Category Archives: germany

Stock photography report: Germany

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I do my best to keep on top of all of my stock photography sales, but every agency reports a little differently. I recently received a quarterly report from one agency covering the period of November 2014 through January 2015. As I entered the images into my tracking report, I noticed a larger number than usual were shot in Germany. That same day, I spotted two sales of Germany images on my Alamy account — which I can check online daily.

You never know how much to read into these reports, but I do like to look for trends of which country’s images seem to be most in demand at any given time. These past few months have been the best for my Germany images by far. I look forward to seeing if the trend continues.

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The images I’m featuring here are not necessarily the ones that were on this report, but it seemed like a good excuse to dig back into my files from Germany and share a few favorites. Above are two from Leipzig, and here are some teacups on display in the Grassi Museum — also in Leipzig:

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And a couple from beautiful Dresden:

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Bavarian portfolio wins Silver

I’m happy to report that my 10-image portfolio of Bavaria was awarded the Silver in the Single Subject Portfolio category of the 2013 SATW Bill Muster Photo Competition yesterday at the SATW Annual Convention in Indianapolis. Congratulations to all of the other winning photographers — it’s an honor to be listed alongside such a talented bunch of shooters. All of the winning images can be seen here. Great work, everyone!

Some of these images have appeared on this blog before but here’s the rest of the Bavaria portfolio that brought me the Silver:

Re-learning to ride a bike

Things generally slow down for me around the holidays and it takes a while for business to get back up to speed again afterwards. That pattern works well for me. I like to take that “quiet time” to re-focus on the coming year and to catch up on in-house activities like self promotion, learning new skills, etc. There’s more of that than usual going on this year, but one unexpected addition came along earlier this month when Adobe released a public beta of Lightroom 4.

There are plenty of Lightroom 4 reviews and introductory videos online already (like Julieanne Kost’s video overviews here) so I won’t go into detail at this point. I’ll do some deeper reporting once the final version comes out as some changes may still occur prior to that launch. For now, I’ll just mention some overall thoughts I’ve had as I have begun to explore the new interface.

And there are some significant changes to the interface — especially to the Develop Module’s Basic panel:

That’s Lightroom 3’s panel on the left and beta 4 on the right. As you can see, the Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks and Brightness sliders have become Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks. Everything has now been reconfigured to be zeroed out in the center of the slider now as well. My initial reaction to this was not very positive. I thought that this might have been yet another attempt by a software developer to make something “simpler” that actually removed some functionality. I’m not sure that’s the case here, though. Yes, things work differently, but I haven’t found anything missing. Nothing that I could do before but can’t do now. Some things, like adjusting the brightness of mid-range values, might just need a different approach now. In that instance, I find my self adjusting the Curve panel in place of using the old Brightness slider. Key here will be to remain flexible in your workflow and not to get hung up on the way you used to do things.

It’s early days and the whole point of these public beta releases are to generate user comments so that the final product can continue to be tweaked. With that in mind, I’m reserving some judgment at this point but I will mention anything interesting I stumble across as I continue to explore beta 4. I am very excited that Lightroom now handles video files and hope to work more with that in the near future. The Book Module also looks interesting, although I imagine I will continue to develop books in InDesign where there is more typographic control. I don’t need one program to do everything and would prefer that Lightroom stay focused on image processing and cataloging.

So far, my Lightroom 4 testing has amounted to importing a couple of duplicated folders from my Lightroom 3 catalog and playing with a few “trouble” images to see if 4 solves any shortcomings of 3. The bike shot at the top of this post is one that didn’t really have major problems, but I thought it might be worth exploring again. First I brought it into Lightroom 4, created a virtual copy (so that I could later compare it to the original 3-rendered version) and did the auto-conversion to the new 2012 process version. In this case, I found that 4 rendered the image a little flatter than 3 had. Next I zeroed everything out and started from scratch, processing the image more or less from top to bottom through the various Develop panels.

In the end, I felt like the 4 version had a little more snap. You can see the two in a comparison window in the screenshot above. Lightroom 3’s version is on top and beta 4 is on the bottom. Is the extra snap due to Lightroom 4? Maybe. But I also know that I can process the same image on two different days and get two different results. Every decision is subjective and there are few right and wrong answers when processing your images. I may have just been looking for a little more contrast today, whereas it was closer to the date of the shoot when I processed this image in Lightroom 3 and I might have been trying to more realistically portray the grey, rainy day as it was fresher in my mind at the time.

The real differences will come as I explore more images with huge contrast ranges or massive highlight issues. I think that’s where the new processing power of Lightroom 4 will really shine. I’ll be sure to share examples as I find them.

Year in Review: 2010

2010 was a year of contrasts for me when it came to travel. I started off with a quick stop in Dubai on my way to Thailand. Dubai is absolutely incredible. The amount of construction going on is mind-numbing — dozens of new skyscrapers going up simultaneously, each trying to outdo the others in terms of whimsical and ground-breaking design. And of course, no trip to Dubai these days would be complete without a stop at the current world’s tallest building, seen above through a bus window as I was on my way to the indoor snow skiing slopes. That’s right. Indoor snow skiing slopes. Dubai was a trip.

