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Landscape and Nature Photography from the North of Europe

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During the last month I had been experimenting quite bit with creating abstracts using the panning technique. I published a first photograph here on the blog a few weeks ago, which was followed by a guest article which I wrote for the german photography blog “Kwerfeldein“. The latter got published just this weekend. Additionally I have been organizing these and some previous abstracts in my galleries.

Every now an then I have been releasing a wallpaper here on the blog, and today it’s time for another one. The image “Pastel Sunrise” as a wallpaper for iPad.

I’m using it myself and from all the wallpapers that I have tried, I like this one best myself (I admit that I kind of have to say that, but it’s true anyway ;-) )

Feel free to download it from here.

There’s more to come, so please stay tuned for future updates.

One of the many things that I did recently, was writing a guest-article for the popular German photography blog “Kwerfeldein.de” and just yesterday Martin published the article. It’s always a pleasure and a honor to write for someone else’s blog, and so was this article.

The article is a introduction to the use of the panning technique in landscape-photography. A technique I recently started to use a little more frequently again.

The article features some tips and tricks which I figured out using this technique as well as some fresh images. I once published a similar article here on blog in english if you are interested.

So, but now I would like to invite you over to Martins blog and have a look at the article. These and a few more images you can by the way also see in my galleries.

A few weeks ago I released my, so far, first e-book “Cornwall – A Photographic Journey” and I’m very happy that it had been very well received. It turned out to be my most popular post/page here on the blog.

As a little follow up, I would like to give away one of the images in a different edit from the book as an iPad wallpaper. I have tested here on my iPad and it works and looks perfectly fine.

If you like it, simply right-click to download it from here and save it to your photolibrary.

I hope you like this, and if you haven’t had the chance to have a look at my e-Book, you’re welcome to do so now.

Last week I posted a tutorial on how it’s possible to create a nicely split-toned B&W image in Aperture and already then I announced the release of this preset. The preset includes the curve and colour panel settings I used to create this image.

Most likely you will need to fine tune the settings to your image. You can do so by adjusting either the curves or the colour settings. Alternatively you could play around with the layer opacity of the curves layer as I described in this post.

Here’s the end result:

You can download the preset for Aperture from here.

Just this week I have started to play around with Lightroom 3 again, and so far I do like it also. For someone who shoots 80% of the time with an ultra-wide angle lens, the automated lens correction is a god-send. Since I was working with already, I created a similar preset for Lightroom which you can download from here.

UPDATE: I did had some issues with some missing files here. I’m sorry about that. I will update this post as soon as I have the adjustment presets updated.

Somehow landscape photography is always full of surprises. Every now and then something unexpected happens. Most of the time it’s just the weather turning bad just an hour before the best light after having a beautiful, occasionally though, something surprisingly nice happens. In the beginning of the year it was a group of whales slowly passing by in the fjord in front of us. Last year it were seals, and this year I got unexpected company by a cute little fox.

I have been strolling along the coast west of the city Vardø, in the very north of Norway the whole day already. A 30km long and narrow road along the coast. In the beginning of the day, I had been trying to resist against the heavy conditions, and once it cleared up, I had been looking for locations and vantage points. I spent the whole day waiting for the conditions to change and the chance to finally to do some photography.

On the what felt like the 10th pass along this road, I stopped to explore a certain viewpoint when I spotted this little fox approaching the car from the front.

Looking rather curious at me, he passed and continued his path. Once he disappeared behind me I get out of the car to explore the area. It was this moment when he returned again and started looking with curiosity at me. One could see the expression “What the heck he’s doing here?” in his face.

Carefully I pulled out my camera and changed to my 70-200mm lens, as this is an opportunity that I didn’t wanted to miss. Trying to be calm to not scare him away, I approach him by a few meters. It turns out, that this really wasn’t so necessary. This little fellow is appears to be too curious to be afraid of me and the lens.

While he comes closer faster, I capture a few photographs, and quickly realize that I’m not used to do wildlife photography, aside the fact that he doesn’t appear to be too wild. Occasionally he holds on a little for a quick posing, and then disappears in the rocks next to the car only to pop up every now and then, to see what I’m doing there. I manage to capture a few fairly useable photographs when he finally disappears for good in the mountains.

It was a lovely and fun moment with this young and cute little fox and I continue searching for locations along the road. The evening will continue still for a few hours before I finally found a resting place and slept until long into the next day.

