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Hvis du er kommet her på siden for at finde billeder fra Musikskolernes Dag i Tivoli 2013, fra Høje-Taastrup Musikskoles Gallakoncert 2013 eller fra SABB og MGK koncert i Jazzhouse 2013, så kan du klikke på linkene herunder for at komme direkte til oversigten:

Musikskolernes Dag i Tivoli 2013 (eller frasorterede)

Høje-Taastrup Musikskoles Gallakoncert 2013 (eller frasorterede)

SABB og MGK koncert i Jazzhouse 2013 (eller frasorterede)

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).

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]

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.

Billeder fra Mariager 2008 ligger nu her på serveren. Der er primært billeder fra et par koncerter, men også lidt andet billedemateriale.

Hvis du gerne vil bruge billederne, så send venligst en mail først.

Sættet med sange (og en del andre) som blev brugt de fleste aftener ligger også tilgængeligt i Worship Assistant format. Hvis du ikke allerede bruger Worship Assistant kan du downloade en demo udgave til PC (kan også køre under Linux under f.eks. Wine). Inde fra “File” menuen vælger du “Restore” og peger på det sæt du lige har downloadet (en .zip fil), så får du en komplet kopi af databasen. Husk at lave en backup af dit eget sæt først, hvis du har lagt sange ind — ellers risikerer du at overskrive dine egne data som så går tabt!

If you follow any of the popular photography related forums on the net, you will find frequent discussions on the Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8. As I have been having mine adjusted, I decided to test it to try to uncover the root cause of some of the complaints about soft sides.

The page can be found here: Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8.

Feel free to leave your comments here at this blog entry.

The picture above illustrates the theme “Pass It On!”. Click on it to see a larger version.

I had this idea of a relay race, with a dad passing on the baton to his son — only in this case, the baton would actually be a Bible.

First problem to overcome was to find a course with clear track marks, to show clearly what is going on even with a tight crop. Most of those around this area are pretty much worn down, but the “model” above (my younger brother) figured Google Earth could locate one for us. Indeed it did, and off we went!

Next problem was that the track was actually only accessible to those with a key… which of course could not be seen from Google Earth 😉 Luckily, after a few minutes, a marathon runner using this for his training session appeared and let us onto the track.

Initially I set up for shots using the 70-200mm at the long end to make it look more like a traditional sports shot with a wide aperture using continuous AF (which I always have enabled, using the AF-ON button on the D200). However, as often happens, towards the end of the session I wanted to do something different, and made a few shots with the 17-55 at the widest end, just to have something completely different also. Due to the fast pace and the proximity of the models, I pre-focused and put the camera on a middle aperture, to make sure most of the important stuff would be in focus.

Back home I went through the shots, and figured that the wide perspective actually gave a more dramatic appearance, and this is now the shot that I prefer. However, the jury is still out, and let’s see what the will editor pick. You can see a few more from the series here.

The lesson learned: I had 100+ traditional shots and 5 or so of the wideangle stuff. There is probably a 2-3% keeper rate of the traditional shots, and around 50-60% keeper rate amongst the last ones. And I often find it so: Either the very first shot is the best or then the very last ones are.

So either you know exactly what you want, and go for that — before the model(s) wear out — or then you keep on experimenting until you feel you have “the right shot”. And in this case “wearing out the model” is quite literally what happened: Quite a few passes (at full speed, of course) had to be done before I got this shot.

Thanks to Claus and Christoffer, and to Rie for the the challenge.

So June ended up being the wettest month ever recorded in history. 150mm rain appeared around here, and most of this fell in the later part of the month — and probably half of it in one or two rather wet days.

However, rain is not bad for photography, and often gives nice photo opportunities, if one resists the temptation to stay inside.

Here is one shot, done with the 105mm f/2.8 VR.

The beauty of VR is that it actually works quite well, even in near-macro settings. As long as you are not too close, hand held is often quite OK. Processing was done with Lightroom version 1.1. I still like the Nikon Capture and NX colours better, but Lightroom is nice for organizing and browsing photos.

By the way, I installed the Lightbox plugin that allows images to overlay the present page. Click on the image above to see how it works.