April 15, 2018

Lofoten

Senja and Lofoten, part 7: weather, wind and animals

April 15, 2018

Lofoten

I woke up for sunset, with a location all mapped out. But when I looked out the window, I saw nothing but snow. The weather in these parts is pretty unpredictable, so I wasn't surprised. Since there was no point in going out, I went back to bed. When I woke up a few hours later, the snow was still going strong.

I had a good breakfast (with real coffee this time, the apartment had a coffee maker!) and started thinking of what to do for the day. There is basically one road going through this part of the islands, and you can drive towards the mainland and towards the sea. For this day, I chose the mainland. I figured since the weather was crap, I could visit the local aquarium instead. I really like aquariums, I don't really know why. There's just something calming about looking at fish slowly swimming around. And after that, if weather permitted, I'd scout the area toward the mainland.

When I finally had everything ready, the clouds had started to clear. I decided to quickly go to my sunrise location to scout it out for the future since it was only a 10 minute drive from the apartment. There was a convenient parking spot there so I parked up, took the camera and walked out on the beach. Even though the light was already a bit harsh, it was a nice scene.

I took a few shots, and turned back to the car. And of course, wouldn't you know it, there was an eagle flying towards the car. And I was 30 meters away from the right lens. The run was a bit slippery, and I had trouble putting on the lens and changing settings. I just caught the bird when it flew past.

A nice location, although there isn't much nice foreground.

Slightly too late, and had the wrong settings again...

...and when the settings were correct it was too late. Damnit.

Good thing that wasn't the only eagle I saw that day. In any case, I took my car and started driving north-east along the main road. The tail end of the bad weather still lingered, and I got a few nice shots of the clouds moving through.

The further I drove, the thicker the clouds got, and soon snow started falling. I was reminded of the drive the day before and took it easy. I wasn't in a hurry anywhere. It wasn't a long drive, and before I knew it, I was at the aquarium. The place looked deserted in the snow storm, but it was open so I walked in and got a ticket.

The aquarium is not that big, and only has local species. I tried to take some photos, but most of them were ruined by the glass. It's tricky to find good angles for the photos, since you basically have to be squared towards the glass, and the fishies and other crawlies typically stay toward the edges. When they do swim in the middle, they are so close to the glass that you pick up all the scratches as well.

I had timed my driving so that I'd be at the aquarium when they were feeding some of the animals. One I've seen in person many times, the other not. It was a bit tricky to get a nice angle, and the strong wind and ever-present snow didn't help. But persistence pays off and I got a few nice photos in the end. I'd prefer if these were wild animals, but I'll take what I can get.

What you typically see of seals. Rarely this close, though :)

I went back inside after the feeding to dry off and check out the rest of the exhibits, and just chilling. I wasn't in a hurry anywhere, the weather being what it was. One of the nicer images I got was this:

After the aquarium it was time for lunch, so I drove into Kabelvåg for a nice burger; I needed something different than the adventure meals :) The weather did clear a bit while I was eating, so I continued the drive towards the mainland. But I didn't get very far. A truck had stopped seemingly random in the middle of the road and two cars had stopped behind it. I was just wondering what the problem was when the truck put on it's emergency blinkies, so I stopped behind the other cars. A minute later a fire truck stopped beside us and a fireman came to my window. A truck had driven a bit too fast on the road and had lost control. The fireman said that I could wait for them to clear the road, which could take a few hours, or to turn back. I read the local news later, the truck had flipped in a corner and a car of tourists had driven into the back. Luckily no one was hurt, but it had taken quite a while to remove all the fish that had spilled all over the road.

You can probably guess I turned back, and drove even more carefully back towards Leknes. The weather was really bad where the accident had happened, but it soon cleared and I could take some more roadside shots.

I love the scale in this photo. That bridge isn't small, but it's still dwarfed by the mountain beside it. And you can't even see the mountaintops!

I was standing on the beach taking the pictures above, enjoying the fast clouds, when I looked back over my shoulder. There was a black lump on the ground that I was pretty sure hadn't been there before. Could it be? I pointed my camera at it since I had a longer lens on, and yes, it was. This time my car was closer, and the bird was sitting still. I was NOT going to mess this up.

The eagle just sat there while I moved gingerly closer. When the eagle turned into the wind, I knew what was happening; large birds like this have to take flight into the wind, especially when it was this windy. And I was ready.

After this particular stop, every time when I put away my camera in the back of the car, I put my birding lens on it. Clearly, there are eagles on Lofoten, lots of them. It was just a question of being ready.

At this point the sunset was closing in, and I still had a drive to get to my sunset location. The problem was that I got distracted. A lot. I stopped twice when an eagle flew overhead, and three times for the scenery. The setting sun produced some absolutely gorgeous light and I just couldn't resist.

