The landscape selection of my personal pictures
I got challenged by my brother to post a ‘nature’ picture each day for 5 days in a row. I have been photographing quite some landscapes in the last years, but my focus gradually shifted towards feminine beauty, so I decided to look for combinations of earlier landscape photographs and pictures of women that suited them well. These are the five images that made the series.
I kinda liked the excercise. I hope you like the pairings too.
have a nice weekend everyone!
Ludwig
I could have called this post: In Flanders Fields, or even in Flanders Mud, … but let’s look on the bright side.
Just some snaps from a frisky but sunny sunday morning walk trough the ‘Flemish Ardennes’. Oh, and I love square format more and more. These are not taken on film, just square cropped digital.
There’s something about the square format, for me the compositions are easier and more peaceful and ‘in balance’. Please tell me if I’m talking rubbish, before I buy a 30.000 € digital medium format camera. 🙂
Bright light against the sun, keep the details in those highlights!!
Come back again soon, I have some new pictures to show you with Pauline M. whom I worked with earlier here and here.
Happy shooting.
Ludwig
Well, vacation is long over, and almost forgotten (almost)
Luckily someone invented photography a couple of hundred years ago.
I don’t want to write a lot of words on this post, only this. The evening we wanted to pack the car for our trip to Italy (2 and a half weeks Tuscany), it broke down.
So no large wagon with rooftop luggage trunk, but only a small Toyota Yaris. This meant a total review of the luggage, which meant I had to leave half of my photo equipment at home. No tripod, that was the biggest drawback for me. But anyway, no other solution possible, and a big challenge for taking landscape images. Normally you want to use closed apertures, meaning long shutter speeds. Well, not possible this time. I had to crank up ISO settings from time to time, which you normally do not for landscape work. To give you an idea, first image: ISO 160 – 17mm – f11 – 1/8th of a second. Last image, ISO 800 – 50mm – f3.2 – 1/25th.
Hope you like the images, I could’n leave the dog out, having its daily portion of ‘gelato’ like everyone else.
happy viewing,
thank you for looking!
Hello there,
I was on a men-only weekend with my oldest son a couple of weeks ago.
We had a lot of fun together, rafting, mountain hiking, drinking beer (at least me), etc. …
I didn’t want to focus on photography that weekend, because of the father and son thing so I only took my compact camera with me. The Canon Powershot S95.
I have used it on weekends out before, but never in a landscape environment. see my post Barcelona Highlights
It is a good compact, but probably not the best you can get.
I don’t want to go into details about this, just put the pros and cons next to each other, compared to my reflex camera.
Compared to the Canon 5D markII and some proper lenses, these are the most relevant cons:
the lens lacks sharpness in the entire zoom range
the sensor has a much smaller dynamic range (whites blowing out or blacks going dead)
it has a much slower reaction time (it’s not a reflex, so there’s a short time lag between pressing the shutter and the picture taken.
it has slower and not so performant AutoFocus (although the AF from the 5D mark II is not top either)
The colors tend to get over-saturated.
these are the pros:
its lightweight compared to any reflex camera 195g vs. 850g without lens for the 5D II
it fits in almost any pocket
it is almost stealth-like compared to a reflex camera, so it doesn’t bother people when it appears (not so important for landscape, but important for street photography)
its silent (except maybe from the lens ring clicks, which are quite noisy)
A pro for this compact, vs some other compacts:
it has all exposure modes, including full manual (P, AV, TV, M), so you can play with the settings as you would with a reflex camera, you can even choose to set the focus manually.
Enough talking, let me show you some pictures. For your info, I have done quite some editing in Lightroom. You won’t notice the lack of sharpness here, I worked a lot on the tonal range in the images, etcetera.
The last image is a photoshop stitched image from 6 shots.
So is it a worthy camera, yes sure it absolutely is a very good travel companion if you don’t wish to focus on photography, but it takes some more time to get good pictures out of it, and you’ll never be able to get really pro-quality pictures out of it.
After all I’m not really a material geek. Sure I love my camera and lenses, but for me a lot of photography is in the eye of the photographer. I’m sure a good photographer can make good pictures with a compact, a bad photographer will not manage taking good pictures with pro gear. I enjoyed being with my son, taking a picture from time to time for the memories, and that is a different mindset than going on a photography trip.
take care, and I hope you come again soon.
Ludwig
Hi all,
we are not so used to having cold winter in Belgium. We usually have a moderate climate, influenced by the warm gulf stream waters, coming from middle-America.
But, some two weeks ago, a package of snow arrived, about 5 inches thick, some extra snow fell a couple of days later, and we had cold winter temperatures, with -15°C as a minimum.
