Black Forest

Triberger Wasserfälle

I recently spent a wonderful day hiking in the black forest. It was cloudy, raining from time to time - perfect conditions for waterfall photography. The cascade in the photo is near Baden Baden in the northern black forest. I had to wade through knee deep water to get a good perspective on the waterfall. The cold water felt very refreshing and I needed it. I had been up since 3 am to get a sunrise in Kraichgau before I went on to the black forest.

Tech: Hoya HD polarizer + Lee 0.9 ND

cheers

Triberger Wasserfälle

Shot on a calm, foggy morning. Used a Pentax 645N camera and Kodak T-Max 100 film

Black forest in spring is more of a green forest. I led my first photography workshop yesterday. 9 hours of photographing waterfalls and streams, 9 hours of pouring rain. But this was perfect for the photos we had in mind, the colors were intense and the streams were at exactly the right level.

Since I was leading the workshop I took only a few photos myself and most of the time I was holding umbrellas ;-) But here I couldn't resist and had to wade out into the creek to get this shot. It was funny, we needed more than two hours to reach the main waterfall of this creek since the stream looked so nice and every few meters waited another photo opportunity.

Have a nice sunday! cheers

Shot with a Pentax 645N and a 35mm lens. Kodak T-Max 100 Film

Selva Negra

Part of my ongoing "Black Forest Waterfalls" series

The waterfalls near Menzenschwand are located inside and just outside a short and narrow canyon....

View On Black

First time I met up with another flickr photographer -> www.flickr.com/photos/andywon/ If you don't know him check out his photostream, lot of great landscape photos and many waterfalls. As I went to the black forest for the first time more than one year ago I was browsing his photostream for possible places to go;-) so it was nice to finally meet up with him.

We went to the Gertelbach cascades which offer plenty of little falls but are not so easy to photograph. Here we were quite lucky with the late afternoon light in the background. It gave a nice reflection in the pool below this little waterfall and with my daylight whitebalance the waterfall had a nice blue cast to it.

As usual I did dri here and some manual blending which I hope is not so obvious.. I tried to keep things natural while increasing the blue in the water a bit.. I just need color contrasts ;-)

cheers

next photoshop tip sharpening:

Well I'm going on without any logical sequence, just what comes to mind.. So the next tip is about the last sharpening you apply to your pictures, right after you scaled them to your desired output size! If you make a smartobject of your layers prior to scaling and sharpening it will be easy to later change the size for web e.g. and also adjust the sharpening radius. That's an important part of my workflow... using smartobjects lets you apply filters nondestructively and you always keep complete control. So here are in fact more than one ps tip.. Try the selective sharpening tool. this is quite superior to the unsharp mask since you can fade the effect in the highlights and shadows. For web try a radius around 0.3 or 0.4 and a sharpening of 120-160.. this way it looks crisp on the screen without to many white edges. For print you need something between 0.8 and 1.5 or even more depending on the size of the print.. there are tools to calculate the optimal size and always remember if it hurts your eye on the screen it might just be right for print.. you need to do some testing there.

And one final tip.. You might want to use a mask to keep the sharpening to the edges and leave planes out.. Go to your channels pallete and CTRL-click on the rgb-layer. Then create a new channel which you could name sharpen-mask and fill the selection with white -> you get a luminance channel for your image. Now use "filter->stylize->find edges" to get the edges of your image.. then use gaussian blur around 2.0 (do some tests) and later tonal adjustment to increase the contrast between the edges and the white around.. You now have an edge-mask which you can use on your sharpening in the smartobject.... and thats another nice thing about the smartobject.. filters you apply there come with a mask :-)

PS: if you have questions feel free to ask . Or if it's bullshit I'm talking here feel free to correct. I'm always eager to learn!

Triberger Wasserfälle

Triberger Wasserfälle

Triberger Wasserfälle

Triberger Wasserfälle

Trinkhalle,. Baden-Baden,. Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Altes Schloß,. Baden-Baden,. Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Taken last spring in the northern black forest at one of my favourite cascades. It was a cloudy and rainy day which was perfect for waterfall photography. A polarizer helped to bring out the wonderful colors. In post I worked on contrast, details and just a bit on the colors, in the end I needed to reduce the saturation a bit since the incresed contrast also led to more intense colors.

I have a before and after comparison on my g+ profile if you're interested.

cheers

Pentax 645D, 33-55mm lens

Theater Baden-Baden,. Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Explore May'2020