As you can see from the picture above I was, once again, cutting it close. This time I knew that there was no way I'd make it to the location I had planned, so I just stopped by the road where I saw some nice light, and went for it. I could have done without the 50 cm of snow on the beach, but it was mostly just an inconvenience.

The water is just crystal clear around these parts. Too bad someone had dropped something into the sea exactly here...

After sunset more clouds rolled in, so I went back to the apartment for some dinner and much-needed sleep. Even though there might be auroras, there wasn't a chance I'd see them through the clouds. The next day it was time to drive south, to visit the legendary village of Hamnøy

Thomas Mattsson

December 22, 2015

Post Processing, Norway

Creating a dramatic Black-And-White Landscape image

Thomas Mattsson

December 22, 2015

Post Processing, Norway

I've shown you a lot of landscapes so far on this blog, but I haven't shown you how they end up here. Some images are simple, requiring minimal editing to produce nice results; some take hours. In this post, I'll show you how I edited one of the images I took in Norway, all the way from raw capture to final result.

I use Lightroom CC for my editing, but you can do all of this in Lightroom 5 or 6, or even pure Photoshop (as long as you have the Adobe Camera RAW plugin installed). Since I shoot all my landscapes excplicitely with post-processing in mind, I always shoot in 14-bit RAW format. JPEG simply doesn't allow me to do even half of the edits I usually do. I always take care to expose for the highlights when I take a photo. That means making sure that no areas of the photo are blown out (the sun being an exception). If you want to take landscape photos, and don't have the highlight warning blinkies turned on, shame on you! :)

Without further ado, here is the final image:

And here is the RAW file exported to JPEG with no processing whatsoever:

Note that the ground is a little bit dark; this is normal when exposing for the highlights when it's cloudy. Don't worry. As they say, we'll fix it in post ;)

OK, let's get started. The very first thing I do, is go to the 'Develop tab' in Lightroom, and go down to 'Lens Corrections'. Here, I check 'Enable Profile Corrections' and 'Remove Chromatic Aberration'. The first setting makes Lightroom correct for any deficiencies in my lens (in this case it was the Nikon 10-24 DX), mainly vignetting and barrel distortion. The second removes unwanted colors around high-contrast edges, which is also a defect of most lenses.

Corrections applied. Not a big difference on the final image, but especially chromatic aberrations show really well in prints if you don't remove them.

There is quite a big difference between the light and dark parts of the image; especially the mountain on the right is too dark. In real life the mountain was very dark, but it doesn't translate that well to the image. In my opinion, it's OK to modify your images. I'm still going to keep it natural, just not the way it actually looked ;)

To lessen the dynamic range (the difference between light and dark) I'm going to use a trick I learned from Sergio Ramelli of YouTube fame. He is very fond of the method, but I think it doesn't always work; in this case, it does. First, go to the 'Basic' tab. Take the 'Highlights' slider, and drag it all the way to the left. This makes light areas darker. Then, take the 'Shadows' slider, and drag it all the way to the right. This lightens up dark areas. The end result looks like this:

What we did was squish all tones towards the middle, making the picture look a bit washed out. Next, we'll fix the blandness using the 'Whites' and 'Blacks' sliders. You can drag these by just looking at the image and seeing the changes, but there is a better way; using the Alt key on your keyboard. Press down the Alt key and grab the 'Whites' slider. You'll notice the image goes black; don't worry. Move the slider towards the right, until small specks of white appear in the image area. Let go of the slider and the Alt key, and you'll see your picture again.

Tiny hint of blue where the clouds are, this is good.

Now, do the same with the 'Blacks' slider, but drag it to the left. The image will be white; stop when you get some black areas, and release.

You can go a bit farther with the black than the whites. As you can see, the lake is the darkest part in this image.

What we did was change the white and black point of your image; the lightest part, and the darkest part. When using the Alt key, Lightroom shows you the areas that are pure white and black, respectively. You always want a little bit pure white and pure black in the images, this helps with perceived contrast. Let's take a look at our image after the adjustment.

Much better than the last, right? It is basically the same as the first image, but we've added contrast. Now, you could do this with the 'Contrast' slider, but I find the results aren't nearly as good. Still with me? Good, then lets do the last bit of global adjustments before we pause and take stock. I do this by adding a touch of 'Clarity', 'Vibrance' and 'Contrast'. How much depends completely on the picture. I usually just eyeball it until it looks good, then take away about 10-20%. Your eyes deceive you into thinking you haven't gone too far, but trust me, you will. If you can pause at this point and come back the next day, do it. It will help you dial back on the heavy processing you are doing right now. I typically try to do two passes, where the second is during another day. Very often I realize my settings are too strong. For now, you can see my eyeballed settings for the three down below, with the end result.

The difference is again quite small. Editing is often about adding small changes, letting the sum of the changes have a big impact.

