Blue tit in da house

 

Yesterday I told you about my experiment with interval shooting the bird feeder in the garden. Here's another result; a blue tit is trying to decide on the menu in the lofty restaurant.

At the bird feeder

 

As told in previous posts I like to explore the functions on my Nikon D800. During Easter the time had come to try the interval shooting, and what better object to try it at than a couple of bird feeders in the garden? So I put the camera on a gorillapod, placed it near the feeder, filled up the feeder with seeds and started experimenting with the settings. I ended up with doing an interval of one shot each minute for two hours. And then it was coffee time. The result was a lot of empty photos, a lot of photos with half a bird or a blurry one leaving or arriving, and a few good ones of different birds. This greenfinch seemed to know something was going on. I'll show some more in the coming days.

 

Bringing out the focus point

 

Another example of mine of how to use selective colouring in a photo, this time on one from the Maltese carnival. This one was taken with the Nikon D800 and edited in Colorblast for the iPhone. With all the clutter in the background it really brings focus to the important part; the girl enjoying a bit of sunshine.

 

Early morning

 

You don't always have to go somewhere special or have your big full-frame DSLR with you to catch a nice sunrise. I took this one with my iPhone while walking to work one cold morning last week. My iPhone is always with me and even when using my Nikon D800 I often shoot a few reference photos with the iPhone. Then I have something to quickly publish on either FB, Instagram or Tadaa. Or on this blog:)

 

Sunrise time lapse

I'm still fascinated by the Nikon D800's time lapse function. Today's video is from yesterday morning's sunrise over the Danish town of Helsinore (Helsingør in Danish). With a weather report promising a clear day, it was just a matter of grabbing an early morning train and find the right spot at the harbour. I managed two shots, one of the sunrise with the ferries crossing every 10-15 minutes and one of Kronborg of Hamlet fame, all edited in the YouTube editor.

Three Candles

What to do when there's what the Danish news call a blizzard (and the Swedes would call a mild snowfall) hits Copenhagen on a Sunday and you have a craving for some photography? How about some more time lapse photography, this time with three burning Christmas tree candles.

Defrosting Santa

I'm still playing around with my new Nikon D800 camera and I'm still struck by awe. One of the new features in it is the time-lapse function and a few days ago I just had to try it out on something. Into the freezer Santa went and out again the next day, now embedded in a block of ice. The camera went on a tripod with the macro lens, a black background went up and a spotlight was used for the main lighting. But as I didn't want to stand around for hours, waiting for the ice to melt, a hair dryer was very handy. Setting the time-lapse function was easy enough; a photo each 2 seconds and 30 minutes of shooting and off I, or rather the camera went. 30 minutes later the the ice had melted and the video was in the box. A few things I needed to improve the next time; manual focus on Santas face, a wider depth of field and a more solid platform for the tripod (or is it the hair dryer moving Santa a bit?). Not too bad for a first try I think, though.

The second attempt was much better. This time I skipped the hair dryer and went for a natural melting. A photo every 20 seconds for 5 hours and manual focus with an f=12 and the shooting could begin. Well home after work (the shooting started at 6am) I discovered that the battery had run out at some point so that the video was 25 seconds long instead of the planned 30 seconds, but I still got the whole melting. And I like the result! I've got a few more ideas to try out so this is not the last time lapse I'm doing.

Half a bench

With a 70-300mm lens it's not always possible to get all of your motive in the frame, so here I opted for just half of the bench. If it's good or just different is for the viewer to decide, but I quite like it.

And winter came

Yesterday Copenhagen got its first large snowfall so it was a nice opportunity to break out the new Nikon D800 and start getting acquainted with it. Well, I actually started a few days ago, but there's still quite a bit of ground to cover before I'm proficient on it. This photo is from the park Frederiksberg Have.