hpd-fotografy

Hatching Dragon Eggs

Deep inside at the end of the fjord during the arctic winter it's cold enough for the salt water to freeze over. When the water level drops at low tide, st...
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Deep inside at the end of the fjord during the arctic winter it's cold enough for the salt water to freeze over. When the water level drops at low tide, stones pierce through the sinking ice crust and break it. Well no... just kidding... what you really see are young Dragons hatching and breaking out of their eggs ;-)
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SONY ILCE-7M2

settings

ISO 100 Shutter 1/30

upload_date

Mar, 2016

Views

3187

Likes

+920

Awards

Featured

Runner Up in Simple Landscapes Photo Contest

Contest Finalist in Simple Landscapes Photo Contest

Peer Award

+258

Superb Composition

+110

Absolute Masterpiece

+97

Top Choice

+58

Outstanding Creativity

+28

Magnificent Capture

+13

All Star

+12

Superior Skill

+11

Genius

Virtuoso

Emotions

Impressed

Top Ranks

Top 30 rank

Top 20 rank week 1

Top 10 rank

Top 10 rank week 1

Top 10 rank

Top 10 rank week 1

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Behind The Lens

Location

In a frozen fjord in the middle of winter on Lofoten islands, Norway.

Time

Late afternoon with the warm sunlight coming perpendicular from the left.

Lighting

Only available light, of course! I didn't travel all the way in winter to the Lofoten for that magic arctic light to spoil it all with a flash!

Equipment

I am a wide angle junkie! The wider , the better. This was done using the 12 mm wide-angle Voigtlander Leica-M-mount lens mounted onto my Sony A72 with an adapter.

Inspiration

The ice, the light and the mountains in the back.

Editing

My post-processing workflow was quite involved and all about quality. Starting out with the best possible raw file I used DxO to convert the file into another raw format (.dng) using DxO's very good and gentle noise reduction, sharpening and my custom made lense profile for the Voigtländer 12mm on the Sony A7II. Then I opened the .dng in Lightroom and did 95% of the post-processing there, completely nondestructive, everything still in raw. At the latest possible point I finally opened the file in Photoshop as a 16 bit .tif for some final touches (like a slight Orton effect, some filters from Nik and Topaz, etc.). Then I saved it as a 16 bit .tif and added it to my Lightroom library. Never, ever did I convert to jpg. A jpg file has only 8 bit of information-depth as compared to the 14 bit I started out with in raw. That is only a tiny fraction, namely 1/64th, of the information I gathered with the camera (2 to the power of 6)! Therefore I do not consider jpgs as a decent photo format worth having in my library. The only time I touch jpg is when I export something to upload to the web.

In my camera bag

I used to have Nikon equipment, namely a D800 and later a D810 camera, the classic Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens and the Nikon 85mm f/1.8 lens, a Nikon D750 camera and the Nikon 70-200 f/4. But now I have sold all this and changed to Sony. I now have a Sony A7RII and a Sony A7II as cameras, the Sony 16-35 f/4 and the Sony 70-200 f/4 FE-lenses, also the Sony-Zeiss 55 f/1.8 lens and a Voigtlaender 12mm f/5.6 VM lens with a Leica-to-Sony adapter.

Feedback

Ultra-wide photography is not at all about 'getting it all into the frame'. It is about getting close... very close. And 12 mm is REALLY wide. So you gotta get REALLY close.

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Hatching Dragon Eggs