Muna Badawi Strasser nominated me for 10 travel photos in 10 days, i’ll probably struggle for 10, and i reckon a explanation is ok so here goes.
This scene sums up Norway for me, the 2nd day there
from a 12 day road trip in a Skoda octavia wagon, the only other image that is quintessential norway would have a road tunnel in itThe scale of the hills in Norway are second to none and this image nails it for me…
Find the hidden house..go on, zoom in 🙂
There must have been a dozen times on this day where I just thought the scale and size of the mountains cannot impress me anymore, however around every corner it seemed each rock face and mountain was placed there just to top the one just past on the road 20 minutes ago.
Alot is lost in this image, but if you view full res you can see a tiny house down there on the lower right hand side, nothing more than a one room shack, but it gives some scale, what you probably can't see, is the figures of the people over on the right hand side.
This one is a handheld pano using 8 images in the portrait orientation, i never really thought I would look at and process it, however I am kinda glad I did now…
Makes our valleys here in the Blue Mountains, Australia look a bit small 🙂
There is a reason why Norwegians do not own drones….
cause they just go to the nearest mountain, yeah there's a few of them about and you'll get the equivalent view 😉
The tourist view
It does not matter what time of the day you visit this spot, you are guaranteed a wonderful vista and the sense of scale given by the town and the cruise liners is just something else!
The National Museum – Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo
Vestnes Molde, Norway
I heard alot of that from Sarah, tickles and chaos as I pulled over said ' i gotta take picture of this' Lucky I was driving and in control, or else i would not have gotten to stop every 5 minutes 🙂
So, as my 5 minutes was ticking, it was bit like.. oh my gosh.. oh my gosh.. oh my gosh.. whadda i shoot.. whadda i shoot.. 🙂 followed by, don't these people know it takes longer than 5 minutes to take a photo.. sheesh.. i gotta find my spot, without falling the water. setup me tripod compose the shot.. etc.. and then my 5 minutes is up 🙁
anyway on the up side, this little stream and cute bridge was pretty well the first and only shot from this spot 🙂
Right who let the dude with the pink jacket in ? I guess to be technically correct it is probably 'peach' so I guess that gives him some relief..
The only straight lines you will find in Trollveggen are on the tourist visitor centre and the newly constructed walk path and look out 🙂
5 shot panorama
D750 coupled with Nikkor16-35 f4 @ 16mm
Aperture: f10 and Shutter Speed: 1/80s
ISO: 200
Out front: Lee Graduated Filter 0.9x and Hoya Circular Polariser
The home of Rollo (some viking dude) whilst appearing to be hundreds of years old is mostly less than hundred years old, back in the early 1900's there was a fire which destroyed pretty much the entire built area on this island. The island which forms the old town and the touristy area of Alesund is fairly large and back then covered with predominantly wooden structures, much like most of Norway, makes sense when you see how much wood they have 🙂 durign that fire there was also a gale force wind, described as strong enough to blow a man over, thus you can only imagine how fast a fire would propagate through nice dry Norwegian timber and it did.
We stayed at the big white one off to the left, not a bad view from it, especially in the dining area, this one of the few we stayed in during our visit to Norway and whilst expensive, it is comparable to Sydney so not that bad I suppose.
This was shot well after sunset, from memory about 11pm and the glow from the sunset, which seems to last for hours , glowed off the hotel strip and created some very nice reflections off the water.
I need a politics filter on my SM feed, here is a great idea, we need a social media plugin that can game the system to filter out certain stuff, like for example if your sick of cat videos with cucumbers you can filter out 'cucumbers' and 'cats' or if like me you sick to death of post with dumb politics in it you could filter 'dickhead', 'politics', trump' etc. Any app designers out wanna have a go? maybe a alternate FB app, one which you control the shit you see 😉 I'll go ya halvies 🙂
I reckon you would be in a great place if you were sitting over there on that little jetty, getting ready to take your boat out on the lake for a spot of fishing, a bit photography or picnic or whatever takes you fancy.
Here is a interesting photography tip, this shot is 4 landscape images shot in the landscape orientation, handheld at 31mm in aperture priority mode, as a result of the aperture priority mode there was a fairly large difference in the exposure between the very left frame (quite bright) and the far right frame (quite dark). With pano stitching, often when the exposures are quite different you can get some not so nice line joins in the pano, usually the software (PS) is pretty good and blending them together, however in this case I tried to stitch it with both Photoshop and PTgui, however both had this rather nasty line where it could not nicely blend the images, I did not really want to spend 30 minutes trying to manually blend them together – time is precious when your kids seem to wanna stay up until 9pm 🙂 – so I had pretty much left this one to the dustbin, however I thought I'll just give the Lightroom software a go and low and behold it came out perfectly. So my tip, you don't always have to got to the hardcore software, sometimes that one click automated stuff works just fine 🙂 It is also, bar a few clones on the bottom right all edited in Lightroom, whilst it still does not quite have all the finer controls tweaks that I am used to from other software, it can do a marvellous job very quickly, and that counts for alot 🙂
Now remember, you can zoom in and check out all the detail, see if you can find any dodgy stitching errors 😉
Well, its Norway's version anyway.. you either get a forest of trees or none at all in that country 🙂 hence for my lonely tree starved soul I found this, way across the lake a lone tree dead amoungst the living. Don't read any weird sh$t about me through that statement, it just sounded good in my head 😉 The seaweed was what caught my attention, that stuff is so thick you could just about walk on it, although, imagine falling into that and trying to get out, i hate brushing up against seaweed when I am snorkelling or swimming (think of those cat videos and cucumbers 😉 )
#Valsøytunet try and pronounce that one!
The first day in Norway was one the most vivid, i sometimes wonder why people rave so much about Australia when there are places like Norway. Whilst I love this sunburnt country of ours (any it'll probably give me skin cancer 'cause of it 😉 ) I found a real connection with the still lakes, towering hills and the simple housing, plus the sun did not burn, even in the middle of summer 🙂
Its funny, months later, I can still grab a point on google maps and find my way to any one of the many beautiful spots we visited, like this one, just on the edge of Vinjeøra, not the most spectacular fjord, just a run of the mill one, but still beautiful.
This is for the peeps on the northern half of the planet… where, apparently, its a bit cold at the moment.. I gotta say, it was a beautiful day when we flew into Trondheim, shorts and tee-shirt weather and a town with a whole lot of history and buildings on the water without a straight line between them 😉
8 shot panorama
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 @ 24mm Aperture: f18 and Shutter Speed: 1/320s
ISO: 100
Out front: cool buildings