Day-to-Night photos of NYC from Stephen Wilkes

Following the light paintings and effects by Lichtfaktor, we found some more fresh photography perspectives.
This time, it is Stephen Wilkes' "Day to Night" exhibit in New York's ClampArt gallery (see at Fstoppers).

His idea is to blend day and night views (of NYC, of course) into a single image.  ClampArt describes it as a
"merge of classic street photography and cityscape styles".  Here is the Flatiron Building, my personal favorite:

In order to achieve the effect, Wilkes photographs a scene for a minimum of 10 hours!  Coney Island, below:

Some of the others in this series (see his site, or the gallery) appear to be night photos with unusual lighting --
I prefer the three images linked here because they have a more impactful (to me) difference across the frame.
(Below:  New York Public Library, with Rockefeller Center and part of the skyline in background)

I can't imagine the post-processing involved with producing these, but the result is worth it.  Also would love to see the big physical prints in person.  Exhibit is open through October 29, 2012, for those in or around the Big Apple.

Lichtfaktor -- painting with light

Instagram has taken photo-effects to the masses, but there's still countless ways to experiment with images.  One example is Lichtfaktor (light factor, or light element perhaps):  Their web site says they are "a collective of light-painting artists" who are "pioneering into new territories".  Hard to argue with that, when you see their work.

I think the technique of light painting is using moving lights during long exposure, but that surely is an over simplification of what they do and how they do it.  The results range from simpler light-added shots...

and

...to full-blown light "paintings":

They will also set up at corporate events -- I need to have my company hire them!  One of their booths:

Employees (or customers, say, at a convention/trade fair) can get an enhanced photo like this Audi guy...

...or something altogether different, like these angel's wings on this woman:

In addition, they hold light-painting workshops.  I would love to attend one of these with Frau A:

They have many more neat pics on their portfolio page.

But their neatest trick to date?  VIDEOS.  Check out this one for Levi's -- production result starts around 1:45:

The growing plants, moving animals, and just-plain-fun and creative graphics are absolutely fantastic.
Well done, Lichtfaktor!

Friday Photo Favorite: Summer Flowers

Unlike Texas, where spring is beautiful and everything dries up in summer, summer is when the beautiful flowers come out in Munich. 

Kuchelbauer Bier Kunst Turm 2

If you remember our Hopfenland trip last year, you'll recall our visit to the Kuchlbauer Brewery...home of the Abensberg Weissbier Dwarves.

After our tour of the brewery, our viewing of the owner's interpretation of The Last Supper, an intro into Hundertwasser's architecture, and the singing dwarves (check out the video in the previous post, if you haven't), we next went on to climb up the Bierkunstturm (Beer-Art Tower) which is the centerpiece of the brewery.  

In fact, the initial plans had the tower at twice the height it stands today.  The city of Abensburg wouldn't permit it, and Kuchlbauer is today rather relieved, as the original tower plans likely would have bankrupted the brewery. 

For the history of the tower, please see our previous post.  This one shows you the walk up the tower.  

We start form the lower level, where our tour ended, and ascend the stairs to the top.  The stairs wind in and out of the tower, and each level has a theme, mostly featuring the ingredients to beer.  But before we start up the tower....more weissbier dwarves!

So we started our trek up the beer-art tower.  

And quickly begin to reach alcoves in each landing dedicated to key weissbier brewing ingredients. First up, Hopfen (hops):

 

Next we have weizen (wheat): 

At certain parts, the stairs wind around the outside of the tower. 

We have no idea what Hefe-Zolgl actually means...Zolgl doens't appear to be a real German word. But it relates to the yeast (hefe). Perhaps it's the yeast bubbles or something like that?

 

And of course the ever critical Brauwasser (brewing water): 

And Gerste (barley):

After the landings with the brewing ingredients, there were several other decorated alcoves. There wasn't a plaque explaining this one, but the round base says something about the brewer. 

This one had a stained glass window that seemed straight out of Dr. Seuss, and a statue of a white dwarf on a barrel in a round alcove. In here, the plaque says that, the smallest little house belonging to the "white" dwarfs of Abensberg has three windows of light. The openings of light stand for modesty, tolerance, and independence.  You should stand in the light to remember these values, and to be helped to live by them. Additionally, one of the windows looks directly onto the final resting place of Leonhard Salleck, one of the brewery's ancestors. 

This was a lovely room that basically was a giant kalleidoscope - a great idea with all of the colors and textures on the walls!

 
Here we could look down into one of the alcoves below:

Finally, we reached the top.  The dome is supposed to represent Paradise (but without the dwarves!). As explained earlier in the tour, they chose the flattene ball shape to to embody the earth "which we should not destroy, since our lives would also be destroyed."  Therfore, it's the symbol for our "paradise," the Earth.

In addition to the crazy mirror mosaic tree, it continually has classical music playing (Beethoven, if I remember correctly).

