Traveling through Morocco: Morocco slide show

A gallery of about 40 pictures from my visit to Morocco.

Morocco slide show

Some photographic highlights from Hawaii

As written earlier, we spent around two weeks end of 2008 and early 2009 on the Hawaiian Islands. Four days on the Big Island, eleven days on Maui and two days on Kauai.

Some of the photographic highlights were: Lava on the Big Island, whale watching and the road to Hana on Maui and a helicopter flight in Kauai.

Lava on the Big Island
South-east outside the Volcano National Park the recent lava stream meets the Ocean. The county keeps a street with parking lots towards the lava fields. The parking lot opens every afternoon weather permitting. You actually cross several times newer lava streams. A marked trail leads from the parking lot over lava fields to a spot were you can observe how the lava meets the ocean. When we were there the trail was about 300 meters (my guess). Tip: to go there you should wear some closed shoes and bring flash lights if you got there at dawn.
During the day you see a huge cloud of steam arising, sometimes some rocks that are hurtled in the air. And some times little tornados leave the clouds.
During dawn and night you can see glowing rocks and lava spraying in the air. The explosions happen when the lava is getting hard by the contact with the water but is not building slid structures. With new lava adding the fresh structures break.
I used my Sigma 70-300 mm lens, a high ISO and a tripod for the pictures at dawn and night.

The Hawaiian Lava Daily-Blog of Leigh Hilbert might be useful for planing you trip to see some glowing lava.

Where lava meets the ocean, steam arises...

...and glowing rocks fly through the air

Whale watching on Maui
From December through March numerous humpback whales visit the sea between Maui, Molokai und Lanai. Pregnant female whale come here to give birth, while the other whales come for mating. We could watch whales almost every day from the Maui coast, none the less a whale watching tour brings you really close to those giants of the ocean. We did a tour with the Pacific Whale Foundation starting from Lahaina. Impressive was the hydrophone they put into the sea to listen to the whales during the tour.
I did most of the pictures of the whales with a focal length from 200 to 300 mm, again using my Sigma 70-300 mm lens. Be careful with exposure times, although the whales are moving relatively slow, they are still moving and the boat is a bit shaky.

Whales of Maui

Road to Hana on Maui
Rumors say the road to Hana has more than 400 turns, I didn’t count them! The road passes waterfalls, jungle, wild coast and lots of beautiful viewpoints. Start early and take your time to make plenty stops.

Road to Hana with plenty of beautiful places

Helicopter flight in Kauai
The impressive Waimea Canyon, Na Pali Coast and other Kauai sights are a fantastic surrounding for a helicopter flight. We did the flight with Blue Hawaiian.
If you are into photography during a helicopter flight you might want to consider the following points:
The windows of the helicopter produces reflexions and flares, there are several possibilities to avoid them. The easiest: take a doors-off flight (we didn’t). If you take the more convenient flight with doors, wear dark clothes (reflections usually come from light coloured things in the helicopter e.g. the people inside the helicopter) and use a polarizer filter, although it has a negative effect of rising the exposure time!
The recommended focal length is 15 to 70 mm. Use exposure times higher than 1/250 second, the helicopter is sometimes moving fast and you have some vibrations from the engine and the air.
The seating in the helicopter is based on the weight; lighter people are seated in the front or on the windows, while the heavier ones sit on the back middle seats.

Waimea Canyon

Na Pali Coast

I prepared a slideshow with more pictures from Hawaii that includes more waterfalls, orchids, Haleakala Mountain, sea turtles and many other impressions from this beautiful islands.

Tokyo and Hawaii Galeries

I created two galleries with a collection of pictures from my recent trip to Tokyo and Hawaii.

• Tokyo and Japan gallery
• Hawaii gallery

The photos were taken with the Pentax K100D and the following lenses
Pentax SMC-DA 1:3,5-5,6 18-55 mm AL,
Sigma 1:4-5,6 DL 70-300 mm,
Sigma 1:2,8 105mm EX Macro.