About a year ago I got very interested about B&W conversion once I got the Silver EfexPro plugin, because it made it easy for me to get the results that I was looking for. In this software I usually add a split-toned toning to my images with a blue tint in the shadows and a yellow tone in the highlights and now I was interested how to achieve the same effect in Aperture.

Since a Split-Tone panel is not available in Aperture I thought about how I can achieve this adjustment in Aperture. My initial thought was using two of the color-monochrome panels and paint these into the shadows/highlights. The results somehow were not very satisfying. Just the other day I figured out a better, more flexible and faster solution using the curves panel which I will discuss in this quick tutorial.

The first thing to do is to convert the image into a B&W by setting the saturation slider to 0. This has the advantage that the curves and color-panel remain fully functional and therefore it’s possible to adjust specific tonal values of the image individually. It is important to NOT use the B&W panel for this tutorial as it will not work with this approach.

The image is now monochrome and I want to apply the toning. I add a curve panel to the adjustments and as I would like to have a blue tone in the shadows, I select the curve of the blue channel and raise the curve only in the shadows and drop it slightly in the highlights to further enhance the yellowish tint which will be added in the next step.

To create the yellow tones in the highlights, I select the Green and the Red channel and raise the curve in the in the highlights and maybe drop both of them slightly in the shadows to further enhance the blues.

If I want to have a stronger toning I now can adjust the curves a little more or I can go into the color panel and adjust the saturation and lightness sliders of the blues and yellows to fine tune the toning. Alternatively it’s possible to either adjust the curves again or simply adjust the opacity of the curves using this method.

And that’s about it. Further overall toning can be now be added by using a color-monochrome panel and drop the strength of this pretty much down, to not override the curves we just created.

As in Photoshop, there are probably more possibilities to achieve this effect in Aperture, but I found this one to be effective, easy and to be very flexible. I’m planning to create one or two presets using this method which I will probably post next week.

Those of you who have been downloading and reading my e-book which I released two weeks ago, might have noticed the announcement at the end of the book that my images will be available for sale starting from October. These will be available in various options and one of them will be a signed, handmade print, readily framed with an passe-partout.

I have been selling and giving away a few of these already and so far and started to wonder which is the best option on where to apply the signature. Basically there are only two possibilities to sign it: on the actual print or on the passe-partout. Today I would like to hear about your opinion on this issua as I know that quite a few of you are also distributing signed prints.

Signing the passe-partout is of course the least intrusive place, but should it be removed the signature is of course removed also. On the image though might distract a little from the image. So, I’m torn.

If have a second or two, feel free to participate in my poll and/or leave me a note in the comments.

After years of working with Lightroom I have switched to Aperture about 6 months ago and I’m very satisfied with the software and have never looked back. The whole interface and editing options somehow are for me much more fun to work with. As every software Aperture is of course not perfect and after a recent conversation on Twitter I thought I’ll write down a list of features that I would like to see in an upcoming Aperture update.

General performance improvement

Well this one would be probably valid for all RAW editors that I have tested. Aperture is fairly fast on my iMac, but once an image has multiple adjustments further editing get’s occasionally a bit sluggish, something I could easily live without with.

Option To Assign Names to Adjustment-Bricks

Since it’s possible to apply multiple adjustments of for example curves, or levels, it would be useful to name those adjustments. The option to assign a name to them would make re-processing an image after a while much easier and would eliminate the guesswork whether or not the adjustment was global or just the sky. Sure one easily could activate an adjustment overlay, but this would be faster.

Global Layer Opacity

I figured out a work-around for this one, but this method will work only for an global adjustment on the whole image. A real layer opacity would solve this issue.

Lens Distortion Correction

One of the things that I like about LR3 is the integrated lens correction feature. Even though I can easily live without this, it would be nice to have this also in Aperture.

Brush sensitivity

At this moment it seems that Aperture has only the possibility to control the opacity of the brush via the brush sensitivity. A real brush sensitivity to control also the size of the brush would make working with it again a little easier (if it’s possible to control the size, I would like to know how).

Calendar option

One of the benefits of Aperture is in my opinion to have the possibility to order prints or books from within the application. Why calendars are missing from Aperture and are only available in iPhoto is somehow a mystery.

This list is definitely not long, but somehow this shows how well Aperture suits my workflow and my needs. In general I would like to see NIK’s SilverEfexPro to be updated to 64bit, but that surely is not an Aperture issue. It is also only a list which reflects my own expectations and needs for the software, and I’m sure that for example a wedding or sports photographer would have a totally different list.

As the last Aperture update is a while ago already, I hope we will see another version in the near future. Fingers crossed.