After paradise the final stop on the tour is in the beergarten, where your ticket stub entitles you to a pretzel and a Kuchlbauer beer of your choice. 

What is there left to say?  This was one of the most, um, unique tours Herr J and I have experienced.
Of course, our final activity was heading to the gift shop and getting a six-pack (one of each kind)!
For a million+1 reasons, this is a great destination on any trip to non-Munich, non-Alpine Bavaria.

Friday Photo Favorite: Streaking Sun

Maybe this happens more often over here, or maybe I'm just noticing it more now.  But for some reason, we've had a number of instances where the clouds were "just right" to let the sun streak through in rays that just look cool.

Outside my office window in Munich:

At the Stuttgart train station:

At the Munich Ostbahnhof (east train station):

Nice work, Mother Nature.  Keep it up!

Macro Photography in the English Garden

Frau A and I spent another morning in Munich's English Garden.  After some "regular" photos, she spotted some caterpillars in a nearby tree and we changed to macro mode for them, a small smail, and a fly.

Note:  I replaced my old Olympus E-PM2 with the newer Olympus E-M5, and have the Panasonic 45-200mm lens with the Canon 500D close-up lens for macro (also using a flash in the hot shoe).

The caterpillars here are maybe 3cm long, and the fly perhaps 1.5cm.  The experts on dpreview.com forums are right -- focusing and DOF are very challenging.  But we're having a lot of fun learning.  My best 5 shots below.

Click on the shots to get a slightly larger version.

Caterpillar hanging from a thread (I like the bokeh and how it framed):

Fly on a leaf:

Caterpillar climbing:

Caterpillar and small snail on the same leaf!

Another fly - he didn't hang around long:

I will be trying the Canon 250D close-up lens on the Panasonic 45-200mm lens to get more magnification -- so we'll see if I can learn to improve focus, lighting, etc. in the future... 

If anyone has tips for us on technique, etc., feel free to leave a comment of course.

Travel and Photography: A Vicious Cycle

Anyone who has met us for at least, oh, 2 minutes knows how much we love to travel and see new places all that this wonderful world has to offer.

And in the past few years, we've both developed a love of photography that usually goes very well with our love of travel. I now find myself taking pictures not just to document the trip, but also enjoying the challenge of trying to capture the beauty of a special place or cope with difficult photographic conditions.  Or, sometimes I start to prioritize destinations based on the photos we could take. There were many reasons I was excited to go to Istanbul over Easter, but the truth is that one of them was I wanted to photograph the gorgeous mosques now that I had a good camera and knew (somewhat) how to use it! 

Sometimes hard to balance the desire to see the sights with the other desire to photograph it. You would think these are always the perfect combination. And though usually they go well together, sometime I find myself concentrating more on the photography than seeing the place. Not sure if that's "right" or "wrong" and it may be quite normal, but it's a bit like the typical quandry of how much time to spend on seeing the sites and how much time to spend eating, relaxing, and soaking up the culture. 

The right balance is key for an enjoyable trip. The Europeans often marvel (and not in a positive way) at the typical American European holiday: It's usually something like 5 cities in 6 days, or sometimes even more cities than days.  I always explain that we have to make our short trips count since we Americans have much less vacation time and great difficulty getting longer than a week off work at a time. But this feeling like you have to see it all and not waste the trip leaves us exhausted by the end of the trip and suffering from what I'd call in Europe "castle fatigue" or in Egypt "tomb burnout."  Andrew from Grounded Traveler calls it the "Aquarium Effect of Sightseeing," but the result is that after too many castles/tombs/old squares they all start to look alike and it's not really that much fun anymore. Diminishing marginal utility of sightseeing...I'm having flashbacks to econ classes...

After enough years of travel (and of having the wrong balance), I've learned to be OK with taking a trip somewhere great and not seeing everything. We usually prioritize what we want to see, and then we don't worry too much if we don't see the rest. It's much more enjoyable if we take the time to sit in a cafe and have turkish coffee or watch the scenes from a lunch table on the plaza instead of rushing around to see everything. Fish and chips in London, macarons in Paris.... part of travel is soaking up the culture and getting to try new foods, right? 

But I'm still working on finding my travel/photography balance.  Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the photography that we forget about how interesting the subject is. I guess luckily there's the internet and we can always read more about it later. Though I struggle with the same question of "am I getting everything out of it that I should?" 

Our trips often look a lot like this

(I'd just gotten a macro lens, so we pulled over to a scenic spot on the way home from spring skiing)

Or this, at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna

We're learning to manage it better and build in time for photos, since that's one of the fun parts of the trip. We know that when we stop to take pictures, we're a lot slower than the average person, so we build in extra time to the schedule. And especially extra time when we're hiking!

But I've recently realized there's a bigger problem with combining travel and photography - it's a vicious (and potentially expensive!) cycle. 

