Yesterday was travel day. Once more I took my usual Delta flight from Amsterdam to Portland. Apart from sitting 3 hours in the plane while still on the ground in AMS (they were fixing a problem with the water system) and apart from finally having a few new movies on the entertainment system (with the start of the new month) it was a totally uneventful and photographically dull flight with one single exception: while starting the decent into PDX we passed Mount Rainier in very close proximity, and the top of the highest stratovolcano of the Cascades Range was raising above the otherwise solid cloud cover. Enough to warrant the seventh episode of my Monday Mountains. For more info about Mount Rainier and more photos continue after the jump….
Another episode of my Monday Mountains. For this I stay in the Pacific Northwest and introduce you to another of the Cascade’s great stratovolcanoes, Mount Jefferson, neighbor to Mount Hood, the subject of the last edition of MM. For some more information about this stratovolcano and more photographs of the mountain I took from inside an airplane passing over it, continue reading after the jump….
I know this is not the prettiest of photos. I took it handheld with 1/2 sec shutter speed and a whopping ISO 25600. Out of the window of an airliner that was shaking from light turbulence. But for me it meant the world. Just a week after crossing off two items from my bucket list when skiing on Mount Hood I saw the very first Northern Lights of my life. And this was in the top 3 of my list. It came upon me out of the night sky 38.000 feet above the Northern Atlantic. For the full story and a few more images continue reading after the jump…
Everybody has a bucket list. And to have those goals to see or do things before you call it a day once and for all is what drives you forward in life. And my bucket list is long, definitely too ambitious for my remaining life time. But yesterday I managed to cross out not one, but two of those items I always wanted to do: I skied on a volcano, and I skied in North America. Why those two items were on my bucket list? To find out and to see the photographs of my magnificent Sunday in the Pacific Northwest continue reading after the jump…
As the job that pays the bills denied me any time to go shooting these past days I need to dig in last weeks archive to send you into the weekend. All these photos are from past Thursday and I took them on my Delta flight from Portland to Los Angeles on my way home to Nuremberg. Camera was my Olympus PEN-F with the mZuiko 12-40mm F/2.8 Pro Zoom. I post the images in sequence from Mount Jefferson that we passed soon after Takeoff from PDX to the streets of Los Angeles while landing in LAX. For the full series continue after the jump….
While back in Europe and even in the middle of the Alps right now, for the 5th episode of my Monday Mountains I turn back to the Pacific Northwest and to magnificent Mount Hood. For some more information about this stratovolcano and more photographs of the mountain I took over the last weeks, mostly from airplanes, continue reading after the jump…. Continue reading “Monday Mountains (5)”→
This week’s Weekly Photo Challenge has the theme “The Road Taken”. I enter the Safari Roads of Southern Africa. There are not many things in life that are more exhilarating than to take a 4×4 before sunrise and head out into the African Bush. The road is bumpy, but it feels more like a refreshing massage. The fresh air is full of excitement. You don’t know what animal waits for you behind the next curve, blocks the road, hides behind the bush watching you carefully. Every trip down these narrow dirt roads will have its own surprises for you. If there is something you need to put on your bucket list, it is an early morning ride on the narrow roads of the African bush veld. To see what blocked my road and hid behind the bushes, continue after the jump…..
I’m safely back home from my trip to Portland. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a very northerly route, that took my Delta Airlines A330 over the center part of Greenland, I was on the lookout for Northern Lights, as I had a window seat on the left side of the plane. A few weeks ago I saw a Blog Post from someone who actually photographed the Aurea Borealis from a plane. As it is a dream of mine to see the magnetic lights in the sky, I stayed up (watching “The Accountant” with Ben Affleck – a super movie) and waited for the green flares to appear, but I didn’t saw any. As it turned out, I might have missed them by just one night, as from this fantastic blog here I learned the Aurea Borealis was active the night before.
But I got lucky on two very important aspects on my return flight. The first you see in the photo to this post, I was blessed with an incredibly colorful dawn high in the sky above France. The colors were insane. I took the photo with the Olympus PEN-F and the mZuiko 14-150mm F/4.0-5.6 Travel Zoom pressed to the window. Image specs were 1/10 sec @ f/4.9 and ISO 1600. The photo is a jpg out of camera.
Let there be light
Almost more important was the fact I saved 4 hours of lay-over at Paris Charles De Gaulle. The Delta flight got in 30 minutes early, which gave me an outside chance of catching the 8:35 morning flight to Nuremberg instead of the 13:00 connection I was booked on (and believe me, waiting 4 hours in the remote Terminal 2G of CDG is no fun). I gave up hope when we taxied in for 15 minutes and then on top parked at an apron position where buses took us to the terminal 2E once everybody was out of the plane. But then security control went so smooth and there was an immediate shuttle bus connection to Terminal 2G where I arrived just when Boarding started for the Air France / HOP flight to Nuremberg. I went directly to the Transfer Counter (where there was also no other passenger) and asked if they can put me on the early flight. The lady there told me it would not be possible as I was on a Delta ticket, and rebooking that would take too long as boarding was already in progress.
Refusing to give up I went directly to the boarding gate to try my luck once more. And there you go, the great guy at the gate typed something in his computer, made a phone call and then printed my new boarding pass. The flight was not even 1/3 full. Instead of coming home Sunday afternoon I was home in time for breakfast with the family, what a treat!