Early winter in the mountains

We spent the last weekend in the Kleinwalsertal, the Austrian valley that is only accessible from Germany and building a part of the ‘Allgäuer Alpen”. Mid November is an unusual time to spend a weekend in the mountains, ski areas are not open yet and the hiking season is over since it is getting colder and wetter and the first snow is covering the mountains. But anyway we had a great weekend, sunny days, some snow and cold nights.

Pentax K100D, DA 18-55, 55 mm, 1:8, 1/30 s, ISO 200
First snow in the Kleinwalsertal with the dominating mountains: Elfer, Zwölfer and Widderstein

We did some small hikes along ice covered creeks up to the snow covered parts of the mountains. The thin layer of snow and the building ice crust were made to shot some pictures.

Pentax K100D, DA 18-55, 55 mm, 1:8, 1/30 s, ISO 200

Pentax K100D, Sigma 70-300, 210 mm, 1:13, 1/500 s, ISO 400
Gras looking through the first snow of the year

Pentax K100D, DA 18-55, 18 mm, 1:11, 1/20 s, ISO 200

Pentax K100D, DA 18-55, 30 mm, 1:8, 1/30 s, ISO 200
Streaming ice – icy streams

Pentax K100D, Sigma 70-300, 160 mm, 1:4,5, 1/4000 s, ISO 400
Waves of Snow

More pictures from the Kleinwalsertal in other posts.

My first HDRI experiments

With the development of digital photography the phenomenon of HDRI (High Dynamic Range Image) got more and more popular. What is HDRI? Regular digital camera sensors can’t “see” such a dynamic range like the human eye and computer screens typically show even a smaller dynamic range than what the camera sensor is saving. In simple words the idea of HDRI is to visualize in a picture the high dynamic range the human eye can see. A series of pictures with different exposure values is taken and composed to a new picture with more details in the light and in the dark areas. Read more about HDRI on Wikipedia.

Generally I prefer photographs with a natural "out of the camera" style. HDR images very often tend to have an artificial touch. The typical raw-converting and digital image editing I do normally is restricted to simple adjustments like white balance, brightness and minor changes to the graduation curves.

Reading quite often about HDRI I decided to get a little bit deeper into the topic. With some internet research and a special edition of a magazine I tried to understand the theory. And of course I had to use my new knowledge about HDRI for some experiments. Since I couldn’t find the time to create a series of long time exposures as a base for a HDRI experiment, I looked up my stock whether I have some suitable photos in raw format to create a series of different exposures out of them. Although I know that the idea of a real HDRI is to take a series of photographs. I found two pictures I took about one year ago doing actually some experiments with grey (ND) filters. One picture shows the Neckar River in Stuttgart at the blue hour, the other picture shows the castle Rosenstein in Stuttgart by night.

Original picture: Neckar River

Original picture: Castle Rosenstein

With the raw converter I generated for both pictures a row of under and over exposed JPGs. In the case of the river from -2 to +2 aperture values and for the castle from -3 to +2.The JPGs with an aperture value of +3 were quite noisy.

For the creation of the HDR-Images I used no special HDRI-software but my old Photoshop 6.0 – it is copying together the different versions of the pictures, selecting the light areas step by step and add mask layer by layer. This is some manual work but it gives you also a clue what HDRI means in detail and you have good control step by step.

And here comes the result. For the placement in this blog I reduced the size to 900 x 600 pixel, I did a very light sharpening and finally I saved the pictures as JPGs with a compression that results in a picture size about 150 kB.

HDR-Image: Neckar River

HDR-Image: Castle Rosenstein

It is quite impressive how much more details are shown in the light and dark areas especially on the picture of the castle.

One bat does not make a summer.

Aristotle (or was it Aesop who) said "One swallow does not make a summer." In a little adaption I would say: "One bat does not make a summer." or even "One bat does not make a spring."
Last Sunday (Feb. 10) I took this picture showing a little bat sitting in the sun on the bark of an old oak tree. Although bats are supposed to hibernate, this little friends seems to enjoy the mild winter this year. I've never seen a bat so close.


The tree is located at the natural reserve of "Eichenhain" south of Stuttgart. There are several 200 to 300 year old oak trees with crowns of more than 30 meters in diameter and 6 meter circumference of the tree trunk.