Amazon.de

and for the uk side:

Amazon.co.uk

Im in the affiliate program there and if you use those links I might get a little money from Amazon from time to time. For you it makes no change to use those links, so why not do it

Thanks a lot!

cheers,
Michael

The problem now is that there are a lot of mobile devices which don’t support flash. Yes I’m talking about the IPhones and IPads out there. For a long time now I wanted to make my homepage more apple friendly since many are using those devices.

Yesterday evening I finally took the time to make the switch. I’m now using a javascript gallery named Galleria in my galleries. Galleria is based on jQuery and is very easy to use. It comes with a classic theme which together with the documentation on the galleria site gave me a good start for adjusting this gallery to my needs.

So from now on you can view my images on your Iphones and IPads too.

A little news to share today. I’m proud to be featured on the Photographers Hall of Fame next to many great photographers. Please take the time to browse through the work of the other photographers there too. You’ll find a lot of stunning photography!

cheers

cheers

Ok lets start right away with some links and news. PhotoWhoa has a special discount going on for the PSKiss photographers toolbox. If you are using Photoshop CS5 this might be worth a look. Included in the toolbox are various plugins, all designed to speed up your postprocessing workflow. To see the toolbox in action there’s a video on PSKiss.com. You can also try the limited demo version there. But mind that the special discount at PhotoWhoa only lasts till Jan 22nd.

Then some news. One of my photos is on the cover of the current issue of UKs top selling photo magazine DigitalPhoto. There are more of my photos in the mag plus a little article about me

Finally here are some links to recent articles I wrote. They are in german but as usual google translate should do a decent job if you are interested:
Gefilterte Fotos – it’s about the filters I use
Warum benutze ich Verlaufsfilter – about why I use GND filters
In die Sonne fotografieren – kind of a tutorial about how to shoot into the sun

Have a nice week!

I want to take the time and share some links with you to some tutorials I did over the past weeks. If you wondered how I process my photos you might find those very interesting.

First of all I have an english tutorial video describing how to blend multiple exposures. You’ll find it on the Landscape Photography Magazine here. Then I did a german tutorial about my complete postprocessing workflow on the KWERFELDEIN photo magazine. It consists of two parts which you’ll find here:

Part 1
Part 2

For my international readers, I tested those with google translate and I find it’s good enough to follow along, although it’s not the best english

There’s also some new photos added to the various galleries on my homepage, so feel free to browse through them and since soon it’s Christmas take the time to visit my Fineart Shop. Maybe you need some gifts or something for your own wall.

And last but not least I prepared a calendar with some of my best work on Redbubble.

cheers

Ok, first I want to point out some interesting links for you. Since a few weeks I’m author for the Landscape Photography Magazine. This means you’ll read something from me in the Photo Talk section of the magazine from time to time. The magazine is subscription based and costs 6 Pounds for one year subscription. In my opinion this is money well spent if you are in to landscape photography. I find the articles there highly interesting and inspirational. Check it out.

For the german readers it might be interesting that I’m now doing articles for the Kwerfeldein online magazine on a regular basis. Here are links to my recent articles there:

Hoch hinaus
Schottland – Ein Reisebericht

After the links back to the original reason for this post. As the title suggests I’ve been to Wales recently. We went to the Gower Peninsula near Swansea, on the coast South of the Brecon Beacons.

I’m currently starting to process the images of this trip and I will regularly update the new gallery I created for it. On my flickr account I also write a bit background information about every image I post.

The trip was great. Never had I hoped to see such fine weather in the UK. Only the first two days it was raining and then blue skys and temperatures that reminded me of summer. The Gower Peninsula was the perfect location for seascape photography. The various bays there are awesome. Examples are the Three Cliffs Bay, Rhossili or the Bracelet Bay which is particularly nice for sunrise photos. Then there are the Brecon Beacons not too far of and there’s an area called Waterfall Country. As fan of Waterfalls I had a great time exploring the area.

We also went to the heritage coast around Southerndown and Nash Point. Unfortunately the tide was in for sunrise and sunset during our week in Wales so I didn’t get the photos I had hoped for. But anyway it was a great place to see!