So the lesson learnt here is: Never give up, always try! Works wonder in travels! And: try to fly with carry on baggage only. With a checked bag this would not have been possible. I can live up to 6 days out of my carry on, I’ve optimized that over the years, so I never check bags unless I absolutely have to.
It’s travel day again. I’ll get up at 4am to be at Nuremberg Airport for my 6:15 KLM flight to Amsterdam (remember the great Heineken bar in the Terminal?) and then onwards with Delta to Seattle where I’ll arrive at 11:24 am local time. Then its a 3 hours drive via Interstate 5 down to Portland where I’ll arrive just in time for the big Kick-Off meeting of my new project that will take me to the Pacific Northwest quite a bit over the next couple of months. It will be a 26 hour day before I get to fall in a bed again. Need to catch some sleep on the plane ! Going west helps with the Jet lag. Will try not to adapt too much to the 9hours time difference, as my flight home is already Saturday.
The photo of the Marabous I took a few minutes before sunrise in Tanzania last year with my Olympus OM-D E-M1 with the mZuiko 14-150mm F/4.0-5.6 Travel Zoom. Image specs are 1/60 sec (handheld) @ f/5.6 and ISO 200 with the zoom at the far end of its focal range. The RAW conversion was done in Lightroom CC, where I increased contrast, dynamic and clarity. I increased also sharpness a bit (you always need to do that when working on a RAW file. What is important is to mask the sharpness so you limited sharpening of pixels to the high contrast edges of the birds and the branches so you avoid over sharpening and subsequent introduction of unwanted noise in the clouds.
I just felt today like I needed to post a sunset photo for all those Valentine Loveducks out there. The weather in Nuremberg during the day was quite nice although still too cold. But with some haze and clouds out and about there was no such thing as a nice sunset. Don’t remember when I saw the last nice one, might have been the one I saw from the plane when arriving to Los Angeles the other week.
As the weather forecast for my next business travel destination (going to Portland via Seattle tomorrow) calls for torrential rain, I decided to go into last years archive and post this beautiful sunset from the little town of Camogli on the Riviera di Levante near Genoa. Not without reason this coastal part of the Ligurian Sea is called Golfo Paradiso. The pebbled beach with the colorful historic town houses (there is an image in this post here) is the perfect swimming destination with crystal clear water and splendid views of the Monte di Portofino, and the sunsets behind the Basilica Santa Maria Assunta and the Castello della Dragonara are one of a kind. And for all you Valentines out there, on the terrace above the beach are plenty of great cocktail bars.
I took the photo with my Olympus PEN-F with the mZuiko 14-150mm F/4.0-5.6 travel zoom. Image specs are 1/320 sec with f/10 and ISO 200, focal length was 22mm (equals 44mm in full frame equivalent). RAW conversion was done in Adobe Lightroom CC where I applied the VSCO 4 Fuji Astia 100F+ preset to warm up the image slightly.
Early morning light touches the summits in the Mont Blanc mountain range in the French Alps, captured from a plane at 28.000 ft en route from Toulouse to Munich. Mont Blanc (Monte Bianco in Italian) rises to 4,808 m (15,774 ft) and is shared by both France and Italy.
With the exception of intercontinental flights, where I prefer to take an aisle seat, I always try to get myself a window seat when flying. I never tire of observing the world passing underneath. And sometimes you are rewarded with great photo opportunities, like on this February morning when flying along the Alps.
Taken with a Canon PowerShot G12 with 1/400 sec at f/4,5, 140mm focal length (full frame equivalent) and ISO 80. Once again, when you shoot through airplane windows, use an open aperture (low f-stop number) and focus to infinity so you minimize image degradation through scratches and blemishes on the glass, even when in the case of this image you would have probably gotten away with it.
Let me see your Monday Mountains…post a link in the comment section and make this a new WordPress regular category.
I never expected the positive response to my first “Monday Mountains” post last week, showing an areal view of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Kenya. So here is the second edition. As my blog is running on CET this post might actually show as being published on Tuesday, but as I’m currently on a business trip to Los Angeles this technically is still Monday evening due to the nine-hour time difference. So it counts 😉 ….
The mountain depicted here is the Watzmann, a mountain in the Bavarian Alps south of the village of Berchtesgaden. Rising to 2713 meters (8900 feet) it is the third highest peak in Germany, and the highest located entirely on German territory.
As in last weeks Monday Mountains I gave some tips towards shooting out of an airplane window, this week I can give you some inspirations towards night photography. When I took this image of Mt. Watzmann from the balcony of a hotel room in Berchtesgaden it was actually pitch dark outside. Mounted on a tripod I set my Nikon D80 (that I was using back then) to an exposure time of 164 seconds, so almost three minutes. The f-stop (aperture) was f/5. As the camera was mounted on a tripod I used the lowest ISO of 100 for maximum image quality. I used self timer (2 seconds) to avoid any camera shake after pressing the shutter. Due to the long exposure time the star trails also nicely appeared in the night sky.
The details that come out of a long exposure night photography are simply amazing. Moonlight is very soft, so it maximizes the textures that come out of an image. You have to try this!
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