KPW | Portland | 2017 1/40 sec @ f/2.8 and ISO 200
After a six week hiatus I was back in Rose City this week. And amazingly, the weather matched the season, with some beautiful and warm summer days. Despite a fully loaded schedule I managed a small photowalk last evening, just taking my tiny Ricoh GR II that I had brought for this trip and doing a bit of walking through a mild Portland summer evening. I was looking for the famous “Keep Portland Weird” sign that I haven’t seen before, and that set the tone for the rest of my walk. For some more “weird” photographs from PDX continue after the jump… Continue reading “Keep Portland Weird”→
“Instant Inspiration” is my series for you if you feel you suffer from “Photographer’s Block” or simply want to shoot something that you have never tried. Or at least not recently. Read the posts, become inspired, take your camera, head out and have fun!
Episode 19 should inspire you to describe your day’s content with just two photos.
The idea to this inspiration came to me while on my “usual” Delta flight from Amsterdam to Portland. “Usual” ? Well, despite having not travelled to Rose City in the past six weeks, this is already my tenth business trip to the USA this year, and we are not even at the half year mark. And in addition to this trip there will be minimum two more travels to PDX before my summer vacation. And I really like being in the USA. Since my days as an exchange student in Pennsylvania some 33 years ago, I consider the USA my adopted second home country. I have been here countless times for travel and on business. And I liked each and every trip.
The thing is, this short trip is packed full of “road work”. I have meetings lined up from the moment of arrival until I step back on the plane for the return flight Friday afternoon. No time for photography this time. But thankfully there is the archive (I took the two photos during one of my last trips to Portland).
Road Work | Portland | 2017
So how does your day look like? Try to capture it in two photos. Take your camera (or phone) and be creative! I’d love to see your photos – post a link in the comment section.
For all other episodes of my instant inspiration and many more photography tips visit my Learning Center
Frequent readers probably know that I try to meet the Weekly Photo Challenge from Word Press’ “The Daily Post” with one of my Street Photos. This week’s challenge has the theme “Danger”. Now this is easy to match.
Street Photography is a dangerous genre. Not that you get hit by people who don’t like you take their photo. Actually this is not a problem at all.
The real danger in Street Photography is that you constantly expose yourself to the risk of being run over by a crazy driver – or by a normal driver while you try to take a crazy photograph.
During last weekend’s trip to the Oregon Coast I took some photographs that due to the high contrasts within the composition, I thought would look good converted to monochrome. When shooting with B&W already on my mind, I typically set my camera to a monochrome preset (most modern cameras have that feature). So when composing, I’m looking already at a monochrome image in my viewfinder or on my LCD screen. This helps me judging the impact of light and contrast before pressing the shutter. Maybe this is not the right approach for a purist, but I gladly take this as a great supportive feature of modern cameras and is as helped me discover the fun in B&W photography. For more monochrome coastal images and some more thoughts around it continue reading after the jump…. Continue reading “Some thoughts on monochrome shooting”→
I need to do my Oregonian friends justice. They say there is sunshine in the PNW. And they are right. Here is the proof! This evening I returned from a 12 day trip to Portland. There was one truly beautiful day with sunshine throughout during these 12 days, which was last Friday. This was also when I took this photo of Mount Hood on my way from the office to the hotel. It rained all other days.
But the weather forecast for the weekend and the coming week calls for warm and fair weather in Rose City. Everybody should enjoy it. Because maybe I’m the one bringing (for sure unintentionally) all that rain. And I will be back the week after next ;-). But meanwhile I will enjoy time with the family and on the Streets of Nuremberg.
Photo was taken with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 with the mZuiko 40-150mm F/2.8 Pro Zoom. Specs are 1/400 sec @ f/11 and ISO200 , focal length was 150mm (equals 300mm in full frame), so I shot at the far end of my zoom. The edge to edge sharpness of this piece of glass is amazing.
Wish everyone a great weekend a sunny trip into May!
I took this image at Cannon Beach, where the late afternoon sun used a short break between showers to backlight the trees on the cliffs at the northern end of this magnificent mile long sandy beach at the shores of the grand Pacific Ocean.
