beautiful sunsets. All you need to do is get out with your camera more regularly and take many more photographs because beauty exists everywhere if you take the time to find it!

Downtown Fredensborg - Deserted

Taken at 23:03 at night and totally deserted it's almost eerie, but great for taking photographs. At this time of night there was still enough light in the sky to balance nicely with the street lights and end up with a single shot containing a wide gamut of fairly even exposure. This sort of photography always requires a tripod as we have to deal with longish exposures and hand holding is impossible without getting a blurry and unusable photo. Tripod = sharp and clear. Get a good sturdy tripod, it'll do wonders for your photographs!

Most people shoot until the sun goes down and then they head indoors for dinner. I try to hang around for an hour or two (or more) after sunset to get this sort of light. It can make for long, cold, hungry evenings, but it gets pictures that very few people are willing or able to take simply because they lack the dedication and commitment to suffer a little inconvenience to get the photo they really want. But then maybe I'm a little too obsessive about these things? ;-)

Nikon D300s, Nikon 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 VR, sturdy tripod, remote trigger, f10.0, 13.0s, 18mm, VR off, ISO 200, Auto White Balance, Matrix Metering, Aperture Priority, quick run through Dx0 Optics Pro 8, and then some adjustments in the curves tool of PSP X5.

Traffic Circle in Fredensborg

Waterfront at Lake Esrum in Denmark

I still haven't got used to the extremely long summer evenings in Scandinavia, despite having been here for over a year now. This is my second summer in these northern countries and the beautiful lingering light still appears miraculous to me after a lifetime of the abrupt sunsets that characterise the evenings in Southern Africa. This particular photograph of the waterfront at Lake Esrum was taken at 20.03pm, and there was still another hour of useable light for a fruitful and fulfilling photowalk that splendid Danish summer "magic hour".

Livet är mycket bra!

Jetty on Lake Esrum in Denmark

I have photographed this jetty before, but never in a beautiful pastel painterly sunset like this!

Fredensborg is one of my favourite places in Scandinavia, and Lake Esrum is down past the palace a couple of kilometers or so from the town center. It is a beautiful walk through a forested area interspersed with parkland from the palace and then the beautiful lake is the cherry on the top.

Life is good!
:-)

Lake Esrum Sunset

I don't often venture into the world of HDR, but when I am faced with a huge lighting challenge like the one in the scene above there really is no other way to get the full dynamic range on offer. If I exposed for the setting sun the boat in the foreground was diminished to murky blacks and greys, and if I exposed for the foreground the sunset became a wash of blown out highlights. Cue bracketing function on camera, roll on Photomatix (I never upgraded from version 3!) tweak in PSP X5, and voila! A simple exposure blend is enough for me, I try to keep these looking as natural as possible given the circumstances because overworked HDR is an abomination to behold... at least to me.

Victoria Falls - from a long obsolete camera!

An oldie from 2009 taken on a Canon 350D that I got super cheap because they were end of line and had been replaced by the 400D back in 2006! I took it with me on a trip to Zambia and got some great photographs from the old 8 megapixel obsolete relic. ;-)

This pic is of the Victoria Falls taken from the Zambian side looking towards the setting sun. It was the rainy season and the Zambezi was in flood making for a very spectacular flow of water over the falls and the "smoke" plume (water mist/spray) that can be seen from many kilometers away. The locals call these falls Mosi-oa-Tunya "the Smoke that Thunders". David Livingstone renamed it after Queen Victoria when he finally got there.

I still have the 350D but these days it mostly just sits in a drawer in my office. I have been trying to decide what to do with it as it is a pity to have such a wonderful camera just gathering dust. What would you do with it? Any great ideas how I can put it back into use? Be creative!