So, at this point we have a nice image, that could be printed and hang on the wall. But when I edited this, I had a couple of thoughts. One, I really liked the road form going down toward the lake and round it. Two, the scene is dramatic, but could be made more so. Three, There is not a lot of color information in the image. Granted, the colors are true to life, but I ended up trying something I usually do when there isn't that much color; I go black and white.

B&W is great for showing form and light; by not having colors in the image, the brain has less distractions to worry about. However, it also means you have to pay much more attention to the light and dark areas (contrast) of you picture, as well as the relationship between lines and forms.

You can go back and forth between color and b&w by clicking the captions. By default, Lightroom chooses the shown mix for black and white conversions; it looks more natural than a flat curve. You can of course change the mix if you prefer.

OK, I can work with this. First thing I did was pump up 'Contrast' and 'Clarity'¨. These sliders work extremely well in black and white, so you have more leeway in using them without the image looking unnatural. Increasing the values for both give us much more contrast, which translates to mood:

The next thing I wanted to fix was the road. I love the form, but I can't really see it. The rocks are a bit too distracting, and the road itself has the same tone as the rocks so it doesn't separate from the clutter. There are a couple of ways to solve this, but I chose a simple method. To reduce the clutter of the rocks, lower contrast and clarity on them. To bring out the road, increase contrast between the road and the rocks by making the road darker and the rocks brighter.

Time for the brush tool, then. For those of you not familiar with brushes, don't worry. Basically what I'm doing is localized changes that you can edit after the fact. If you mess up, you can undo anything. I'll start by selecting the brush tool and making sure the settings for the brush itself is OK. The effects do not matter at all at this point; I can change them in any way I like afterward. With brushes, you want to have a light touch, so I chose values around 75 for 'Flow' and 'Density'. For the size, I adjust it continually with my mouse wheel while I'm painting; big areas get a big brush, while small areas need a smaller brush. Lastly i press the 'O' key to turn on 'Show selected mask overlay'. You can also do this in the toolbar below the image. Now, start painting:

You can see the painted area above. Each click and drag will add a little more color. Remember, you are not painting the color, the color only shows you what you selected for your adjustments that will be done later. Carefully go through the area you want to change, in my case I started with the rocks in the foreground and between the bends in the road. When done, the selection looked like this:

If you paint on something you didn't intend to paint on, it's easy to fix; In the brush menu, you can select the 'Erase' brush, which does exactly what you'd expect. The same exact thing can also be found using the Alt key; when pressed, you are using the erase brush. To turn off the red mask, press 'O' again.

Now, the next thing is to do the actual adjustment. Remember, what I wanted was to reduce the contrast and make the rocks lighter, so lets do exactly that:

Add a bit of 'Exposure', drop 'Contrast' and 'Clarity'.

Next, let's do the road. We will need a new brush for this, because we don't want to mess up the changes we just did to the rocks. In the top right of the brush panel, select 'New'. This allows you to start painting a completely new area, that will have different settings. This time, paint only the road:

I wanted to darken the road, so lets do that:

'Exposure' and 'Contrast' darken the road, while 'Clarity' helps keep some of the detail.

There are a lot of things I could still do; the rocks in the foreground could have even less contrast, the water in the lake could be smoother, etc. I spent around an hour on the real version of this image, fixing small things like the reflections of the snow in the lake. I've ordered a big print for my wall, I think It will look amazing :) For this post, I think I'll stop here.

Thanks for reading, and please join me in the next one, where I create a high dynamic range (HDR) image!

Thomas Mattsson

September 25, 2015

Norway

Day 4: sunrise and a familiar-ish view.

Thomas Mattsson

September 25, 2015

Norway

When going to bed the previous day, I almost set the alarm to wake in the middle of the night to get some star shots. After a few seconds I made up my mind not to; I was simply too tired. I did set it to 6 o'clock though, half an hour before sunrise. The awesome sunset had wet my appetite, so I thought 'since I'm here...'

When I woke up it was still mostly dark. Everything was still in the cabin, only a faint crackle coming from the heating system. Outside, I could hear a breeze. The sky to the east was cloudy, just as it had been the night before. No coloured sunrise, then. Except maybe there was, but I'd have to get out of bed since the window was pointed the wrong way. I sighed, pulled myself out of the warm bed, and gathered my stuff.

The moon was kind enough to be in the exactly right place.

A hint of color, but not the fireworks of the earlier sunset.

A nice effect of the rising sun. The clouds covered the east all the way from Fannaråken to the horizon.

I went back to bed, setting my alarm so that I wouldn't miss breakfast. I dozed off immediately, which wasn't that surprising. I'm not really a morning person, which is unfortunate for my photography aspirations. After waking up again, the sun was already high up. I put on my clothes and walked to the main cabin for some breakfast. I took my camera along this time, to capture the inside of the main cabin. It is utilitarian, but cozy. The best thing at that particular moment was the food, though.

