A night in Paris around the Eiffel Tower!
Sorry, but I’m running a bit short of time to write more.
Enjoy anyway 😉
A night in Paris around the Eiffel Tower!
Sorry, but I’m running a bit short of time to write more.
Enjoy anyway 😉
On our last vacation I passed through Dubai airport for the first time in my life. All we had were three hours of lay over. As I have seen nice photos of Dubai in the past but had no time to go to the city all I could do was hoping for a a decent view from the plane when taking off to fly home.
Here is what I managed to “grab”
Back from a business trip to Hong Kong.
As with every trip with limited time – preparation is everything. Google+ comes in pretty handy for this task. I searched for pics I liked, tried to figure out where they were taken, hoped for good shooting weather (whatever that is) and hoped for a long enough time slot to smear away and take some pictures. I had two hours to work with!
I stayed in a hotel in Kowloon and first headed over to Hong Kong Island to get a few pics of Kowloon and the ICC – not a very good idea. So I grabed a taxi and drove back to Kowloon and directly to the ICC – International Commerce Center, Hong Kong’s tallest building with an observation deck on the 100th floor called Sky 100. The ride up cost 150 HK$. You have a 360 degree view around the city, but as is normal for skyscraper observation decks, there are windows and reflections on these windows to merely destroy every opportunity for a decent night shot. So one has to get creative. First I looked for a somewhat clean window corner and had to find a possibility to place my camera as close to the window as possible to prevent to many light reflections. Now a jacket, scarf, Shirt or sweater is needed to block all light around the lens and one is ready to shoot – not an easy task. But it can work 😉
Hope you like some of the shots. I at least enjoyed the challenge!!
This past holiday season my wife and I travelled to Calicornia and Colorado to meet with relatives and enjoy a few days of vacation. In preparation for thie upcoming trip I also wanted to be sure to understand where some of the best photographic opportunities lay hidden.
Google+ nowadays is my top resource for for inspiration as well as research on photography. Micah Birke and Thomas Hawk are fellow photographers that helped me most in finding the right spots as well as to give me some ideas as to how the beauty of a city like San Francisco can be captured. I had by far not enough time to visit all the top locations and also the weather was not always to my likes. And then there are just not enough sunrises and sunsets in a single day to hit all the great spot in the best light 😉
So here is what I managed to capture!
Enjoy
The city of Berne Switzerland offers a cultural event during the advent called “Rendez-vous Bundesplatz” whereby the Federal Palace of Switzerland is the canvas for a breathtaking lightshow – see here for more information.
Below are just a few of the many scenes that are being projected.
The Lightshow was seen by more then 300’000 people in 2011. The two nightly shows gather big crowds making it quite difficult to take decent pictures as you will not get the preferred spot to shoot from ( these are usually taken by folks that come well before you) and you’ll have to shoot over the heads of folks in front of you. Here Lightroom comes in quite handy in the post processing. Not only can you correct exposure settings, white balance (if you photograph in RAW that is), contrast, color settings, do dodge and burn and much more but you can do amazing perspective corrections with ease. Just go to lens corrections, go to the manual tab and adjust the vertical and horizontal setting if you did not have the opportunity to stand straight in front of the building and did have to look up at the building. This sure helped for me 😉
Enjoy!
If you look at my website you easily might ask yourself “what is actually the main focus here”? I can openly admit – I don’t know yet! But then again – I don’t care 😉 I currently simply enjoy doing all kinds of different things, trying out different techniques, facing different challenges and to just see what all I can accomplish with my limited photography knowledge the means I have at hand.
When I published my first website a couple of months age I sent an personal e-mail to everybody I knew and actually had their e-mail address in my posession. Luck had it that one of my friends responded in saying that he really adores what I’m doing and if I would ever want to shoot vintage cars he would have a great opportunity for me www.rhyfallclassic.ch . I didn’t take long to say YES?
And here I am with the results of my first ever car shoot. For those who are interested let me tell you a little bit about how I did it, what the challenges were and what key learnings I took away from it.
How did I go about the shoot
I actually just went head over into this adventure. I screend google for car shots I liked and some simple tutorials. The best tutorial I found was this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0zXd9-4VJJc . I went to www.lynda.com and bought the full turorial knowing full well that I would never be able to do anything close to this. But I have to say that whenever I do something for the first time I try to set my goals very high and try to learn from some of the best tutors around. Thanks to the internet all that knowledge is at your fingertip!
So I packed all equipment I had and headed for the shoot. The equipment used was the following: Canon EOS7D, Canon 50mm 1.2, Canon 15-85mm 3.5 – 5.6, Canon 10 – 22mm 3.5 – 5.6, two striplights 25 x 180cm, a black background cloth, a few small flash lights and my tripod.
Challenges
The first challenge was that my friend offers space for vitage cars to collectors. So there were easily 30 cars around to choose from. With only a few hours to spend in a freezing cold storage room we focused on two cars to start, knowing full well that trying to do more would lead to not having anything usable at the end. The next challenge was the limited space. With a room height of just about 10 -11 ft and expensive vintage cars parked all around you one does not have much space to move around or set the light in ways one would prefer. But you don’t want to disappoint so you just get started and try to do the best with the situation at hand 😉
Key Learnings
There are many learnings I took from this shoot. Here are a few that might help you as well:
The cars
See also my Vintage Car Shooting Nr. 2 Blog Post!
Thanks much for your interest and now enjoy the pictures!
Here are a few more bullet trains.
I have to admit that I’m very impressed with this train. We here in Switzerland do have quite a good train system too, but when you then see what the Japanese do in terms of train systems and connections – that is simply impressive.
An example: I had a ticket with reserved seating from Kobe to Tokyo. As we ran about thirty minutes early we checked to see if we can change the ticket to an earlier train. There where three trains that left Kobe for Tokyo before my scheduled departure. They had a train every 10 Minutes. This for a Swiss is unbelievable for a high speed train system a for such long distances.
The ride was smooth and departed and arrived to the minute as per schedule.
Ok tech freaks, enjoy!!
Just came home from a business trip to Japan. I thought I share with you a few pics I squeezed in with what otherwise was a busy time schedule.
Between meetings and dinner I quickly ran off to take a few shots from Tokyo Tower. The tower itself is quite iconic and would make for a great picture target. In talking to other folks I learned that a great place to shoot Tokyo Tower at night would be the World Trade Center. There seems to be an observation platform on the 38 level. If somebody checks it out, please share your pics 😉
Then I had day trip to Kobe for some business. Because I love the Shinkansen Bullet trains I got up early that morning to hang out a bit at Tokyo station. This train does not just look great but it fun to ride it too. The 430km ride to Kobe was done in less then three hours. It would take you longer with by air. In Kobe we had some time to walk by the Kobe Earthquake Memorial of the 1995 quake at the harbor. There is still some damage to be seen where the old harbor was.
And finally on the way home I had a perfect view of Mount Fuji. All I had was about one minute to get the camera out and get that picture. I have to admit that I would have missed it if it weren’t for the flight attendant who was nice enough to tell me. She must have seen me playing around with my camera earlier on.
I guess what I want to say with this post is that if you love photography then take your camera along where ever you go. Opportunities for a few cool shot will present themselves.
Love to read your feedback 😉
What I said in my last post about the “Rheinfall” also counts for the other beautiful landscapes around where I live. I again included some of the Rheinfall pictures in this post along with a few landscapes of the Klettgau valley where I live. Also here I’m trying my best to show things the way I like to see them.
Enjoy my homeland !