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Autumn has been particularly beautiful this year. Until roughly a week ago, we had only little wind and not too cold weather, so the leaves stayed put for a long time. Sadly that has now changed…

Luckily, we visited the picturesque National Park Söderåsen in Skåne, Sweeden while the colors were still at their best. Hiking the forest was a wonderful experience, following trails along the small river until it eventually took us up the ridge overlooking the rift valley. Just as we came there, the setting sun broke through the clouds again and bathed the area in gorgeous golden light.

Working fast with the camera, I managed to capture a series of exposures, intending to run these through some HDR (High Dynamic Range) processing to be able to capture both the sun, the sky and the dark areas in the valley.

Back home, I started working on the files as I normally do on all files in Lightroom — and quickly discovered that the D800 had captured all of the high dynamic range scene in the first shot. There was no need for any fancy HDR processing. I adjusted the image as I normally do, here making sure the darker colors would look right. I didn’t have to increase saturation much, as the colors were already dark and saturated. I then pulled down a graduated 2 stop filter over the sky area, in the same way as I might had done in the actual capture on location (if I would have had a filter suitable for the 14-24mm f/2.8) and increased the clarity some. A little CA correction, and that was pretty much it, I think. The result is what you see here, just out of Lightroom.

I did try to stack some of the bracketed images, and run them through either Photoshop or Luminance HDR. The results were significantly less convincing, and since I had not brought a tripod, alignment errors caused some ghosting too.

So I gave up on that, and felt content with the straight shot from the remarkable D800! And oh… I didn’t find any issues with flare from the 14-24mm f/2.8 here either. There is an expected slight lack of contrast in the valley close to the sun, but it is less than what I would have expected. And in fact, I happen to like the effect here as it almost enhances the “emotional mood”.

If you click the image, you can see a larger version (or find your way through to the full 36MPix capture).

Lyset er altid flot i Vadehavet, og mulighederne for fantastiske naturoplevelser er store — også når sommeren går på hæld!

Efterårsferien er det bedste tidspunkt at opleve det fantastiske naturfænomen “Sort Sol”: Op mod 1 mio stære som ved solnedgang samles i rørskovene for at gå til ro for natten. Vi var heldige at se det to gange i år; én gang med Sort Safari syd for grænsen i Tøndermarsken, og dagen efter i Ribe Østerå.

I Tøndermarsken anslog vores kyndige guide Frands (sp?) at der var omkring  700.000 stære. Vi har tidligere set Sort Sol (i 2008,), og dengang anslog vores guide Lau at der også var ca. samme antal. Under alle omstændigheder er det rigtigt mange(!), og det er en fantastisk at opleve på nært hold. Lyset og vores position i forhold til solen var ikke helt så god denne gang som sidst, og der var ikke så mange rovfugle til at få stærene på vingerne, men der kom lidt billeder og et videoklip ud af det. Videoen ligger her på YouTube (lydsporet er frit efter “Hør den lille stær”):

(Læs videre ved at klikke på linket herunder)

Continue reading ‘Sort Sol 2012’

After having run the previous version of MythTV for a couple of years without any significant issues, I upgraded to MythTV 0.25.

That broke a few thing, one of which I initially didn’t want to spend time on fixing for now: My existing grabber card sometimes locked up when starting a recording, preventing the box from shutting down, and it didn’t record any of the scheduled recordings either. I thought this could be related to a bug in an updated driver, so I decided to test out a HDHomeRun setup instead. As for saving time, that turned out to be a bad idea! But in terms of getting to a working solution, it looks as if I eventually got to a working solution… read on below.

Continue reading ‘HDHomeRun and MythTV 0.25’

Even though wordpress runs very well on lighttpd (lightty), information on how to set this up is quite scattered around the net. On top, most of the explanations refer to one another, and only a few have proper explanations on what is going on — even though many are very helpful and may even work in some/many cases.

One otherwise good write-up is the one done by Joe Crobak, but I think it is not fully correct as it suggests the two alternative methods below to be used in parallel (which is not really be needed).

My take on this (which could also be incorrect… so I advice the reader to dig into the details of this before deploying it) is as follows:

Continue reading ‘WordPress on lighttpd with pretty permalinks’

OK, it’s an old saying but nevertheless: The worlds best camera is the camera you bring with you, especially when there is a shot you’d otherwise have lost.

