• flowers,  Lightbox,  Long time exposure

    Amaryllis

    I’ve been experimenting with macro shots or portraits that have a black background. For this I reduce the roomlight with the help of the electric shutters, the exposure time and the ISO value are increased. To improve the quality of the shots, I also used the method of frame averaging to get the RAW image with single shot and sufficient quality.
    Yesterday I was able to admire my friend Harold in a tutorial how he created LowKey HDR macro photographs using an exposure series from -4 EV to 0 EV. I tried all paths today with my Amaryllis, which I had bought 2 days ago.

    Salmon pink Amaryllis. Two exposure series at two different aperture values. © Julian Köpke

    The exposure series can be performed for LowKey pictures and HighKey pictures. Through the systematic under-exposure one can create a beautiful black background. The use of a surface spotlight creates transparencies with HighKey effect.

    Amaryllis. 25s, Automated Frame Average, longtime exposure © Julian Köpke
    Salmon pink Amaryllis on a lightbox © Julian Köpke

    The LED lightbox can be placed vertically on the wall. With two clamps you attach the black velvet as a background and loosen the clamp gently to create the HighKey image after switching on the lightbox.

    Black velvet in front of the lightbox © Julian Köpke
    Black velvet dropped behind the bouquet © Julian Köpke

    A series of exposures with 5 shots between -4 EV and 0 EV is sufficient to capture the set in high quality.

    Bouquet with Amaryllis © Julian Köpke
  • Landscape,  Long time exposure,  Sylt,  Travel

    Sylt

    Two more days on the island. I had secretly speculated before the start of the trip to be able to make interesting longtime exposures of the sea. We went to the sea once very early and often late at night. On Friday, the 13th, the weather was particularly stormy. I felt that half a second exposure time was the optimal value to capture the dynamics of the sea’s motion and at the same time to get structure.

    La mer © Julian Köpke

    Many of the photographs I took with the quadrupeds, which were laid out as a coastal protection near Hörnum. Depending on the time of day and the weather, they are a fantastic backdrop. This image was taken early in the morning short after sunrise.

    Shape of tetrapodes, Hörnum © Julian Köpke

    At the time of the highest water level during the flood, these concrete blocks almost disappear underneath the water surface. The next image is a combination of different exposure values to express the power of the incoming tide.

    Tide is coming in at Hörnum beach, Sylt © Julian Köpke

    Without wind, the sea is so calm at low tide that you don’t want to imply anything violent to it anymore. To capture the calm of the low tide water I needed 30s of exposure time. However, the Moon would become blurred at that value. So combined two shots into one picture.

    Evening and waxing crescent Moon at Hörnum beach, Sylt. Longtime exposure 1s and 30s. © Julian Köpke

    Weather change is associated with stronger wind and light changes. This situation is often felt on the island in rather pleasant way.

    Thunderstorm building on the horizon © Julian Köpke
  • Landscape,  Long time exposure,  reflection,  Travel

    Beach Westerland

    The German philosopher Karl Jaspers described in his memoirs the boy’s experiences with the sea. The sea, he noted, is a symbol of philosophy, because it makes infinity present to us.

    Is a photo on the beach enough to bring us closer to the infinity of thoughtMaybe at that moment, I think, when we stop thinking focused when we look at the photo.

    Different motifs are able to change our inner view. They don’t have to be pictures of the sea. But with these, our feeling is often more evident.

    Technically I did three longtime exposure of 15s, which is a sort of time fusion. I used a 6EV Lee filter to photograph these three stones at the beach short after sunrise. You can see the colourful reflections of the morning sky in the sea and on the damp beach.

    Colors of waves. Early morning near Westerland, Sylt. © Julian Köpke
  • Heidelberg,  Landscape,  Motion Blur,  Train window,  Travel

    Train ride

    Lockdown drives us crazy. Official measures increasingly breathe the spirit of decay. The Age of Enlightenment is over. It is no longer a reasonable reflection that counts or thoughts, that are discussed. Politics behaves more like a war management. The first victim of a war is the truth. That’s more and more disturbing.

    This morning I stepped over an enigma. A structure in the roof of our Main Station in Heidelberg. As an image, there are many ways this structure could be thought of: a top-down bowl, a flying saucer – or a light dome. As it was still dark about 6 o’clock the windows appeared in a dark blue, like the adjacent ceiling.

    Other perspectives show a content that could be seen as a china plate. I couldn’t stop to photograph this dome.

    Longtime exposures made from a train window have a look and feel of their own. Perspective loses its sense. A moment loses its meaning. But these images are inspiring.

    How to photograph the feeling of eternity ? Can there really be a feeling of eternity or are we subjected to a deception when we perceive it ? Does time fusion help although a finite process ? The following image was captured with the Slow Shutter app on my cell phone with 8 seconds.

