Travelphotography ain't always colorful

What's cooking? Oh, this BBQ set in the middle of nowhere, during gray weather you ask? I have no idea how this works (not the BBQ, but how people are not stealing this), but apparently, the Swedes are very good at trusting other strangers. When I first saw this place, I just wanted to go there for the rough nature. But after seeing this BBQ spot, it kinda pulled me closer to something else that I wanted to see. I usually enjoy my photographs without people in them or manmade stuff. But this camping site just begged me to tell a story about it. So, I took a snapshot of it and decided to share it with you guys on Hive. Pretty cool huh?

The like behind the BBQ wasn't frozen. But I thought it would be a nice idea to freeze it myself with some long-exposure photography. I was hoping to find a beautiful sunset in Sweden again, but it was a gray and rainy day instead. You can't have it all eh, but you sure can make the most out of it.


©2023 - Ruben Cress | 10 second exposure




©2023 - Ruben Cress | 8 second exposure




©2023 - Ruben Cress | 4 second exposure

Travel photography, one of the downsides

One of the downsides of being on the road for longer periods can be the collection of dust a camera welcomes in. This is quite the troublemaker, and sometimes an unforgiving one. Dust particles on my travel shots are no joke, and they certainly do not come as a surprise. Usually, I'm prepared to deal with dust particles. But if you're traveling for longer periods, you switch lenses a lot, and you do not "care" about your surroundings, this can become a time-consuming process once you get back home.

For example, -most- of my photographs during my travels to Sweden caught a lot of dust. Firstly, these photographs are over a decade old, and a decade ago, I was more reckless than I am right now. I only cared about the shot, and I cared for the quality of the shot. I did not care for future post-processing, as I have dealt with that for quite some time.

Let me show you this example below.



©2023 - Ruben Cress




©2023 - Ruben Cress




©2023 - Ruben Cress

In the first screenshot, you'll see the RAW image in its full glory. Take a moment, I rarely share RAW files online, as I'd like to prevent people from seeing such a catastrophe. However, for illustration of the amount of work the average photographer has to go through, I'm more than happy to share an example :p. Look at all those dust bunnies!

So, in my last post, I talked a little bit about how technology advances. A decade ago, I did not discover this function whenever I wanted to clean my photographs, this cleaning process also took much longer. Behold, the second screenshot, where you easily can see and identify these dust bunnies. Quite a lot, eh? I've had a few photographs that broadcasted a higher number of these bunnies in my RAW images. This job took me about 5 minutes. I kinda like to think of it as shooting practice for Apex Legends.

If you look closely at the first and third images, you can see that there are a lot of dust bunnies collected in the third image. It often goes without notice, that most of these dust particles can't be easily spotted, so you could say that the tool in the second image is a warm welcome to technology.




Well, I'm not here just to talk about the downside of traveling, you didn't ask for that, and you're probably not waiting for it either. As a photographer, it's my duty to collect clean and fresh memories of time, that I can present to the public, right? So, how did this photograph turn out? Was it worth the work that I did on it? Well, that's a subjective matter. But I can ensure you, removing this amount of dust bunnies from Raw photographs can prevent me from editing.

Keep in mind, that these are in ALL photographs clipped in the same range of time/days until cleaned properly by a professional. So, me showing you -only- one image, kind of give you an idea of how much dust has to get cleaned before publishing :D. Personally, I absolutely love the reflection of the water, that's why I decided to clean it. The movement in the trees. The only thing that's missing, is a grayer sky, but it is as it is. A rainy day... in Jakobsberg.



©2023 - Ruben Cress | 25 second exposure


Now that I look at it again, I think it's pretty gray, and not that colorful. Perhaps it would do well in Black and White.



©2023 - Ruben Cress




©2023 - Ruben Cress




©2023 - Ruben Cress




©2023 - Ruben Cress




©2023 - Ruben Cress




©2023 - Ruben Cress




©2023 - Ruben Cress


Oh, that double exposure looks quite nice. I'm glad that I took the time to clean these photographs and got them dust free. Even though I don't really enjoy cleaning photographs with such an excessive amount of dust, it's rewarding once I finish it.

Hope you all have a great day

Cheers,
Ruben


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Nice, I just made a post about a spot like this in Sweden! So cool to see that this works so good out there! That every man's right works wonderful. And about that dust, when I do long exposures, I have many dead or weak pixels. Isn't that the same in you pictures?

I saw your series yesterday, they looked awesome. These are shot with a Canon 5D Mark II, not that many dead pixels in these RAW images, but just an overload of dust particles. I actually had to get it fixed in Stockholm because it was just horrible. Of course, they let me pay twice as much.

It's not persé the long exposures that cause me to see dust on my images, it's more or less the aperture that sharpens them.

Seeing this photo gave me a very good feeling. And I enjoy, I like to be in that place


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Dust particles are especially troublesome on the mirrorless camera I now use. It used to be quite easy to wipe off the dust from the mirror of a DSLR with a soft glasses wipe. This is not really the case with mirrorless because under no circumstances should you touch the sensor itself. If you happen to scratch it just a little bit, you can consider the camera totaled.

True that man, these photographs were taken with my Canon though. I actually had to clean it at a Swedish photography store where they ripped me off big time lol. Had to pay 85 Euros for sensor cleaning. Now that I have my mirrorless, I try to keep it as clean as possible.