My photographer guru Scott Kelby has written something to the effect that no self-respecting photographer will shoot outdoor pictures in the middle of the day. The blue hour and altogether the light around sunrise and sunset is the only light worth using.

Well, even though he's my guru, and even though I of course agree that those times of day are the best to shoot in, I have two problems with that: 1) using HDR you can do a lot to compensate for the harsh light of mid-day, and 2) if I could only shoot during those early and late hours, I'd hardly shoot at all. I know that part of it is laziness and unwillingness to get up early enough to catch the sunrise, or lift my butt from the couch in the evening. But when photography is not your main occupation, real life just makes it very difficult to get out there with your camera when you ought to. And even if you do have the opportunity, the weather might be a hindrance, especially in a country such as mine where it seems a thick cloud layer will often block any magical light that the sun might otherwise have served you with.

So, I'm sorry, Mr. Kelby, but I will continue to shoot even when the sun is high in the sky and the shadows are harsh and try to make the best of it. That's why the other day I ventured into Copenhagen to spend some time doing a little mid-day urban photo exploration -despite a clear blue sky and Scott Kelby's admonitions - and here's what happened:

The above is a revisit of a motif I shot months ago with my cell phone: the corner of Danish Industry's HQ in downtown Copenhagen. The original picture went on to become my most popular submission to YouPic so far, much to my own suprise. Well, I wanted to do it again with my "real" camera and it turned out pretty well too.
This one is my favorite from that day: the underneath of a new elevated bike path among modern glass facades. Conditions were difficult for taking pictures with, indeed, harsh shadows and even harsher sun reflections in the water. This was put together from three different shots.

One of my goals for the day was to take pictures of trains. I did take a bunch, but nothing too spectacular. This one was my favorite. I love the wide railroad area near Copenhagen Central Station.

Another revisit of a scene I took with my cell phone more than a year ago that turned out really well. This isn't too shabby either. And yes, while I think this mid-day picture is perfectly fine, I can only imagine how gorgeous that glass facade must look in a beautiful, colorful sunset.

A canal in the part of Copenhagen called Christianshavn. The canals were one of my main objectives of the day, too, but I didn't quite find the right spots. This one turned out okay, but the light definitely was a challenge that again required three different exposures put together to overcome the shadows and the highlights.

One of the things I realized on that day was that urban photography is often made difficult because of all the cars that are everywhere and that just get in the way of all the interesting buildings and other objects. Here I tried to make them work to my advantage in how the shiny metal contrasts the old buildings.

Finally, you may ask, where are all the people? Isn't that an important part of taking pictures in the city? Well, maybe. But that's where the landscape photographer in me takes control. In landscape photography, people are usually just in the way. So on that day at least, I avoided places with lots of people. Maybe that will be a challenge for another day.

Six shots from a photo walk in the local neighborhood April 18, 2016. Not many spring colors yet, so I used it to my advantage and did some black and white and low-saturation images. I was quite happy with the result. I think for once I'm just going to let the images speak for themselves.

It was just five months after I got my Sony A33 camera (the one I'm still using today). I really had no clue how to use it. Automatic mode was all I knew. ISO, aperture, and shutter speed? Those were all gibberish to me. So were words like composition and RAW.

So up until then my upgrade from a compact camera to a DSLR hadn't resulted in the expected transformation of my pictures to an array of masterpieces. I probably wouldn't have admitted that back then, just as I have trouble admitting today that I won't be the next Ansel Adams (I'm practically there, right?).

Anyway, so when my friend Brian asked if I was interested in going to Tivoli Gardens for an open-air concert with Danish rock star Michael Falch and that cameras were allowed, I of course said yes. I figured it would be great practice for when Bruce Springsteen would call to make me his official tour photographer.