Namnam, indeed. I don't always eat porridge, but when I do,  it's accompanied by a hand-drawn teletubbie. — Namnam, indeed. I don't always eat porridge, but when I do, it's accompanied by a hand-drawn teletubbie.

An assortment of entertainment and breakfast cheeses. If you ever get to try Norwegian brown cheese, go for it. It's weird.

The last angle. And yes, I'm tall, and couldn't be bothered to get the perspective right :)

After the breakfast, it was time to start heading down. The clouds had moved closer to Fannaråken, covering the east and north views completely, sometimes rolling over Fannaråken itself. I tried to get some photos, but the sun was high, the clouds were in the way, and I couldn't find anything I hadn't shot the day before. I still have a lot to learn when it comes to thinking through the picture before taking it. Next time, I'll be more thorough, taking pictures of every nook and cranny.

The way down was, not surprisingly, much easier than walking up. The weather was better, and the view was clear. I decided to take it easy, and stop for photos every now and then. This resulted in hundreds of almost identical images of the valley below, since there isn't really anything interesting along the path itself.

You can see where the path winds down the mountainside. The hotel is at the end of the valley, just over the hill with the road, 1150 meters further down and 8 kilometers away.

I just happened to notice this little fellow not far from the top; it blended in really well with the rocks. After two seconds of staring at me it took off, along with ten others I hadn't seen.

The color difference of the lakes was really clear in this light.

'Follow the path! Undergrowth is vulnerable'. This is a National Park, after all. Also, the path isn't slippery and dangerous, like the moss is.

I made slow progress down the mountain, stopping and appreciating the view from time to time. Although the website for Fannaråken says the way down takes a bit over three hours, I spent almost five; more than on the way up. The progress was much faster, but the photo nerd in me took over several times, prompting me to stop and play with my camera.

Halfway down now. You can see the change in the path and the terrain.

Remember those cars from the previous day? I had been wondering where they went. I finally found out. That, right there, is a nice camping spot.

A better view of the glacier stream at the end of the valley. You could clearly hear the constant noise of rushing water.

Me in my super-sexy climbing clothes. At least I'll be easily spotted if I get lost in the wilderness.

The smaller stream, coming down from Fannaråken. It is bigger than it looks on the photo, unfortunately there wasn't really anything available to show the scale.

The path took me right across this small waterfall. You had to be careful where to step; the water is so clear that 10cm of water looks the same as 30cm.

I came here to photograph streams, so that's what I'll do, damnit!

I finally made it down to the valley floor, where I was greeted by a welcoming party. Just after I passed the sheep, I caught something in the corner of my eye. It was an eagle, flying on the top of the valley wall. This was the only time during the trip I wished I had my 300mm; I still got a few decent shots of the slow, majestic bird, but they were a lot fuzzier and further away than I'd like. And of course, all my settings were completely wrong. Spending a couple of days here with proper birding gear would be awesome :)

Norwegian sheep apparently know traffic rules, the filed neatly to the right side so that I could pass.

One of the stream coming down the valley sides. This one was a over a hundred meters high.

There is a strange effect when hiking alongside tall mountains; I found that my brain had difficulties processing the distances correctly. I kept missing focus when looking at the valley walls and Fannaråken itself. My brain simply thought that the mountains were much smaller and closer than they actually were, giving me a bad headache. The second last day of the trip the exact same thing happened in Utladalen. I guess you will get used to it after a while.

The main stream in the valley that I couldn't be bothered to get to on the day before, with Fannaråken to the left. You can see the mountaintop!

This pic is taken a few kilometers further from the last one, just outside the valley. The mountain is still the same size, which messes with your brain when you aren't used to these sorts of landscapes. The houses in the bottom left give some scale… — This pic is taken a few kilometers further from the last one, just outside the valley. The mountain is still the same size, which messes with your brain when you aren't used to these sorts of landscapes. The houses in the bottom left give some scale, but trust me, it isn't accurate. The houses look tiny in comparison in real life.

Getting close to the hotel now. The valley stream starts rushing down toward the Sogne fjord.

Did I mention that the sheep are everywhere?

My gear; the camera strap was really handy, allowing me to rest the camera from my shoulder but still being able to access it immediately. The whole set weighed about 13 kilos.

So, not a lot to talk about in this one; I hope you don't mind. I arrived at the hotel without any incidents, and without being too tired. My shoulders were killing me, though, and I clearly felt the accrued filth I had gathered during the trip. After a really long shower, I backed up all my photos to my laptop, and started planning the coming days. But more on that in the next installment, where I drive up to Geiranger for a single photo, but find a lot of distractions the way :)