  • flowers,  Lightbox,  Long time exposure,  Motion Blur,  Texture

    Time fusion tulips

    Longtime exposures hold a special appeal for me. Again and again I try do do it. I found the idea for this picture in a book about modern photography. The photographer took a picture of flowers in a vase with a specially built camera for many days until the first petals fell. The passing of time, which often cannot be experienced directly by us, can thus be illustrated by a photograph. Due to the new corona virus we had plenty of time at home to make flower photographs.

    With my macro lens I can only realize the aperture value f/32, which means that even at ISO 50 the exposure time dose not rise above 15s possible when the lightbox is turned on. As an approximation to a true long-time exposure, I started a series of 23 HDR images at irregular intervals over the course of 4 days, just as it became apparent that my tulips would rise wide.

    Time fusion tulips in a vase © Julian Köpke

    Each HDR image was created from6 shots at f/32 and ISO 50 with exposure times of 0.5s, 1s, 2s, 4s, 8s and 15s. The biggest difficulty was to block off a part of our living room before Christmas so that the exposures could always be done in the same way. Furthermore, the camera was not allowed to be changed by switching it on and off, changing the exposure times or removing the memory card.

    I processed the layer stack of 23 TIF images in two ways. First straightforward as a smart object and then change the stacking mode in Photoshop as an average. Or fade out the layers after the start shot using black layer masks and gradually paint in interesting parts of the later images with a soft brush to create an overall impression. This approach was more promising to me than averaging the layer stack, which in my eyes expresses the flow of time too weakly.

    Just to do the math: each image of my camera has 151 million pixels with a file size between 125 and 180 MByte in RAW format and 866 MByte after a RAW conversion to a TIF file. The total size of the project is something above 300 GB. 138 RAW files sum up to nearly 21 Billion Pixels. The final image has 159 million pixels due to some added background at the top of the result.

  • Landscape,  Long time exposure,  Motion Blur

    Painted waves at Kampen, Sylt

    Looking at waves captivates us just as much as looking at an open fire. Digital photography provides us with very short shutter speeds or exposure times static, better: frozen images of the ups and downs of water movements.

    There are no creative limits when trying to extend exposure times (or shutter speeds) instead of further shortening them, at most technical ones. Longer exposure times merge several moments of water movement and thus paradoxically have a dynamic effect, meaning a look and feel of a movement.

    There is no right or wrong exposure time. There is a special impression for each exposure time in the fusion image of several moments.

    The proof of the pudding is in the eating. By experimenting with a neutral density filter of 10 EV I managed to get at a not too long exposure time of 1/4s to 1/3s making waves look like painted. With only economical digital post-processing worth seeing images were created.

  • flowers,  Long time exposure

    Time fusion tulips

    Inspired by a photography of german photographer Michael Wesely, I tried to superimpose the movements of orange tulips in a white vase to create an equivalent to a longtime exposure image. A longtime exposure with 3 or 4 days exposure time was unfortunately not possible for me. Therefore I took 35 pictures with my camera at irregular intervals dictated by occupational requirements whose pixels were to be averaged. Here 4 examples of the highly active flowers in a vase:

    Each RAW image has a file size of 125 MB, after RAW conversion this was 580 MB per image as TIF. The entire stack had a size of 21,5 GB. The image of the average then becomes 580 MB again. The pure mean value image was interesting to me but not exciting. Therefore I took this image and layered in parts of original images. The result became convincing:

    Time fusion tulips © Julian Köpke
  • FAQ: Time fusion

    Time fusion is something I couldn’t find elsewhere. Basically it is a longtime exposure. Nothing new so far. Why making a point ?

    Longtime exposures fascinate me. There are famous ones of extreme long exposure times, say one year. The camera is always at the same location. What happens with a moving camera while doing a longtime exposure ? Motion blur !

    A photographer typically uses a shake or a rotation of his camera while holding it in his hands or e.g. mounted on a tripod with full flexible ball head. Postproduction uses a single shot or a combination of blurred and non-blurred images to get  a result.

    Here is the new idea. Sun was shining and green and yellow summer fields exerted a strong attraction to me while driving at high speed from Heidelberg to Paris using a TGV train. With my iPhone looking out of a train window I started to experiment with the Slow Shutter App. The motion blur gets a horizontal orientation with some landscape in the background of an image. The foreground is completely blurred. Some light reflections of the train window are always added. No rotational or shaky effect occurs.

    Thus, a feeling of speed is transferred from the image to the viewer. See more in Discover or Flickr.

    Flying into Paris by train © Julian Köpke

    Compare this method to a single shot motion blur during the sunset at Sylt island or to the yellow trees in the High Sierra, CA. The foreground has to be more marked, the background tends to be more blurred.

    Sky and North Sea © Julian Köpke
    Lake and yellow trees © Julian Köpke