As for Michael Falch, I can sort of take him or leave him. He plays the kind of no-frills rock that I prefer, and he's made a few pretty decent songs, but not enough to seriously catch my interest. I'm not even going to start talking about how he performed with Bruce Springsteen during the latter's first visit to Copenhagen in 1981, because then we'd stray too far from the topic.

So, to make a long story even longer, that night we found ourselves in the front row in front of the open-air stage inside Tivoli Gardens; and with cameras being perfectly allowed in Tivoli, we were well-equipped and ready for some music and some shooting.

Now, I don't remember if I set my camera to "Automatic with no flash" or "Night Scene". Whatever the case, not even today, with five years of experience, would I have been able to do a manual setting that matched what the camera figured out on its own. And I don't say that often. I usually find that the automatic settings are lacking in one way or another, usually over-exposing the image. But when it came to this low-light-but-lots-of-artificial-light-up-on-the-stage scene, the camera rocked as much as the band.

That night I took in the neighborhood of 200 pictures, and I don't exaggerate when I say that every one of them was a keeper from a technical point of view. And what's more, from an artistic point of view, it may have been 80% of the pictures that were good to excellent. Of course, some of them were very similar, but there was enough variety to make it interesting. It didn't hurt that the show featured several guest artists and thereby offered new exciting motifs on a regular basis.

For that reason, it's been really difficult to choose a limited number of pictures to present here. I did pick a few, but as a bonus I created a slideshow video containing a whole bunch more. Sorry about the length of it, but note that it contains music from the actual show during which the pictures were taken.

 

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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.

We were heading back to our hotel after a long, exhausting day in Glacier National Park. Just before entering the town of Columbia Falls, where we were staying, we drove across a bridge over the Flathead River. It's the kind of bridge where you hardly notice you are on a bridge. The road just goes a little uphill and then a little downhill - it's over in 10 seconds - and if you don't happen to look to the sides, you might have thought it was just a small hill.

Fortunately, on that night I did look to the side, and what I saw was one of the most magical sights I'd ever seen. The sun had gone down, but some light still remained. An orange glow on the far horizon where the sun had recently disappeared, gradually, and with the help of a few high clouds, turned purple, leaving a magical pink reflection on the river.  And right smack in the middle of the river a lonely canoe floated silently toward the bridge carrying two people.

This was not the kind of bridge where you could just stop in the middle and get out and take a picture. If I wanted a picture, it had to be right there, that instant, and out through the side window of the moving car.

Fortunately, the camera was already in my hand so all I had to do was raise it, point, and shoot. That's all there was time for. I managed to get two shots off within a couple of seconds. Then the scene disappeared behind us.

Well, not that I had the highest expectations, but you can imagine my disappointment when I later looked at the pictures and the best of the two  had turned out like this:

That was hardly what I had seen with my own eyes. Still, I had hope. While I knew that this would never be the technically best picture I'd ever taken or anywhere near sharp, I thought that I could probably improve it enough to make it decent.

Well, I will let you be the judge now, but this is the result after quite a bit of work in Lightroom. Obviously, the horizon has been straightened, the colors have been emphasized, highlights down, shadows up, and I made it as sharp as I could without making it grainy. I was personally very happy with just how much I was able to improve it considering it was taken out the side window of a car moving at 50 kilometers an hour.

The next night I made sure we returned to the spot around the same time hoping there would be more time to take a better picture. But the light was nowhere near as good, and despite spending around an hour there, I didn't take a single picture that was worth showing off.

So, the moral of the story? Well, if the choice is between shooting a crappy picture and not shooting at all, shoot the crappy picture. You might just be able to save it.

Found this picture from a year ago of Sputnik posing like a model in the bathroom doorway. Does she know she's a beauty or what?

Again, being from 2008, don't expect masterful photography here, but I think this slideshow is worth sharing for its drama, owing not least to the soundtrack of Metallica covering Ennio Morricone.

I'm passionate about the Battle of Little Big Horn, so there will be lots of newer and much better photos from that place on this site before too long, but this will do for now.

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