Ok enough for now, time to grab some food. As said above more can be read on my flickr account.

have a nice week!

cheers

Last month I provided one of the major photography magazines here in germany – DigitalPhoto – with photos and tips for an article about Landscape photography. The whole article was 8 pages and if you like you can now freely access it in digital form through this pdf they sent me. For the international readers, it’s in german but you could take a look anyway, the images make most of the article

cheers

I’m working in Lightroom for some time now and am quite familiar with most of it’s settings. But there was one setting which I skipped all the time. I don’t know why but I never made use of the integrated color profiles which you get with lightroom 3, it’s under Camera Calibration. For nearly every camera there are some profiles which affect the color interpretation during raw conversion. This results in a completely different starting point for your raw workflow. Depending on the profile you choose there the look of an image can be dramatically changed. Just give it a try and switch to Camera Landscape for an image – this is one of the settings you’ll find there. Either there’s a wow effect or your eyes start to hurt from the colors If it’s the last try a different profile and don’t stop with one image. Switch through the profiles for a couple of images and you’ll find that for many images there’s one of the profiles which looks better than the default Adobe Standard.

Last week I was pointed to this page which contains additional color profiles for Lightroom and Camera Raw. The demo video there was the reason I started taking a closer look at the Camera Calibration feature in Lightroom in the first place. I’m currently evaluating the PSKiss Color Profiles in my postprocessing workflow and I’m gonna share my thoughts with you here.

So in Lightroom you allready have 5 Camera Color Profiles, with PSKiss you get 6 additional profiles of which some are very artistic and for me don’t work since I’m a landscape photographer and am looking for a natural color interpretation of what I saw. So Cool BrightUp and Vintage are at least for me not very usefull. But still there are 4 left and those are very interesting. Before I’m showing you a before-after which I did by applying Vivid Landscape here one tip. As with the standard profiles there’s no ONE color profile you can use for all images. Sometimes what looks great for one images looks awefull for another. My tip now is for every image you start working on in Lightroom or Camera Raw first go to the Camera Calibration and switch through the available profiles. For me those are now 9 together with the usable PSKiss profiles. The switching takes less than a minute, maybe two and you possibly have a much better starting point for your folowing workflow and saved a lot of time to get there!

So here’s the out of camera from an image I recently took in the german Alps. It’s part of a panorama I’m currently working on. Here my standard lightroom presets are applied which remove CA, do presharpening, reduce contrast etc. . The aim of this preset is to get as much information out of the raw data as possible. It might look a little flat but this is usually remedied in further postprocessing.

And now for comparison 10 seconds of postprocessing later by switchig to PSKiss Vivid Landscape.

Usually for this I’d do tonal adjustments, folowed by curves, folowed by selective color, folowed by saturation in Photoshop. Guess what, this usually takes a lot more than 10 seconds For this image PSKiss gives me cleaner colors, the start of a nice warm cool contrast building up, it adds contrast without sacrificing dark tones or bright tones and it punches up the reds. The preview here is a bit small but I think you can see the positive effect and also that for this image it’s really true to the landscape and no exaggeration.

Here the PSKiss Profile leaves the integrated profiles behind, the normal Camera Landscape is much to drastic, the others to neutral and the adobe Standard you saw in the first image. I haven’t tested the profiles long enough to give you some numbers on how much of the time the PSKiss profiles are really an improvement, but this is an example that shows you some of their potential, a more vivid image without postprocessing.

So this was just a short introduction. In my opinion those profiles are a really interesting approach on improving your images very fast. Even if they won’t work equally well on every image it doesn’t hurt to try out the profiles as a first step in the workflow together with the built in profiles. When I’ve done some more tests I’ll give a brief update here and some more examples.

PS: besides the color profiles the PSKiss package also contains additional presets. I haven’t had the time to play around with those but I think for me the color profiles are much more interesting because they don’t interfere with my standard workflow and my own preset.

PPS: notice the Personal Network links on the upper right of this blog, there you’ll find my newest images and a bit more regular news besides this blog.

cheers,
Michael

Here’s my solution. I did a search on Amazon and found a quite cheep hard case

EDIT: I just heard that the links don’t show for some people. Dunno why.. Then just do a search for “AmazonBasics Travel Case” or for the germans “Amazon Basics Universaltasche” .

The best thing about that case, it’s very lightweigh, it holds the Lee filter pouch exactly + some other stuff like flash cards and so on. It’s not as sturdy as an aluminium hardcase but it will help to keep the filters from breaking if stuffed into a rucksack.

cheers