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FollowSevere winter way up north in Northern Norway. Don't worry if you start feeling a bit chilly while looking at this... it's sort of what I intended ;-)...
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Severe winter way up north in Northern Norway. Don't worry if you start feeling a bit chilly while looking at this... it's sort of what I intended ;-)
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Awards
Contest Finalist in Depth In Nature Photo Contest
Peer Choice Award
Contest Finalist in Rugged Landscapes Photo Contest
Honorable Mention in Image Of The Month Photo Contest Vol 19
Contest Finalist in Image Of The Month Photo Contest Vol 19
Peer Award
Superb Composition
Absolute Masterpiece
Top Choice
Outstanding Creativity
Magnificent Capture
Superior Skill
All Star
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Same photographer See allBehind The Lens
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Behind The Lens
Location
A small river streaming into a mountain lake in Northern Norway, on the way back from Senja.Time
Blue hour in late November, which means this far north around 1 pm. The sun is out only an hour or two per day. And a few weeks later it will not come up at all in the long 24h arctic winter nights. This was the last day of the last trip before the darkness settles.Lighting
As always: No flash, only available light! And who wouldn't? Why travel thousands of miles northwards, in the cold winter, to get this amazing arctic light and then spoil it with a flash? No way! The light you get in winter this far north is just so special. A constant blue-pink hour from sunrise to sunset.Equipment
This one was done using the the widest full frame rectangular (i.e. non-fisheye) lens available today, the Voigtlaender 10mm f/5.6 Hyper-Wide manual focus lens mounted onto my Sony A7R2 mirrorless camera. No flash. Unfortunately also no tripod. Normally I always use a tripod whenever possible. It just gives better image quality. But in this particular situation it wasn't possible. I was balancing on another ice block in that river hoping to to get a decent shot handheld.Inspiration
I wanted to convey the coldness in this grand arctic landscape, with that frozen river transporting the viewer right into the scene. For this, I needed wide-angle, the wider the better. That's why I always try to have the widest possible lens available on the market with me.Editing
My post-processing workflow is quite involved and all about quality. Starting out with the best possible raw file I used DxO to convert the file into another raw format (.dng) using DxO's very good and gentle noise reduction, sharpening and my custom made lense profile for the Voigtländer 10mm on the Sony A7RII. Then I opened the .dng in Lightroom and did 95% of the post-processing there, completely nondestructive, everything still in raw. At the latest possible point I finally opened the file in Photoshop as a 16 bit .tif for some final touches (like a slight Orton effect, some filters from Nik and Topaz, etc.). Then I saved it as a 16 bit .tif and added it to my Lightroom library. Never, ever did I convert to jpg. A jpg file has only 8 bit of information-depth as compared to the 14 bit I started out with in raw. That is only a tiny fraction, namely 1/64th (i.e. ca. 1.6%), of the information I gathered with the camera! Therefore I do not consider jpgs as a decent photo format worth having in my library. The only time I touch jpg is when I export something to upload to the web.In my camera bag
For 30 years I used to have Nikon equipment, lately the D800 and D810 cameras, the classic Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens and the Nikon 85mm f/1.8 lens, a Nikon D750 camera and the Nikon 70-200 f/4. But I have sold all this and changed to Sony mirrorless. I now have a Sony A7RII and a Sony A7II as cameras, the Sony-Zeiss 16-35 f/4, the Sony 70-200 f/4 and the Sony-Zeiss 55 f/1.8 lens - and also the Voigtlaender 10mm f/5.6 Hyper-Wide, the widest full frame rectangular (i.e. non-fisheye) lens available today. Since for me, wider is always better... as soon as it came out, I bought it straight away. I was probably the first person in Germany using it.Feedback
In wide angle shost like this you must get very close to the foreground object to get the intended impact. And 10 mm is REALLY wide. That means, you gotta get really, REALLY close... and probably wet! I was balancing on another chunk of ice in the middle of the river to get close enough. I don't know why I keep risking my gear (and probably my life) for shots like this. Must be some kind of addiction...