Author: John

Portrait of a Moose

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When traveling around in Lille Vildmose you will see sign telling you to keep a safe distance of 30meters from the moose as they are wild animals and could potentially do harm. I always respect that (and the animals), also because if some day some fool gets hurt by a moose, it will be the moose who pays the price. Or access to these amazing animals would be restricted.
..but then one day, as I was sitting in my car scouting for anything of interest, this moose came out of the reeds and up the ditch, less than 2 meters from my car.. the 100mm end of the 100-500mm lens was almost too much 🙂

P

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The Lensbaby Edge 50 in action on a spontaneous photowalk in Aalborg. Usually I prefer the combination of the Edge 50 and monochrome photos, but for this picture I prefer the color version.

Lifeguard

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I visited Blokhus on a typical danish summer day (meaning overcast with showers) and came across this RIB belonging to the lifeguards. I guess they had an easy day in the office, as I only saw 4-5 people who went out to swim in the 17°C water.

Needlemouse Pt. 2

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Sometimes we have these cute little hedgehogs visiting our garden. They play it safe and roll up in a spikey ball when they notice you, but if you lie still on the ground with the camera ready and make no noise, they will soon move on and you can get a great picture of them.

Taken with my R6 at a wooping 25.600 ISO and then cleaned up using Lightroom Denoise.

Lost in Genoa

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Genoa has a lot of narrow streets and it is actually not that easy to find your way around. I don’t know if that is the case for the small family in this picture, but they do look a bit lost.

Talk to me Goose

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Greylag Geese (Anser anser) seems to be everywhere in Lille Vildmose, especially in the winter. They are fun birds, always making noise and watching out for predators, but they aren’t too shy. But, as soon as one of them panicks and takes off, the entire flock scrambles. Seeing several hundred geese scramble at once, straight over your head, because something on the opposite side startled them is quite a sight.

Blue Jellyfish

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From a fish tank in Nordsø Oceanariet in Hirtshals, Denmark.
it was a bit hard to get good focus, as they were in a round fish tank that you could walk around, so obviously the glass was curved and you had to get as straight an angle as possible through the glass.

Moose In The Rain

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Went out trying to get more familiar with my newly acquired RF 100-500L. This lens really blows me away! It is SO much sharper and much better at locking focus than my good old Tamron 150-600 G2.
Granted, I lose 100mm in reach, but when the image quality is this much better, I can live with that.
I went to Lille Vildmose, and found this Moose bull and a fellow bull minding their own business about 50 meter from the path I was following. Looks like a wet day to be a moose.

Visayan hornbill

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A scruffy looking male Visayan hornbill (Penelopides panini) I photographed when visiting BIOPARC Fuengirola in Spain.
I hadn’t packed a long lens for this trip, so I had to make due with the Canon 24-105mm f/4 L.
In general I would say the in most cases it was okay, but I would have liked having my Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8 G2 with me, or my R7, to get a bit more reach.

Eurasian Tree Sparrow Part II

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I’ve been shooting with my R7 and the Tamron 150-600mm G2 for some years now, and even though I think I have gotten some decent shots with that combination, I have also found it to be really hard to get consistently sharp images with the Tamron, especially with a 1.4x extender attached. On my R6 using the extender would often be fine, but on the R7 I wasn’t impressed and ended up never using the extender. Still I didn’t get the image quality that I expected. So, I emptied the piggy bank and invested in the Canon RF 100-500mm L lens. Unfortunately it has been either dark, raining or snowing (or a combination of the above) more or less constantly since I bought it. But I did manage to take it out a couple of times and even though I still haven’t had decent light, I think this lens performs way better than the Tamron. Granted, it is more than twice as expensive, so better performance was to be expected but it still impressed me how much more sharpness I got.

Old school

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One of the many interesting old buildings in Aalborg, the old navigation school in Aalborg Vestby. For many years this building has been used by various political youth organizations.
Taken with the Lensbaby Edge 50

The Watcher and the Tower

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I’ll be the first to admit that a 50mm Lensbaby Edge 50 is not the optimal wildlife lens.. ..but you have to work with what you have at hand. I was actually out trying to do something else than wildlife photography, when I saw a Cormorant drying its wings in the winter sun, on one of the foundations of the old railroad bridge in Aalborg. I quickly ran up on the new(er) bridge next to it to get the buildings on the other side of Limfjorden as a background. I then twisted and turned the Edge 50 to get the line of focus just right.. and then the bird turned its head.. perfect timing.. I ended up with a picture I really like.

Waterfront in low sun

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It has been a while since I went for a walk with my Lensbaby Edge 50 by the waterfront in Aalborg. A bit sad actually, because I always seem to get home with something i like. This time it was these buildings on the other side of Limfjorden, being lighted by the afternoon sun, which is really low this time of the year. The light became even more dominant because heavy snow clouds were passing further North.
The Lensbaby Edge 50 has this ability to enhance this feeling of surrealism that I really like and even though it isn’t that dominant in this shot, I like the end result.

Twilight Moose

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Just as I had packed up my gear and was driving out of Lille Vildmose, I suddenly saw this great Moose bull. I quickly pulled over and had about five minutes alone with the big guy before other cars started pulling over and he decided to walk away.
I am actually quite amazed over this picture. It was twilight, I shot at 600mm with a shutter speed of just 1/80s at ISO 6400. Still, with help from Topaz Photo AI and the skills I have acquired in Lightroom over the years, I still ended up with an acceptable result. Even though the R7 is a crop sensor camera, it is still capable of delivering, even at high ISO.

Switching grooves

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When I started taking photography more serious, I mainly shot black and white photos. I loved a good black and white photo. To be fair, I still do.
And I also still love when I see a subject or scene that I know exactly how to capture in black and white.

But still I have noticed a change in the photos I post here on my site. A while back, the majority were black and white, now most of them are in color.

The reason for this is quite simple. I have switched groove. I am now primarily taking pictures of animals, either in the wild or on various zoos.
Animals usually have strong or distinctive colors, and while some animals photos can work in black and white, most of them deserve to be in color.

Switching grooves is not a bad thing. It is an evolution. The next step.
Instead of keeping in the same groove and starting to repeat yourself, or growing tired of what you do, you can try something else. It doesn’t mean that you can’t switch back to your old groove if you want to at some later point.
And if you switch back, maybe you will have learned something new, that takes your work to another level.

At the moment I still have a strong urge to photograph wildlife, but I can also feel a beginng yearning for the old days of picking up my camera, put on a 35mm lens or a Lensbaby, and go out exploring and capture new black and white sceneries.