Grebe on the Marked Waterway

While this year we’ve rarely crossed our paths with great crested grebes, last year presented numerous opportunities to explore color contrast between these beautiful birds and their surroundings.

Grebe on the Marked Waterway

It was funny to observe that grebes travelled mostly between the flower strips, as if it was some kind of waterway marking.

The 5DS R produces magical environmental portraits, and the 500mm paired with the 1.4x teleconverter is about the perfect focal length for this purpose. If you haven’t done so, check out my former post on using this rig for grebe photography.

Turbulences

Water is an inexhaustible source of inspiration. It isn’t always fluid, it isn’t always blue. But it’s always changing and invites you to experiment. And along the way you may discover fragments of it’s hidden nature.

Turbulences

This image is part of my “Colors of a Lake” series, a long running project that explores unusual colors and forms of one of my favorite places.

Spring Has Finally Arrived

After a long winterless winter, spring is finally here. There wasn’t too much to photograph in the last five months, so I spent that time adding neat new features to my existing apps, as well as building a new one.

Curious Bearded Reedling

If you are as curious as this bird, you don’t have to wait too much. All will be revealed in the coming months.

Rosette Nebula

Opportunities for astrophotography are few and far between: one needs clear, Moonless, windless nights; something interesting to shoot and a couple of hours spare time. I had no such opportunity for more than a year, and was keen to try a few new pieces of gear I got in the meantime.

Rosette Nebula

Rosette Nebula

The above image was the first light for my 5DS R (performed very well, it seems to be sensitive to hydrogen alpha wavelength range without the overly reddish appearance of astro converted cameras), 500mm f/4L IS II and the IDAS LPS-D1 light pollution suppression filter (did an admirable job – the above image was shot from our backyard in the countryside). Well, I would expect this level of performance from a filter costing over 250 Euros in 52mm size…

A stack of six exposures, 4 minutes each with another 4 minutes for the dark frame subtraction. 4m was the upper limit dictated by tracking precision that night (even 5m exposures were not skyfog limited). Had to throw away another four frames because of wind gusts. Shot at ISO 1600. The frames were converted in Capture One 10 (moved to C1 from DxO Optics Pro because I get much more details this way) and then processed in Photoshop.

All in all, I’m very satisfied with the result and looking forward for the next opportunity.