November was a surprisingly active month for me photo-wise. I was out there with my camera three out of four weekends and actually got some pretty decent shots of the neighborhood and a little beyond.

The first three images were taken during a magic afternoon sunset at Strødam where I have posted pictures from before (yes, I trespassed again). They all feature swans, and they were all taken with my cell phone. I did bring my real camera, but the battery died before the magic started to happen in the shape of this flock of swans doing their bedtime routines. Not paying any attention to me standing right there on the shore, they went about their business of eating, chasing each other, and just floating around aimlessly in beautiful formations on the calm water.

The next picture was taken the following weekend and shows our local castle, Frederiksborg Castle. It's one of the most beautiful castles in the country and I have taken tons of pictures of it. However, it had been a while since my last visit so I figured I would find a good spot and hope for a nice sunset. I didn't quite get what I hoped for, but an orange stripe on the horizon along with dramatic clouds saved the day. I'll be back though, because there's a lot more potential in that castle than this image brings out.

Finally, on the last weekend of November, I went back to the Strøbæk area. It still amazes me how you can continue to find new spots and angles on otherwise well-known turf. I have passed this gate numerous times, but suddenly I saw what a fine composition lay hidden there. Post-processing revealed that it worked best in black and white, at least in my own opinion.

My last November fave was taken on the same day as the one above and shows a church in the tiny village of Gadevang, which is within walking distance of my house. It's a typical Danish church and really nothing special, but I think I nailed it. It's actually a stitch of two images as even my wide-angle lens couldn't contain both the foreground and the church in one frame.

It will probably be too much to hope for that December will prove as productive for me as November. Especially since the days are getting so very short.

It's been a while since my last post here. Not for lack of picture-taking or writing-desire. On the contrary, during my annual voyage to the United States (with side trips to Canada and Iceland) in September, I took a couple of thousand. So instead of blogging, I have actually been busy selecting, post-processing, and organizing those pictures.

Out of the approximately 2000 pictures taken, I have saved around 400 to what I call my Master Collection. They are the pictures that I like, as well as those I want to keep for other reasons, like an important moment captured.

The challenge is to present some of those pictures. When you are an amateur photographer you go back and forth between loving and loathing your own work. During the former periods when you are full of confidence in your own skills, you want to show all your pictures to everybody, and you cannot fathom if everybody is not interested in seeing all your pictures. Nonetheless, that's what the experts say: choose a few. And by "a few" they mean less than 50.

Of course, there's no way I can just pick 50 or less, so what do you do? You turn them into a slideshow, or even a movie, and you add music and cool effects, and voila, suddenly 100+ pictures go down a lot easier. So that's what I did, and I am happy enough with the result that I will share it here. I used Camtasia 9 from TechSmith, which I highly recommend. It may be primarily for screen capturing, but it works really well for slideshows too. It's easy to use, and has tons of features and tweeking options.

It should be pointed out that some of the photos used in the video were taken by my wife Peggy and her daughter Jen, who are both much better than me at getting people to pose and capturing those familiy moments that are probably much more important to save than all the landscape pictures in the world.

And while I'm giving credit to others, the music in the video is "Drive All Night" by Bruce Springsteen, "500 Miles" by Peter, Paul, and Mary, and "Way Back Home" by Band of Horses.

Later on I hope to post high definition versions of a few of the pictures included in the video - and possibly some not in the video - that I like and talk more about them and how they were taken.

I haven't been doing a lot of serious picture taking so far this summer. It's been a combination of bad weather and good weather. Good weather meaning clear blue sky, which equals uninteresting backgrounds in general and sunsets in particular.

But last Sunday evening the perfect conditions were suddenly present. Lots of clouds, but also lots of sun in between the clouds, promising a beautiful sunset. Additionally, there was absolutely no wind. This is important when shooting in low-light conditions when you need exposures of maybe up to 1/2 second and you don't want wavy grass or moving leaves turning into blurry spots.

So off I went, over to a location I've gone to many times before: the Strødam area. Despite its beautiful lake and green surroundings, it's not the easiest place to shoot. Most of it is fenced off. You have to stick to a path, and in most places, dense vegetation prevents you from accessing the lake shore. So most of my pictures in the past were kind of blah.

But on this evening I was determined to crack the nut called Strødam and get some quality sunset shots. I quickly realized, however, that that wasn't going to happen sticking to the official path. So I did what all serious photographers have to do once in a while: I trespassed. I jumped the fence, determined to chase the sunset, which I could tell would be on the other side of a ridge in the middle of the fenced area.

So into the fenced area I went. No one came out of the woods to yell at me, and I was not attacked by angry wildlife. Still, I felt brave as a Navy Seal.

Fortunately, my bravery was rewarded. Reaching the top of the ridge, a  dream scenery manifested itself below me: a herd of cows peacefully grazing on a meadow, a calm lake, and all of it shrouded in a purple and orange sunset with the sun having almost disappeared behind a tree line.

Over the next 30 minutes I took dozens of pictures of varying exposures, ISO and f-values. I moved closer a few times to make sure I didn't miss anything. I was certain this scenery was a slam-dunk and that I was shooting the pictures of my life!

And, well, it's not that I'm unhappy with the result, but I'm just not completely happy either.  A better foreground would have been nice for starters, but the main problem is that it's just not as sharp as I would have liked it to be. I don't know if it's my camera, my lens, or my skills that leave something to be desired, but those cows should have had a lot more details.

One of the best pictures was taken as I was leaving the area. A few cows had moved over to where I had been moments before, so I stopped and got a few shots off before I retreated, afraid the cows might start chasing me (so much for being a Navy Seal). Again, it should have been sharper, but the motif is kind of pretty.

In the end, my own favorite shots of the night were not of cows or lakes. I really like this one of the purple flowers under a purple sky. Sure, the purple has been enhanced, but it really was an absolutely gorgeous scene.

Finally, just before I left the area, it was time for a self-congratulating selfie. It might have been better without the chubby fellow awkwardly embodying the rule of thirds, but there he is.

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.

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.