Are you ready boots?

Track near Feuerpalven (NIKON D700, 1/200s @ ISO 250; f/4.5, 70 mm (in 35mm)

A personal note... I picked this photo because I will leave Germany soon and leave these landscapes behind... me and Toni are heading for San Diego, California, where Shuwen is waiting for us. It took quite a while to get the K-1 visa, and it took quite another while :) to clean out my apartment and get everything done here in Germany. This is the last blogpost from my old computer in my old living room. :)

I don't know when I will be back online, hopefully soon - because I have a lot of photos from my recent "farewell hikes" that I want to share with you. There's also a pretty long story that includes hiking boots and slippers that I want to tell, but it has to wait; I'm busy with cleaning out my apartment and getting everything prepared for travelling.

Until later! ;)

It's your vision

Thom Hogan has a wonderful, wonderful photo and, more important, an excellent text that goes along with it on his start page at the moment (so be quick and go there while it lasts!)

The photo is an image of the Grand Tetons reflecting in a lake, and I love his explanation that goes along with it:

"There's great debate over how to post process images like this one, which has a complete reflection. First, when you "mirror" like this, you should strongly consider putting the horizon in center of the frame, something that you don't normally do with landscape photos. Mirrors imply symmetry, and a central line helps reinforce that symmetry. But the real debate about reflections tends to be whether the reflection should be brighter, equal, or darker than the real scene above it. The answer, I think depends upon what you're trying to do. This time around I've processed the image with the reflection being slightly darker. This forces our eyes upward due to the difference in brightness. But some think that in a true mirror like this, the tones should be processed equally, to reinforce the "mirrorness" of the reflection. I teach that you need to control what the viewer's eye does in your image, so the real question is what do you want the eye to do? If you want it to bounce back and forth between scene and reflection, that argues for equal tonality. If you want the eye to move to a detail (the Teton range in this case), this argues for the reflection to be darker and act as a darker mimic to the scene. There's no correct answer here. Great photographs consist of hundreds of choices made by the photographer, some during capture, some during processing. There is no "reality" in photos because of that. None. Starting with when you choose the shutter release through to where you point the camera and how you set it, every decision you make narrows "reality" down to something you saw and wanted to capture. It's your vision, not reality, that is captured."

Brilliant! I wanted to quote it here because unlike his Nikon related news and articles, he doesn't seem to archive his start page images and text anywhere, and I don't know how long it will remain on his page.

Moving Particles (Sensor Dust)

Here's the next in the endless story of sensor dust (and sensor dust removal). The Nikon D700 has, like most of the modern cameras, a built-in sensor cleaning feature (some ultrasonic vibration, or whatever). After painfully realizing that a full frame sensor (more than twice the size of a DX/APS-C sensor) of course attracts more dust (due to the charge), I configured the camera to automatically run the built-in sensor cleaning every time I turn it off or on.

With my outdoor activity, I seem to catch up more greasy/sticky dust than just dry fluff, or whatever. The problem with that is: the camera's built in sensor cleaning can not remove that. Instead, the dust moves on the surface of the sensor and is multiplied that way as this 1:1 crop clearly shows:


Moving dust (the contrast & clarity have been increased a lot to make the problem more visible)

Which would you rather do? Use the Spot Removal feature in post processing once for a single dust particle, or three times? I chose that one usage is enough, and turned off the camera's built in dust removal feature again. The fact that it is not really efficient anyway is underlined by this article which I found (the article is in German, but just scroll down and look at the examples.)

The other obstacle that I ran into concerns the "Arctic Butterfly" - that super-expensive brush which is supposed to get some charge when rotating it with the battery-powered motor in its handle. I somehow managed to get some grease onto the brush itself. Maybe from some inner part of the camera, whatever. Now when I use the brush, chances are that I add a nice trail of grease onto the sensor - almost invisible to the human eye on the sensor, but VERY visible in the photos (not just a spot - a line, a streak... duh!). Now I know why they started to sell an even more expensive version with exchangeable brushes. :P

The quest for a clean sensor continues...