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Cliff at Morsum
In Morsum one finds a cliff on the northern shore at the border to the Hindenburgdamm, shaped some 120.000 years ago, which is a national geotope. It is a soil structure formed by northern European glaciers with red (limonite), yellowish and white(kaolin) sands. These sands itself had been deposited 7 – 11 million years ago. More detailed information can be found in a Wiki (English oder German).
The image is an HDR of 5 exposures, intentionally overexposed and combined manually and one processed with software (HDR Efex Pro 2). Doing so no traces of a technically generated HDR image are recognizable. The resulting HighKey image looks natural. I adopted this way of processing HDR images from Harold Davis.
View of Morsum cliff in eastern direction. © Julian Köpke The layer structure only detects at close range. These layers are like loose sandstone. Unfortunately, they got knotted. Some layers a pretty coarse.
North Sea is rough and versatile. The water comes close to the cliff. It was low tide today when we passed by. So we didn’t get wet feet.
Patterns of deposit layers at Morsum cliff © Julian Köpke 
Patterns of deposit layers at Morsum cliff © Julian Köpke It is spring on Sylt, during the year everything blooms later than in the South.
Willow catkin © Julian Köpke -
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 thought? Maybe 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 -
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.
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Frame averaging
Otto Flechtenmacher was a painter who lived in Austria, an uncle of Christa. I often did photography for documentary purposes, especially paintings.
This morning I listened to a workshop of portrait photography. To some extend the audience received explanations of the PhaseOne camera, which I use quite frequently. The vast dynamic range and the frame averaging feature of a PhaseOne were mentioned.
To reproduce these features I intentionally underexposed a photo of a painting of Otto. The original histogram can be seen on the left, the processed one on the right. The quality is quite surprising, when you are used to full frame sensors.
Typical histogram of the RAW-files 
Typical histogram after processing in CaptureOne To compare the quality of a single shot image to frame average files, I did a sample of a single shot and two shots of 5 and 9 averages. Clearly, noise will be reduced. At the same time, structures come out more detailed, what might be seen from the following examples:
I never thought of using this feature for landscape photography – but it makes sense. By applying frame averaging you can get a landscape photograph with preserved highlights and well structured dark parts.
Roses - oil painting by Otto Flechtenmacher © Julian Köpke -
Darkroom studio II (glasses)
My darkroom studio is convenient for flower photography and high contrast, especially white. Today I tried out glasses with reflections and a nearly complete homogenous white vase. The only variations are reflections imposed on it from little light leaks of my improvised studio.
White vase © Julian Köpke A photograph of a glass in a more documentary style is the following. The representation of the glass cutting is realistic. The stem out of the focal plane is appropriate for the focus of the photograph.
Glass cutting © Julian Köpke The combination of black and green thrilled me in the composition with traditional wine glasses for regional white wine. Unexpectedly, I got some copper allusions with some warmth in the transparent glass.
Wine glasses with green stem © Julian Köpke A more cool representation is the following composition with more glasses, including a tasting glass for Whisky. Is it the morning after a roaring party ? No leftovers can be seen so far …
Glasses with white and green stem © Julian Köpke A more detailed view ist the following photograph, which is more on the warm side. The glasses get a copper-like appearance.
Details of glasses © Julian Köpke -
Darkroom studio
The darkroom was the centre of analogue photography. In a darkroom were created the copies of a picture on photo paper, which had been planned when shooting with camera and film.
The “digital darkroom” is in a way the continuation of the darkroom from analogue times. Nowadays, the role of the film is taken over by the RAW image. The development of the film was linked to chemistry, intentional light and shadow effects and fine feeling. Each print was unique.
The “digital development” or postprocessing is non-destructive, repeatable and delivers a result, which at least theoretically can be printed as often as desired. In the digital workflow no print is unique anymore.With a dark background and systematic shading of daylight, my photo studio became a darkroom where I could photograph flowers. Exposure times became longer, almost like a long-term exposure at night outside. The saturation of the colors came out surprisingly strong.
Anthuria on black © Julian Köpke 
Red gerbera and fern © Julian Köpke The creation of a floating cloud with the help of white tulle did not require shading to achieve the effect of a darkroom. As my friend Lorenz mentioned, looking closer you can see nice interference patterns (Newtonian rings). I’m happy with this image idea: the image got two days later a Flickr in explore.
White cloudy glow of a piece of fabric © Julian Köpke The soft variations of light and shadow fit well to a soft vetch.