The more I travel and practice, the more I enjoy photography. And the better my pictures and processing get, the more I want to take pictures and improve my photography. And the more my photography improves, the more unhappy I am with the older pictures because I remember how beautiful the place was and I know I could do it better now. So then I want to go back and "do it right." And I want more equipment...

Luckily the processing side of it only costs time and terabytes in the digital photography world. Herr J is finding that out the hard way. Every time he learns a better way to process the pictures, he wants to go back and redo the older ones. That can eat up a lot of time! As for me...I'm still trying to get through the huge backlog of almost every photo I've taken since getting a DSLR.... But we now have a digital photo frame filled with hundreds of beautiful places and happy memories.

Last week as I was dreaming of potential honeymoon destinations, I was inspired to look through my safari photos from a trip to South Africa a couple of years ago. This trip was the catalyst for upgrading to a D700. I'd been thinking about going to full frame and knew this trip was coming up later in the year, so it was a good time. The problem now is that I didn't know a quarter of what I know now (and there's so much I STILL don't know!). So I was disappointed looking back through the pictures. There were some good shots, but most of them were not what I remembered/expected and a few simple adjustments like shutter priority would have really made a huge difference. 

Looking through those photos again, I concluded that:

1) I'm so lucky to have the chance to go such an amazing trip

2) Wow, I did NOT know how to use my camera back then!!

3) I need a longer lens

4) I need to go back*

* this one probably is only 50% photography related. I just love animals. I could easily be a safari junkie!

Realistically, I can't justify one of those awesome, superfast 400mm+ lenses. Even if money were no object, would I really carry around a 10-15 pound lens??? 

No, but looking through these photos - remembering how amazing it is to see the animals and knowing how much better the pictures could be - I find myself wanting to take more pictures and travel more. (And really wanting some extra reach) In the short run, a trip to the zoo or to one of Germany's safari parks would be a great idea. All the fun of seeing/photographing animals for a fraction of the price and travel time! And a good opportunity to practice before the the next time. Maybe next time we rent a lens? I'm currently still failing, but I keep trying to rationalize Nikon's 70-200mm 2.8 and a 2x teleconverter. Herr J's micro four-thirds with it's tiny, light effectively 600mm lens beats me every time!

But, back to South Africa...while there were disappointingly few good ones among the couple thousand photos I took, there still were a few good ones. And I guess even the not so good ones are worth keeping, since they provide me with memories of good experiences and time with friends. And, of course, inspiration for the future! 

Here were some of the better ones:

The vultures waiting for the lions to leave the dinner table

 

 In the middle of a huge herd of Cape Buffalo and their birdie friends

This one of the European Roller came out very well!

We unintentionally drove right into the middle of an elephant herd. None of the photos of the babies came out well, but one or two out of a hundred worked. Frustrating about the photos, but I do have the memories.

 

More birds, either waiting for a free meal or hiding out up high as the predators come out for dinner time

In this case, the 70-300mm was plenty to get a nice close shot of a Cape Buffalo. I like how their horns grow to look like they're wearing an old-fashioned wig. 

Not very nice skies, but a decent shot of the Southern Yellow-billed Hornbill

 

Procrastination actually paid off for me here. Upon returning 2 years ago, I did nothing other than convert the RAW files to jpg. But in the last month, we've found out how to rescue those grainy night shots using Topaz DeNoise. It's a bit of a miracle-worker!

No animals, but this one pretty much sums up the safari experience....hats, cocktail hour, photography, and some wildlife magazines. And a big bowl of brightly colored monkey balls.  

Capturing the moon is one of the big photo challenges I haven't yet worked out, but I do like the dreaminess of this shot of it coming up above the trees and grass.

And it's shots like these that make me want the big boy lenses.....This was at 300mm and cropped as much as I could. Though the picture is nothing special, it reminds me how helpful the monkeys were. Thanks to their incessant screeching, we realized there was a young leopard nearby!

Sure, I'm biased because I love cats, especially big, boldly patterned ones. But the leopards were by far my favorite animal out there. We saw 3 or 4 of them. They are breathtakingly beautiful and one can easily lose an hour just watching the leopard stroll around, roll in the grass, and primp. And my lack of good photos of the cats (and anything that moved, really) makes me want to go back and try again. Too many were blurry (use a faster shutter speed), not proper exposure, or obscured by grass (more careful composition). I want to go take a beautiful portrait of the cat's face, but I just never got in close enough.  Isn't he gorgeous? 

(Something tells me that getting a leopard to stay still and to look in my direction is going to be equally frustrating as trying to get my housecat to pose!)

And finally, we found the giraffes, about 5 minutes before it was time to turn around and head back to the airport.

 

It wasn't all big creatures. The smaller ones were everywhere too. Luckily this little guy was slow enough for me to catch him in focus. Unfortunately most of the smaller, faster creatures were too far or too fast to really be in detail. Especially the wildebeasts and the cute little warthogs that ran through the grass with their anntenna-like tails sticking up - just like Pumba!

 

Though I was able to get a few impala not running.