Yes, the quality is not as good as when I bring my Lowepro bag stuffed with DSLR equipment and a tripod. But sometimes you just happen to experience a beatiful or maybe unexpected sight that only lasts for a few minutes, and you want to capture it in some form, for you to recall later.

Point in case: Here are a couple of shots to illustrate this, from a few recent business trips to Finland.

Finns usually enjoy a short but intensely coloured autumn. The first one here is taken a bit west of Helsinki, during a small break in a day-long meeting session. 60 seconds after I took this shot, the light changed and the green-yellow-brown colours faded somewhat away.

The second one here is also from Helsinki — from (and through!) the hotel window in the early morning, in fact. Totally unexpected sight for me when I pulled the curtains: A beatiful subdued scene with quite intense red tones from the rising sun reflected in the very calm sea. A few minutes later, the red colours were gone from the scene.

Obviously none of these pictures are unique or something truely special. But as I look at the scenes now somewhat later, I can still recall the impression the scenes left on me.

So sometimes your camera phone (here a Nokia 700) will do a good-enough job for you!

Billeder fra Musikskolernes Dag i Tivoli 2010 er nu online, og du kommer direkte til dem ved at klikke på teksten først i dette afsnit eller billedet herunder.

Syng med rokkerne...

Hvis du gerne vil bruge billederne i f.eks. en folder, brochure eller tilsvarende, så send en mail til mig først (eller læg en kommentar til dette indlæg med en gyldig mail-adresse, så mail’er jeg tilbage). [really_simple_share]

Jeg har lavet en vejledning til at sætte en MythTV platform op på en Asrock ION platform, som du kan finde under IT notes. Kommentarer kan gives her i forbindelse med denne post, eller du kan mail’e mig direkte. [really_simple_share]

Making white really white is not always easy. Or, to be more precise, shooting on a white seamless background, trying both to make it truly white and at the same time getting the foreground correctly exposed, is a delicate balance. If you underexpose the background, it will not be white and there will be a lot of photoshop’ing needed. If you overexpose it, you will probably have a lot of flare and reduced contrast and also quite some photoshop’ing to be done…

Simon plays the sax (white seamless)

There are, however, good explanations on the net (and unfortunately also some that has less good advice). The best I’ve seen are the installments by Zack Arias. Read those 5 parts, and you will be able to do it yourself.

In my case, I only needed to shoot silhouettes. I thought that would be easier, and it may very well be. But if you don’t have a really large room or have painted the walls in your makeshift studio/living room completely black, there will be a lot of light spill anyway, and some photoshop’ing will still be needed.

I hung up my 2.72m super white seamless roll after having removed parts of the furniture in the living room; those rolls are indeed quite wide… Using a couple of flashes on the background made it as white as I needed with some careful placement, and I then ended up placing another couple of flashes behind the model, Simon, in order to create a rim light on him and to make the floor almost white. I didn’t have any tiles to put on the floor, as Zack otherwise recommends, so I needed the flashes. Thus, I initially set them up to whiten the floor, but ended up being very happy that they also worked as rim lights!

I should probably have placed a black piece of molton or similar on the closest wall to kill some of the light spill, but I didn’t.

My Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 was on the camera, and even if I had planed to use the 35mm f/2, I stayed with the zoom that worked surprisingly well with little flare. I have tried using the 85mm f/1.8 for similar types of shots earlier, but it does not work well; there is a lot of loss of contrast. Probably the 105mm f/2.8 VR would be better for that — I’ll have to test that some other time.

After a bit of photoshop’ing (or actually, lighroom tweaking), the shots came out as you can see here. This particular one is not a silhouette, which is what I needed, but I like it a lot as it is here. Yes, there are some flaws that should have been corrected (like the shadows around the feet — probably needs a reflecting tile to fix). The vignette is created in post, by the way, and is not a flaw in capture. If you study the gallery, notice that the rim light helps a lot to create definition around the right hand, like seen in some of the silhouettes. It was not really planned that way initially, but I’m sure glad I put it there!

There are more in the gallery, where you also find the silhouette versions.

Hvis du er kommet her fordi du leder efter billeder af Maria og Kasper’s hyggelige aftenbryllup i Roskilde Baptistkirke, så klik her.

Hvis du leder efter billeder af Fresco, og ikke kun vil se det bedste billede, så kan du både finde et mindre udvalg samt alle billederne ubehandlet.