POTD 31/3/2013: De-feet-ed

"De-feet-ed", ©2013 Lars Clausen

This is my entry into the current photo challenge between me and +aurin ræder. The challenge is "Feet, using extreme tele/crop". This is a detail of the Mariensaüle at Marienplatz, and while it looks dramatic, the owner of the victorious foot is actually a chubby little cherub, one of four defeating various monsters. I like it for the dramatic composition and the mixture of two very different feet.

POTD 23/3 2013: Rust Plants

"Rust Plants" ©2013 Lars Clausen
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I'm with +Mickey Blake  in Wales this weekend. While she's learning new and exciting knitting things (such as that she's been knitting her purls twisted since the very beginning), I'm going around with my camera, trying to get the best out of a cloudy early spring in the Welsh countryside.

Today I went over to Pembroke and from there out to the ocean at Freshwater West, which is a quite impressive sight (more pictures from that trip can be seen at http://goo.gl/JgDRq). On the way to the ocean, I stopped off in a little forest, and while the forest itself wasn't that interesting, there were a series of two meter high rusted metal structures that were quite interesting for a macro photographer. I could have spent hours there exploring the rust and paint flakes and plants and how they all came together in strange ways, but I wanted to get out to the water before it got dark.

This photo was the best of the trip, I love the rusted surface as the little mosses growing into the tube. My macro lens still seems to front-focus a bit, which is why the right side isn't quite in focus. I should compare the normal focus with the (very slow and light-sensitive) live-view focus. Unfortunately, the 60D does not have a focus microadjustment feature, maybe Magic Lantern will add that (if it can).

POTD 20/3 2013: Dice Tower

"Tower of Dice" ©2008 Lars Clausen
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I doubt any long-time RPG gamer hasn't at some point stacked their dice like this, only to have a fellow player "accidentally" bump the table just enough to make it topple.

This is the other picture that got sold as a wedding present. I like how clean this turned out, and how the transparency plays out. The shots were taken when I had built an impromptu lightbox and was trying with everyday lights to make effective shots, trying for some subjects that hadn't already been done a million times before. Though now later I have to admit that doing subjects that have been done before isn't such a bad thing. You can learn from how others have done them, you can compare yours to theirs, and you can get some experience in all those things that are common to almost all subjects, like lighting, background, composition, lighting, shadows, lighting, color management, lighting, lighting and more lighting.

POTD 19/3 2013: Barbed Morning Glory Wire

"Barbed Morning Glory Wire" ©2008 Lars Clausen
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This photo could be taken just about anywhere, but it's from Royal Oak, the suburb of Detroit my wife's aunt lives in ("I'm so bad, I vacation in Detroit!"). Being from a very peaceful country, I'm not used to seeing barbed wire around normal neighborhoods, so this juxtaposition really struck me. I have a thing for morning glory, since we brought some back from our time in Iran and have been growing them ever since.

This was taken with the 70-300 f/4.0-5.6 IS, which was a good lens for its price, but larger and heavier than I wanted it, especially since most of the size and weight was wasted on my crop camera. So I have since swapped it out for the 55-250, which works nicely as a walk-around lens. It's hard to tell on this small version, but the flower is not entirely sharp. The background separation is excellent, though.

POTD 17/3 2013: Dot dot dot...

"Dot dot dot..." © Lars Clausen 2007
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A more whimsical shot today, from a morning walk in a cold November. The way the gulls spread out evenly from the fall-colored tree struck me as curious, accentuated by the reflections. I deliberately darkened the background in Lightroom, as it was only distracting from the main subject. The gulls are unfortunately somewhat overexposed on the bright parts, I should have gone for "expose-to-the-right", which in this case would mean underexposing a bit. Which in turn would have made the background disappear more.

POTD 16/3 2013

"Heavenly Bubble" ©2006 Lars Clausen
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This is my entry for the first photo challenge between me and +aurin ræder: "Soft Water, High Key". It was taken at night on the Mountain View Google campus with an 8 second exposure. The "bubble" is actually water flowing up from the tube visible underneath it. This is one of the few of my shots from that night that didn't come out rather shaken, however several of the other ones are abstract enough that it doesn't matter.

I like this for the soft tones of blue, the faint hint of texture in most of it, and the little streaks of white on and around the bubble. It would make for an excellent screen background, too.

POTD 11/3 2013: Wake

"Wake" ©2007 Lars Clausen
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Today for something much more abstract. This may look to some like a computer-generated visualization of some esoteric function, but it's actually quite naturalistic. It's from an early morning in Norway on the ferry between Hirtshals and Bergen, coming out from one of several deep-fjord stops along the way. The reflected sun combined with a bit of reflection of the sky gives it a nice color composition, and the simplicity of form and stroke is almost Japanese. Cropping away unnecessary details like the coast line in the distance really helped make this piece.

POTD 9/3 2013: Roll the Dice...

"Roll the Dice..." ©2008 Lars Clausen
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For a while, I tried my hand at (micro-)stock photography, but found it an extremely full market. The only way to really get anywhere in it would be to take either a lot of pictures or very unusual but interesting pictures, in both cases mainly with people for business purposes. I later moved on to doing just art photography, uploading pictures to RedBubble.com and selling through there for a much tidier price. This is one of two similar pictures that comprise my total sales from there and more income than from all other sites together, by far. They were bought as wedding presents for an avid gamer, and I couldn't wish for a better use.

POTD 8/3 2013: Bike portal

"Bike Portal" ©2006 Lars Clausen
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Another early SLR days photo, this one from the path around Brabrand Sø, Denmark, on a slightly hazy Spring morning. The bicyclist was not entirely accidental (as I remember it), but something I waited to get. That the rays turned out so well was more luck, and even so I had to do a fair amount of fiddling to get some parts of them to not be discolored. I found this picture so successful that I used it for the professional business cards back when I had a photo business.

POTD 7/3 2013: Greedy gull

"Greedy Gull" ©2006 Lars Clausen
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An old picture, from the ferry between Denmark and Norway. The gulls were quite proficient at sweeping in and picking food from between people's fingers.

This was not long after I got my first SLR, so I was testing its limits - which turned out to be surprisingly wide. What I like about this photo is that I got the texture on the body and at the same time the wings spread out like that adds drama. It's slightly cropped from the right and bottom to focus on those parts. Unfortunately, there is a slight amount of movement to the gull, even though the shot was taken at 1/1000th of a second.

POTD 3/3 2013

"Hazy morning landscape II" ©2006 Lars Clausen
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I'm going back through some of my best pictures from previous years, to getting into the rhytm of uploading and posting and iron out wrinkles in my workflow. This shot is from not long after I got my first SLR, from a morning shot on Mols. I like how the mist creates a sense of distance and a golden, otherworld glow, but I have had trouble getting the details the way I like them.