Enjoy the pictures I took in the morning, two days ago. I’m not so fond of the Belgian landscape in general, but I enjoyed the marvels of snow and ice, and the misty morning added to it’s magic.
No more words, just images!
see you soon, I have two more beauty shoots to post!
Ch.
(from Charlemagne – my other name)
Hi,
long time since I posted some new images. I have been busy preparing the two exhibitions and that is now over, with the last exhibition opening this saturday evening. You are still very welcome to come visit the exhibition. (wednesday, saturday and sunday from 14:00 h till 18:00 h. in ‘de Oude Brouwerij’ Ronse.)
I have been to the North sea on april 22nd, and I wanted to show you some images I brought with me. I have further experimented with the ND Grey filters, I used them before in Calais/Cap-Griz-Nez too.
Here I used only the ND 1000 filter, which blocks about 8 stops of light, and let’s pass only 1/1000th of the light. This allows for long exposure times in plain daylight.
The technique is quite simple: you setup your tripod (best a good sturdy one, because when the sea surface is coming over the breakwater, you get some nasty winds blowing you almost out of your clothes.) and make your best composition possible. Verify your normal exposure. Now without further touching your camera, switch to manual focus if not already done, screw on your ND filter and calculate your new exposure time. In my situation, I had to lengthen the exposer time x1000. E.g. 1/100 sec without filter became 10 seconds with filter.
Then wait for the sea tide to come up. Get cold, try to protect your camera from waves splattering on the rocks, almost get blown over, get wet feet, get a rain shower on your head, and then decide you tried your best and try to find some shelter.
All images taken with 17-40 mm on Canon 5D mark II, exposure times of about 50-60 seconds. Aperture f1/16 up to f1/22. The first shot is composed out of 4 exposures, I converted the images to BW in Lightroom, then added a blue’isch color cast in Photoshop.
Hope you liked them, click for bigger version!
ludwig
A 10 minutes behind the scenes video from our shoot in Hallerbos.
Some parts are english spoken, in-video conversations are mainly dutch, without subtitles, but nevertheless great to look at. 😉
thanks to Martine and Raf for filming
Enjoy!
I did a shoot last Sunday in Hallerbos, with models Jessika and Sari. I’ll show you some of the images of the shoot with Jessika.
We had a great time, and we got some great pictures as a result. My first goal was making some composed panoramic images. I shot a lot of poses of Jessika, and then some images left and right of her. I picked out some nice poses to compose a wider final image. The largest pano’s are about 100 Mpix in size, large enough for a very wide print 😉
It was quite a challenge to picture her in the middle of the flowers, because you are actually not allowed entering the flower beds. We worked at some path crossings to achieve these results.
I am currently making a BTS video that shows a little more of the day. Make sure to come and check this page again soon!
After the wedding dress shoot, Jessika tried to get warm again (12°C outside), and then she changed for a nice ‘roman style’ blue dress, almost matching the colors of the Hyacinths -bluebells-. She also brought a kind of an antique bird cage. We shot for another 45 minutes, and at the very end of the shoot, we experimented a little with off camera flash. One single Canon flash, triggered with Cactus V5 transmitter. I had an assistant with me, and she handheld the flash. This allowed for quick changes in position and distance, and very much liked the results. I’m especially fond of the last image, I think it got a sense of drama in it.
Don’t forget to click them to view a larger version.
thank you for reading, come again soon!
Ludwig.
Some pictures I took on our family trip to Calais – Cap Griz Nez and Cap Blanc Nez.
The use of an ND filter and long exposures make for foamy sea-surface. I loved experimenting with it an will surely go back there for some more of these. All three with the Canon 17-40 mm on 5D MarkII.
Don’t forget to click them to see a bigger version.
Remember, all of my images are available for sales. they are perfect for your modern home decoration. 😉
Ludwig
From some time ago, some more landscape images. Almost got my fingers frozen of this morning, didn’t expect minus 0°C temperatures and got very cold. Happy I could take some beautiful images home with me. Enjoy!
All images were taken in the Valley of the Schelde, Eastern Flanders, Belgium.
I managed to get myself published in the newest edition of the EosZine magazine, an online magazine for the EOS-Cameras enthusiast. You can read it here: EosZine 9-2011 . You will have to register if you want to view it.
Toscane, Val d'Orcia
One of my favourite images taken in Tuscany, Italy this summer. Val d’Orcia, Between Grosseto and Arezzo.
This image was composed out of two shots with my 135 mm lens.
Hope you like it.
Ludwig