Poem for a Saturday

1/160s (bracketed HDR), f/5.6, ISO 800, 30mm

Encounter

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going?
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Czeslaw Milosz (1936)

Frosty

1/640s (bracketed HDR), f/8.0, ISO 400, 24mm

Here's a shot from Slivsø (Sliv Lake) near Haderslev in Denmark.  The lake is one of the largest in southern Denmark but was drained and used for farm land for almost half a century.  It's a beautiful spot any time of the year but it feels particularly peaceful in the winter.  I used moderate HDR processing to capture the details in the sky.

Where to?

1/60s (bracketed HDR), f/8, ISO 800, 24mm

I will have more blog posts coming soon.  In the meantime, here's a shot from this summer.  I've tried to go easy on the HDR processing on this one but wanted to bring out a little more detail in the shadows.  The highway is in the southern part of Denmark near my parents' farm.

Hong Kong from the Peak

5s (bracketed), f/16.0, ISO 200, 28mm

I went up to the Peak yesterday to take some shots of Hong Kong's skyline.  It's difficult to do anything terribly creative with a view like that.  No doubt, on clear day the view from the Peak is stunning.  But since everyone shares the same vantage point, there's a good chance that someone else has a shot that looks exactly like yours.  It get's a little more interesting on some of the trails near the peak.  The view is still amazing and you can sometimes use trees and bushes to frame photo (I did something like this on a hike a few months ago looking over the southern part of the island).

To make my photos stand out at least a little bit, I bracketed my exposures and processed my images with Photoshop's High Dynamic Range (HDR) function.  The shot above was taken a few minutes after sunset.  HDR works well here to bring out the green color in the hillside (which otherwise would have been difficult to expose correctly).  I have included another shot below the fold taken about 30 minutes after the sunset.  I processed that image with more muted colors to give it more of a "Gotham" feel.

15s (bracketed), f/11.0, ISO 800, 27mm