Happy New Year 2020

Happy New Year 2020

.:. © 2020 Ludwig Keck

The Marine

There are seven sculptures by Chad Fisher at the Peachtree Corners veterans Monument. One of them has been the subject of several of my posts on my other blogs. I thought I might as well join in here and show you "The Marine".

For more photos of this sculpture see my post "The Marine" on my other Cafe Ludwig blog.

.:. © 2019 Ludwig Keck

Veterans Day in Peachtree Corners

https://cafeludwig.wordpress.com/2019/11/15/veterans-day/

For a larger collection of photos the "Tiled Gallery" feature over on WordPress provides a more compact and pleasing display. Please click on the link or image above to hop over to my WordPress blog with my photo portfolio.

You are welcome to leave your comments here. Thank you for visiting.

World Elephant Day

Trunks up! This is World Elephant Day!

Way back, many decades ago, when I had just come to the United States, I was enrolled in high school and they picked classes for me that they thought would be appropriate for a sixteen year old kid who didn't speak much English. One of the classes was "Shop". My teacher gave me a block of wood and instructed me to sculpt an elephant. I didn't even know the English names for the most common tools, my artistic skills did not extend to sculpture, so I was totally lost.

I have since been told that sculpting an elephant is easy, "you just chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant". Back then I really had no idea on how to proceed. So I looked around for some other class. When I told my shop teacher that I was switching to physics he was aghast, "you are giving up shop for physics???" He just couldn't understand that to me me physics seemed easier than shop.

Many years later I received this hand-sculpted elephant as a gift from my mother. It has an honored place on my desk.

Happy World Elephant Day to all! Trunks Up!!

.:. © 2019 Ludwig Keck

Photography at Highway Speed

Instead of the freeways we took the byways one recent afternoon. Route US78 east of Athens, Georgia, took us through rural areas, small towns, as well as Athens itself. Photographing from the back seat is quite a challenge. The countryside rushes by allowing just a few seconds to recognize an interesting scene. Signs, berms, fences, trees and power poles are constantly in the way. Then there are the wires, lots and lots of wires always hanging into the view.

 

My approach to photography is not to shoot rapid-fire sequences. I prefer to find the "decisive moment" when taking the picture, not afterward selecting it from reams of exposures. Shooting from a moving car makes that more the "frantic moment", but I had fun.

This "style" is not for the contemplative artist. The technical aspects are a bit different. I used an aperture of f/8 throughout. My shutter speed was mostly at 1/500 second with a few at 1/250 second. I let the camera set the ISO for automatic exposure. Exposure was often unduly affected by the bright sky and I had to "dig out" some of my images from the deep shadows.

There was, of course, no way to compose a photo. I did not use the viewfinder. I used a wide angle setting, mostly 24mm on my full-frame camera, pointing the camera at my subject, panning with it as we drove by. Hoping that I didn't rotate the camera too much and got my shot before some foreground object interfered. That also caused close buildings to "fall over" due the low viewpoint from the car window necessitating pointing the camera upwards. Perspective correction to the rescue. I like using "ICE", Image Composite Editor, as it allows so many different was to reshape the view.

Here is a collection of my photos. They may not be masterpieces of landscape and cityscape photography, but they are fun mementos and unusual views from along our byways.

This post is shared on two of my blogs so I can reach more of my fans, maybe both of them!

.:.

© 2019 Ludwig Keck

Evening Concert - 2

The Challenge of Blogger

Well, my previous post was cut short. Blogger refused to allow uploading images. Turns our Google had a wide area problem for several hours and I was trying to prepare a post during that time.

Now it should be a snap. So here are the photos I tried to show before.

Indeed they uploaded just fine. Blogger hesitated on just one of them but did the job.

Now for the story of making crowd panoramas see my other Cafe Ludwig blog over on WordPress. Here is the link to the post Crowd Panos.

.:.

© 2019 Ludwig Keck

Evening Concert

The Challenge of Darkness

Photographing evening concerts has always been both a challenge and a pleasure. The contrast between the stage lights and the dark audience area makes for difficulties. The low light challenges equipment and photographer.

In addition I just love to do crowd panoramas.

Here are two photos from the Peachtree Corners Town Center with Sister Hazel in concert. 

I tried uploading more photos, but Blogger won't let me. I get "Upload failed. Server rejected."

So now I have another project. Trying to figure out what stupid thing Google has done this time.

.:.

© 2019 Ludwig Keck

Red Letter Day

What a wonderful day!

Anybody who remembers me might wonder why I haven't posted for almost a year. There were many reasons but no good excuses, so let's just skip ahead.

Today I got to meet the real people behind Beatrice and Grenville of the Frog and PenguINN blog. If you follow their blog, and you really should, you have learned of their vacation trip. They explain their journey in captivating and informative stories. 

https://thefrogandpenguinn.blogspot.com/

It was a delight and real pleasure to have lunch with Dorothy and Pat and to chat about many things. We left way too many topics untouched. The get-together has given me the nudge to get back to my blogs and my many other friends out there.

So I will just quickly post this photo, lest I get bogged down in looking up how long I have been a keen follower of their tales ...

.:.

© 2019 Ludwig Keck