Vetch on white fabric © Julian Köpke 
Vetch and white fabric © Julian Köpke -
Heidelberg Castle, flowers and flypaper textures
Heidelberg Castle is a landmark. In winter its red color becomes softer. For one winter Frederick V. became king with his home in this castle. After that, Germany sank into the 30 Years War. The castle had been ruined already by fire a couple of years before.
Winter Castle of the Winter King © Julian Köpke The delicacy and dreaminess of a photo is not always the result of intensive digital processing. The ranuncula of the following image hardly needed editing. You can feel it. With a tripod and a 85mm Lensbaby velvet at f/16 I shot this image with really delicate color.
Ranuncula © Julian Köpke The lavish feast is over. Paradise is no more. The king went into exile. We’re staying.
The roaring party is over © Julian Köpke -
Callas and pink fern leave
For a short time the winter kept us still. Nature offers many motifs, the effect of which depends on the time of the day.
Disturbing scene of ice formations (skull) © Julian Köpke 
Arbre japonais © Julian Köpke Shortly after, the snow has said goodbye to us. Still very, very cold cloudless nights, more and more often glorious sunny days let you catch your breath.
Quarry at Schauenburg ruin Dossenheim © Julian Köpke 
Early spring sun throws light on pampas grass © Julian Köpke Yesterday I came across Calla lilies and rosé-fixed fern at the florists’s. „Expensive“, she told me. But I was already determined wether the many possibilities I had in mind.
Through a chemical process, the fern has received a fixation and new color. That would make it durable for many compositions ….
Pink fern leave © Julian Köpke 
Red callas in a white vase © Julian Köpke The next day, I combined the callas and the fern to a single composition. With a background the image looks soft and dreamy. This texture puts a kind of patina over the image.
Red callas and rosé fixed fern © Julian Köpke 
Red callas and rosé fixed fern II © Julian Köpke -
Fibonacci numbers
I wanted to study shadows of simple bodies again today. It all started with an egg last week. The shadow of last week’s egg photo was ring-shaped. I noticed that, but it didn’t bother me. Could the ring shape of the shadow be overcome by skillful selection of light and would the backside of the egg lie entirely in the shadow? This assignment was given to me by a school friend, who himself is a professional photographer.
Shadow cast of an egg © Julian Köpke 
Shadow cast of an egg © Julian Köpke The shadow looks better today, with a little help from Photoshop.
A neighbor had given me simple bodies, which I placed like an egg on the white background. First of all as a play with form and shadow, where I had to think of the X-ra image of a human hand.
Shadow cast of building blocks on white © Julian Köpke The small wooden blocks were wonderfully colorful. Unfortunately, I didn’t have as many as my imagination would have liked. Arranged in concentric circles, they are delightful to the eyes. At the suggestion of a friend, I arranged, the number of blocks into Fibonacci numbers. The processing of the shadows leads to an exciting image, similar to solarization. Since it is a kind of negative, I named the picture after the impression it makes: „Flow of light“, although in reality it was the shadows of the blocks.
Shadows around building blocks sorted in circles of Fibonacci numbers © Julian Köpke 
Shadows around building blocks sorted in circles of Fibonacci numbers © Julian Köpke -
Infinity
Everyone has an idea about infinity. Infinity always confronts us with the question of wether we can see or recognize it at all. Modern mathematics knows that infinite series of numbers may well have a finite limit. The ancient greeks had realized that Achilles will always outrun a tortoise, but they couldn’t prove it. For the solution remained hidden.
Photographing a single, well reflecting steel sphere I got on the surface pointing to my macro lens a distorted image of the surrounding. One can see the tree in our garden, the lens and the tripod of my equipment, even the photographer’s legs are visible. That’s why I think it’s sort of a selfie.
Photographic world on a steel ball © Julian Köpke Immediately, I thought of my friend Harold, who had worked a lot on photographing water drops and who had made a book about the photography of water drops. In the juxtaposition of several water drops the environment is displayed several times side by side in the drops.
Well, this happens as well, if you place two well reflecting steel balls side by side. So far, there is nothing unexpected.
On closer inspection, the opposite sides of the spheres show further images of the surroundings slightly outside the original image, well visible on the tree. These images of the tree become smaller and smaller lying within the circular image of the first reflection.
An infinite series of images in one picture is created by the reflection on the surface of two adjacent steel spheres. As the reflected images become smaller and smaller, the total area of the image is finite. A similar effect is known with water drops as well.
Close look of an infinite reflection on a steel sphere © Julian Köpke