I’ve been privileged to have been at the Pacific many times before, but never this far north. The moment felt special, the beauty of this moment where I saw the glow of the sun on the wet sand of this magnificent beach, the cliffs and the tree providing a perfect backdrop. The sound of the waves, the spray of salty air on my face. It felt great, I felt wanderlust throughout. I felt blessed that despite all the hard times that the job that pays the bills demands of my family and myself, it still gives me the opportunity to occasionally explore places I haven’t seen before and that I might never have seen otherwise.
Wanderlust!
The photo was taken with my Olympus PEN-F with the mZuiko 12-40mm F/2.8 Pro Zoom, image specs are 1/640 sec at f/9 and ISO 200 with 12mm focal length. B&W conversion of the raw file in Adobe Lightroom CC.
Yesterday I did a nice tour from Portland, driving up along the Columbia River to Astoria where the mighty river flows into the Pacific, then down the coast to Cannon Beach and finally back to PDX. All in all I was 14 hours on the road. The weather was very oregonic, starting with pouring rain along the river, turning to a sun / show mix on the coast and eventually finishing in a nice sunset. I will need to hit the digital darkroom over the next days to look through my images, but I’ll show you a first photo from the mouth of the Columbia River, where a mighty, 4.1 mile long bridge takes Route 101 across and connects Astoria in Oregon with Megler in Washington State. It opened in 1966. The south part has a 200 ft clearance so oceangoing ships can pass on their way to the upstream harbors of Portland and Vancouver.
I took this long exposure image from the Cannery Pier just west of it. To smooth out the water and clouds I dialed in a 13 second shutter speed, closed aperture down to f/20 and used the lowest ISO of my PEN-F. To avoid overexposure I had attached my Haida ND3.0 neutral density filter, essentially a piece of darkened glass that reduces the amount of light hitting the sensor by 10 stops, the only way to achieve these long shutter speeds in bright daylight. The camera was mounted on a tripod and I used the Haida ND3.0 filter.
I converted the RAW file to monochrome in Lightroom CC, using a monochrome preset as a starting point and then mainly adjusting the gradation curves.
You will get to see more of this trip in the next days. Today will be all rain and I haven’t decided if I drive up to the Columbia Gorge to see the waterfalls.
I successfully made it through the week and am now looking forward to a weekend in the Pacific Northwest. After work I drove into downtown for some later afternoon and blue hour shooting. Still fighting some jet lag after arriving in Portland two days ago I’m much too tired to post process my photos, but after a quick scan I send all of us into a well deserved weekend with a photo I took on the famous Steel Bridge that crosses the Willamette River and provides great views across the river towards Broadway-and Fremont Bridges in the upcoming dusk.
Tomorrow I head out to the Oregon Shores of the Pacific Ocean. I’m so much looking forward to it!
The above photo was taken with the Olympus PEN-F with the mZuiko 12-40mm F/2.8 Pro Zoom, specs are 1/25 sec @ f/2.8 and ISO 1600, handheld.
Old Warehouse in the Pearl District | Portland | 2017
As the job that pays the bills currently keeps me off the Streets of Nuremberg I can just as well make a virtue of necessity and show you a bit more of my “exile”, the Streets of Portland. And in case any Portlandians ever read this: Rest assured, I honestly LOVE your city already, and the word “exile” isn’t really in place here. So in the coming months the Streets of Nuremberg, temporarily turned Streets of Portland, will introduce more and more of Rose City or PDX, as Portland is also affectionately known. Today I show you some photos I took on my weekend walk through the Pearl District, originally a quarter of old empty brick warehouses, now turned into an urban designer’s dream. To see and learn more continue reading 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….
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…
Back in the Rose City, staying once more at the Heathman Hotel on Portland’s Broadway. The week was all work without as much as a chance to touch my camera, but Friday night I took the Olympus OM-D E-M1 with the mZuiko 12-40mm F/2.8 along while going to the Target supermarket in Morrison Street to by myself some basic supplies (there is just no way eating out every night on a two-week business trip). The above photo I took in front of one of the shop windows of the Target. I loved the lady boxer, positioned myself at the rail of the city train station tin my back and then it was just a matter of the right person walking by. I took the image at 1/80 sec @ f/5 and ISO 1000 with 30mm focal length. For a fe more photos continue after the jump…
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