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I went for another walk yesterday and came across an old favorite subject of mine. That is, I have always seen the photo potential in this old abandoned gate in the middle of the woods, but I never quite got it. Until now. I think.

One of the problems was that it's actually not easy to get in position to take a picture of the gate. You can't get far enough away from it to make it fit in a frame, unless you stand in front of it at a straight angle, which makes it visually rather uninteresting.

The solution, it turned out, was my cell phone. I am really impressed with my cell phone camera's panorama feature that allows you to stitch together nine images on-the-fly to great effect. Still, in order to get a good angle of the gate, I had to back into a bunch of branches, but from there I was able to fire off those nine images, and the phone managed to put hem together seamlessly.

While the above picture is proof to me that it's not always the most expensive camera that takes the best picture in a given situation, I did also take a couple with my full-frame camera that I was happy with. Here's one:

And with that I left the gate to its hopeless struggle of keeping intruders out of someplace that is no longer there, and my own struggle to take a decent picture of it had come to an end.

Just added a new collection consisting of pictures taken through the windshield of a moving car. Anyone who has seen my travel pictures in the past won't be surprised. Family and friends have been force-fed these pictures that I took from the passenger seat of various cars dating back to around 2003. Shooting pictures in that way is one of my favorite occupations while cruising through the landscape. There is just something about particularly the American landscape that makes it look great framed by a dashboard and the top edge of a windshield. I guess I have felt that way since I saw the cover of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska album. In the back of my head that is often the image I have been trying to recreate.

Well, you be the judge of whether I have succeeded. Go to the Collections section and click the Thru the Windshield album.

Last but not least, thank you to my dear wife for driving the car and putting up with my constant picture snapping.

Whether you live near the Grand Canyon, in a pulsating city, or on the outskirts of a medium sized Danish castle town, if you go for a walk, there are only so many new and interesting things to look at. At some point everything around you just takes on a familiarity that makes you not even see the most attractive features. The gorgeous Frederiksborg Castle in the middle of my town that makes tourists drop their jaw... I often drive by it and don't even look in its direction.

So last Sunday when I grabbed my camera and went for a much needed walk in the neighborhood, I had more hopes for the spring air than I did for the pictures I would bring home.

But it turns out that if you are really tuned in on your surroundings, it doesn't matter that you have taken the same walk a dozen times. Suddenly you notice things that you never noticed before, or that you didn't see the photo potential in. Or maybe the light somehow makes things look different. Or the horses on that pasture suddenly want to come over and pose for you like they never did the other 10 times you walked by.

Even a church and a graveyard that I have often passed by without even slowing down, on that Sunday made me stop and see several objects and angles that I just had to go shoot, and with a pretty good result.

By the end of the walk, I felt so inspired that I even posed for a selfie in that beautiful old alley that I have taken tons of pictures of before, but never quite like this.

Here are the rest of the pictures from that day that are worth sharing: [gallery_bank type="images" format="blog" title="false" desc="false" display="all" sort_by="date" special_effect="grayscale" animation_effect="fadeIn" album_title="false" album_id="6"]

The battery ran out after 30 minutes, I couldn't get my new smartphone controlled remote to work, and the few pictures I took were kind of blah. But... for the first time this year I managed to get out there with my camera and shoot a little bit, and it was great!

Actually, all it was was a walk around my neighborhood and up on a ridge running along a highway on one side and the cluster of houses on the other side that my own place is part of. I have been up there lots of times and taken lots of pictures. There is a pretty good view, and the houses line up in a way that make them suited for pictures. So I keep returning, if nothing else, just for practice or for the exercise.

Here are the three shots that I thought were decent enough to get posted here, including a panorama stitched together of three images, and an HDR image made of three different exposures.

This is the HDR picture, in case you were wondering.

Lower Falls in Yellowstone National Park must be one of the most beautiful landscape sceneries you can lay your eyes on. I remember the first time we visited it back in 2003, I literally started crying. It was that overwhelming. I think it's impossible to take a bad picture of it (still, that doesn't mean you should just point a crappy cell phone camera at it and push the button.... it deserves so much more than that).

And yet, after our latest visit there in 2014, my first time in Yellowstone with a DSLR camera, I just wasn't happy with the result. I took dozens of pictures, even using a tripod, and while none of them were bad - because, like I said, it's impossible to take a bad picture there - they just didn't do the place justice either. Mostly it was the light. It was in the late afternoon, and the sun was still high in the sky and at a bad angle, creating a hard light unsuited for photography.

Recently I decided that another factor was the sky. It was just a plain blue sky with a few white clouds thrown in. No drama. No colors. Just a bland postcard blue sky. Yawn!

So what if I could change those two factors? Well, thanks to Photoshop, I could, and I did, as you can see. But isn't that cheating? That depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to make an exact representation of reality, then yes. But if your goal is to create a beautiful, evocative piece of art, there's nothing wrong with doing whatever you want to achieve that. Whether I was successful is up to the viewer, but I'm happy enough with the result that I think I can finally stop beating myself up over what I could have done differently to perfect what should have been a slam dunk.

This is the "original" picture, as in, this is kind of what it really looked like. The picture has been enhanced, but these were the colors and those were the clouds. And I wasn't completely happy with it.

"Dramatic clouds" version with the clouds complementing the waterfall.

The "sunset version", again with the clouds fetched from another picture.