Posts Tagged: Photo

Landscapes / Photo First — 1 Comment
7
Jan 12

It’s winter out there after all – a Zhivago-esque moment

Well, the weather over here so far hasn’t lived up to the expectations of a photogenic winter – we keep having rains and temperatures slightly above 0°C – no snow yet.

How nice it is to be able to reach the winter within an hour drive – yesterday, the Bavarian alps were still experiencing remnants of that winter storm Andrea that hit Germany on Thursday. A lot of fresh snow, allowing this intimate photo of a mountain hut near Unterammergau.

Zhivago-esque mountain hut in snow

 

How Tos / Landscapes — No Comments
2
Jul 11

How to: photograph lightning (at night)

Lightning

Lightning photography seems either extremely easy, or extremely hard: When the thunder god is willing to show his best side, all you need is a camera and a tripod and some patience. If not, it seems impossible to get a single image with a lightning visible in any corner of the frame.

Until last month I was strictly subscribed to the latter – I had tried but never made any lightning photo the subject was clearly visible in. This changed when Thor (or pick your favorite one from the Wikipedia List Of Thundergods) showed his muscles as I hadn’t seen before…

The theory to take an image like above is rather easy:

  1. Put the camera on a steady tripod.
  2. Put it into Manual exposure mode (that’s the M, you heard correctly ;-) )!
  3. Decide on an exposure time that will be long enough to get some lightning in there – you will press the shutter *before* you see a lightning… I chose 10 seconds here. 30 might do as well, depending on the amount of ambient light. You want your photo to be all black when taken without lightnings’ light.
  4. Lightning is very very bright, but it will vary greatly depending on rain and distance. Ideally, you have none or at least not heavy rain. In addition,  you can decide to get only the brightest lightnings correctly exposed, and have the weak ones underexposed. I started with setting the ISO to 100 (or “low” on a Nikon), and closed the aperture down to 8, and later adjusted it to 11 when I saw I was still getting some overexposed images.
  5. Take a test image to check the exposure without lightning.
  6. Make sure the focus is on the foreground you framed. Focus manually and turn off autofocus. It won’t work in the pitch black night anyway, and slow down every shutter release.
  7. And now comes the hard part – if you are lucky, your camera supports an automatic interval timer like my D300 does. Else, you will need a cable release with that feature, or do manual clicks all night long.  Use the interval timer to repeat taking exposures until your flash card is full or the thunder is gone.
    I set my Nikon to do 500 images with a gap of 1 second (the smallest possible). Thus, I would expose 10 seconds, then the camera would wait for a second, and then shoot the next 10 second image. So I could make sure I would have 91% of all lightning on my sensor within the framed part of the sky.
  8. For this image, I did not take a wide angle but rather a mild telelens (100 mm on a 1.5x crop camera here). I chose a pleasing (well, you might recognize the building from my earlier teleconverter tests) foreground and framed a part of the night sky where I hoped the lightning would occur, and waited…

The fun part is harvesting the results after the thunderstorm. This one lasted a full three hours, and I kept adjusting the part of the sky I was photographing to the slowly moving “hot spot” of lightning as the clouds were moving as well. The exposure time of 10 seconds allowed to aggregate multiple smaller lightnings into one frame like in the image above.

“Depending on the storm, lightning flashes can last for several hundred milliseconds and contain dozens of strokes each occurring approximately 40 milliseconds apart.” (lightningtrigger.com)

Statistics? Well, I took 303 images, of which 247 showed no sign of lightning at all. 23 were lit by lightning not in the frame or just barely being visible (for those tiny lightnings, the aperture was closed too much). Another 18 showed more promising lightning strikes which were either under- or overexposed, or were just at the border of the frame. This left me with 15 rather decent lightning images.

Of those, I really liked the spectactular above and this one:

So the next time you meet the Thunder God, enjoy the digital age, make sure to have a tripod with you and just shoot away! But stay safe and out of the danger area – read through the safety tips by the NWS before you decide to give it a try! I made these photos through a window from the safety from my home!

If you wonder how our grandfathers did this without the blessing of digital images, have a look at this great page at weatherscapes, with more info on the different type of thunderstorms and more. And if you are looking into daytime lightning photography, you will have to invest in more gear (oh joy!) and have a look at a lightning trigger (more great information about lightning photography there as well!).

Birding — 3 Comments
13
May 11

Summer Bird Census 2011 – #stg11

Blogging seems to be so old fashioned nowadays – I just saw that the Nabu Germany now also advertises Twitter. To follow the discussion about this year’s summer bird census, called Stunde Der Gartenvögel, you can use the tag #stg11.

This weekend everybody is invited to spend one hour counting (and identifying) birds in the garden or a different place, and report the results back to support scientific long term observations on the biodiversity in our “civilized” environment.

Not much content on Twitter yet, though. So for you here is the result of me counting birds in Munich Alt-Bogenhausen, one of the greener corners of this not-everywhere-so-green city.

I am getting better in identifying birds by their song, therefore my list actually is a little bit longer than last year’s :-)

  1. Blackbird – three. Actually they were everywhere, but you ought to only count those you can see at the same time (they might fly behind your back to the next corner and continue singing there… not probable? Who knows…)
  2. Great Tit – Two. They confused me without end because I actually saw two juvenile first, already big enough for me to think “hey, this is a different type of swamp tit!”. Embarrassing enough, but you don’t see the little ones that often!
  3. Blue Tit – One. Very busy very high up in a tree, no time to loose to collect food for the chicks.
  4. Chaffinch – Three, a complete family with a chick being fed by Mom. And I saw a second lonely chick trying to “climb” a huge tree with a trunk diameter of certainly more than two feet without success. I hope it did not fall from the nest. While I watched, it tried again and again to climb that wall that must have seemed like the Eiger Nordwand from its perspective. But probably it helps if you have two wings, even if they were not flight functional they seemed to provide some stability when beaten fast enough. When I passed by the same tree 20 minutes later again, the little one was gone. I like to think he made it :-)
  5. Great Spotted Woodpecker – One. They are quite common around here, and I got a good and long look at this individual.
  6. Carrion Crow – One. You can’t leave the house without seeing them around here.
  7. European Greenfinch – Two. These had eluded me the prior years, but maybe only by now I have learned to look at the highest tree tops to find them.
  8. Eurasian Collared Dove – One. Beautifully colored bird.
  9. Common Swift – Eight. My current favorite species, I keep watching their aerial maneuvers from my balcony in the evenings :-)
  10. Common Chiffchaff – One. At least, I kept hearing one, I didn’t see it.

Oh, and as usual you can see the online results of the bird census over at the LBV. Will be interesting to see the trends in bird population.

To learn more bird-songs, I bought the – German language only, sorry – book Grundkurs Vogelstimmen: Heimische Vögel an ihren Stimmen erkennen, written by Hans-Heiner Bergmann and Uwe Westphal. Not sure on my success with that book, though, I will report in a later post, so stay tuned and subscribe!

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