But the trip wasn’t over by a long shot. Next came Thailand.



Thailand is one of those places that sticks with you. The longer it’s been since I was there, the more I seem to think about it. I have a feeling I’ll be back.

Next, a quick trip to Jamaica:

The highlight of which may have been this night visit to the bioluminescent bay. Organisms in the water cause it to glow when the water is disturbed — as it was here when a couple of people from my boat took a swim:

Tough to shoot, but a fun experience.

There were several US trips that I won’t take the time to list here, and a Fall drive up the North Shore of Lake Superior to Thunder Bay, Canada.


On the heels of that trip, I was off to Germany:

Crossing the bridge in that first shot, I actually set foot in Austria, too.

2010 was a great year for me in terms of travel. I enjoyed each and every place I visited and would eagerly return to any of them. 2011 is already shaping up to be another busy one, however. I have one more year to serve as the Chair of the Freelance Council of the Society of American Travel Writers and already have a fair number of SATW meetings on my calendar including one in San Diego this week. Fiji and New Zealand are also on the agenda for 2011 and I’m sure there will be some surprises as well. Stay tuned…

Rainy day options

I talked a little bit yesterday about how to best handle less than ideal weather situations. My day in Passau was white-skied and a tad dreary. I actually like that kind of weather and think some great shots can be made when there’s a little more “atmosphere” than usual. Unfortunately, from a business sense, my likes are trumped by what sells. I’ll still shoot for myself and make the shots available to publishers, but they’ll typically take those dramatic sunsets or clear blue skies over this:

That’s the Passau I saw last month. Beautiful city, actually. And I had a great time wandering its streets finding incredible vantage point after more incredible vantage point. But… reality sets in and you need to make some photos that will sell, too. Heading inside is one option as seen by the church interior at the top of this post. The softened light from the overcast skies didn’t give those dramatic shafts of light that you might sometimes see streaming through the windows but — with an interior as bright and white as this one — you don’t really need them. The soft light did a great job of modeling all of the ornate features and did so with lower contrast than direct sun would have.

Passau also has a great glass museum. We’re talking about a rambling, multi-story maze of room after room of extraordinary glass. You can seriously get lost in there, but you won’t mind much because there’s good stuff around every corner. The lighting doesn’t look too sympathetic to photography at first. There are all different color temperatures from pink to blue to green. Happily, the auto white balance on my Nikon was able to clean that right up without a second thought from me. I just popped on the 60mm Micro lens and went crazy. Most of the glass was behind glass, but limiting depth of field and blocking the background with my own body allowed me to deal with most reflections. Some of these shots will make nice cutouts (like the one on the right) for those guidebooks that want a little detail shot to break up a long block of copy.

All in all, not bad for a rainy day’s work.

Produce in Passau

Nearing the end of my trip to Germany last month, I found myself in the town of Passau on a less than perfect day. It was cold and grey and overcast. The light was nice and soft, however, and you just had to pick your subjects appropriately. This produce stand, for instance. The colors were so saturated and the lack of direct sunlight kept the contrast from being too great.

I also found the light to be nice for some of the tight alleyways where I could shoot and not show any sky. Again, the contrast of direct sun would have made these areas very difficult to capture but the clouds helped keep that contrast down. The town is also famous for its glass museum which was another comfy place to shoot on a chilly day. The lesson is: make the most of your situation. There’s always some way to make the weather work to your advantage.

Stumbling blocks

Monuments and memorials always used to be large statues and obelisks that you couldn’t miss, but sometimes a more powerful statement can be made with subtlety. Take these stolpersteine, or “stumbling blocks” that I ran across in the narrow streets of Regensburg, Germany:

Artist Gunter Demnig has been installing these brass-covered cobblestones all over Europe outside of the last homes of those deported and killed by the Nazis around the time of the Second World War. This stone reads roughly; “Here lived Gisela Loewy”, birthdate, date of deportation, “murdered”. I have to say, finding these scattered through out the streets at every turn is extremely moving. These small stones do more than any enormous obelisk ever could.

Here’s an article about Demnig and his project from Canada.com.

Weiners and weiner dogs

While in Regensburg, Germany, I had lunch at the historic Sausage Kitchen — the oldest in the world at over 9 centuries. The food was great and, of course, I had to grab a few shots of the women in the kitchen before I left. I can recommend the potato soup and the bratwurst with sauerkraut. Actually… I think that’s the entire menu. But you do get your choice of 6, 8 or 10 sausages — and a great view of the Danube.

Navigating the narrow, cobblestone streets after lunch I ran across more weiners:

Scale

I’d love to see this shot run as a double-page spread one day. At a large size it’s chock-full of detail and nearly entirely monochromatic except for the tiny red-coated figure in the lower left. Not only does he give a little splash of color, but he makes it apparent just how large the cathedral in Regensburg, Germany, really is. Often with something huge like this the impulse is to get it all in frame, but that can actually make it look quite small in the final image. Cropping in and using just a portion of the church so that it bleeds off on all sides emphasizes that it’s so big it won’t even fit in the shot. Even so, without that lone figure in the corner the effect would not be nearly as strong. (And thank you, sir, for wearing your red coat that day!)