Some inspiration from Lenbachhaus

Long time no blog! I have shelved my camera for the last 5 years to focus more on establishing the Monachium Belegarth group, first solid one of its kind in Europe. Most of my Sundays went into that, so I couldn't really go out and photograph as much as I wanted. Now Monachium is established and other members are doing most of the day-to-day running, so I will have some more spare tome to myself. This allows me to turn back to one of my other main hobbies, camerawork. 

My in-laws were visiting this week, and today we went to the Lenbachhaus museum. While a lot of their main art, the Blaue Reiter school, is not so much my thing, they happened to have a flock of 19th century artists out on exhibit, and there was some nice stuff. The landscape painters of that time - while obviously romanticizing nature - did some lovely things with composition and light that is very much like what I want to get out of my photography. Here three photos that I particularly enjoyed.

Domenico Quaglio: Die Vautsburg am Mittelrhein
Creditline: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München

Domenico Quaglio: Die Vautsburg am Mittelrhein - a moody scene of a castle on the Rhine that I really must go see. It has nice leading lines in the path way, placed off-center, with stormy clouds helping to point out the castle itself, but the entire thing kept in greys and greens that help emphasize the grim look appropriate to a 14th-century castle.

Johan Friedrich Hennings: Studie vom Königssee
Creditline: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München

Johan Friedrich Hennings: Studie vom Königssee
Creditline: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München
Edited: Darkened to match how I remember seeing it.

Johan Friedrich Hennings: Studie vom Königssee. The digital reproduction doesn't do justice to the original, they brightened it too much. It's very low-key, only the sunlit parts have any real detail to them, so it appears mystical and secret, with the edges of the plants and boat glowing like gold. Lots of negative space suggestion who-knows-what lurking around.

Anton Zwengauer: Herbstmorgen
Creditline: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München

Anton Zwengauer: Herbstmorgen. There's a lot of empty space in this, more that half is just shades of a murky blueish-yellow sky, and the landscape below disappears into the morning mist. The ramshackle hut is a mere detail in this view, where the feeling of clammy solitude palpably emanates from the canvas. Simple, quiet, and utterly gorgeous.

Take-aways: Negative space is a big deal. Simple tones avoid confusion and distraction. Low-key can be super effective. Landscape paintings can make for really good inspiration (in fact, I got their book of their landscape paintings for this purpose). And mainly, I need to get out there and find these views.

Thanks to the Lenbachhaus for giving me permission to using the digital versions of the pictures in this post.

Pictures from planes

Every time I travel by plane, I want to take pictures of the landscape passing gently but quickly underneath. I have only very occasionally managed to get anything useful out of my attempts, though. It's a tough environment, after all: Constant shaking, limited viewport, thick crappy slabs of transparent plastic, lots of UV light, extra haze, and typically bright light. Our eyes adjust, but the camera struggles.

Here's an example of a picture that works out, though more in an abstract manner than a direct depiction. It took some drastic manipulation to make it useful, so I'll go a bit more into details:


The first version is how it came out of the camera; had I been the type to delete on the camera, it would have gone.


The second one is with auto white balance and auto toning. Not much better, but you can start to see things.


The third and final one is with manual adjustments up the wazoo. For the Lightroom users: Exposure -1.2, Blacks +100, Brightness +58, Contrast +100, Clarity +77, Vibrance +45, Strong contrast tone curve with Highlights +49, Lights -11, Darks -100, Shadows -15, and finally a graduated filter over most of it with Brightness -21, Contrast 13, Saturation -8, Clarity 51.

This is a massive adjustment that would normally ruin a photo, but for these pictures, it's the only way to save them. And it's only because it's shot in raw that there is so much to save. To determine which of the shots I'd taken were any good, I applied the more extreme of these settings to all the shots, and got surprisingly many I liked.