Photographing Black Objects

We were visiting the Vemork Hydroelectric Plant in Rukan, Norway which is now a museum. This is the site were the allies in WWI tried to destroy because the Germans were producing heavy water during the war.

In a previous article, Your Body of Work or Life Long Project , I discussed the train that was sunk on the ferry carrying the heavy water back to Germany. See link

Off camera flash. Blue colour added as a layer in Photoshop and set to color mode and the copper items masked-out Blue and orange are complimentary colours and I wanted to create contrast and conflict with this image. There are lovely tones and shapes in the blue areas and the 2 copper items disrupt these patterns and almost don’t seem to fit.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the hydro plant tour but I thought we would see more of the inner workings of the whole plant, maybe down the water tubes and other good tunnels and underground workings. This was not the case as we first saw a 12 hour film (British movie about the mission to destroy the plant) and then a tour guide explaining about the processes and equipment for electricity generation.

Being an electrical engineer I did not need a repeat of previous general course material and went off to film the generators in the other half of the large singular room. The photo below shows the area I was exploring while others were listening to the museum guide.


The room has very many windows facing the cliff side, which was now in the shade and therefore, no direct light striking any surfaces and thereby creating very large dynamic range from pure black to white, which would make it even harder to show any details in the image.

I only had about a half hour to shoot before the gang moved on. For these types of scenes that are new, complex to shoot and contains a lot of detail, I would have liked to spend at least an hour to walk around and visually inspect all the nuts, bolts and other doodads before planning what to shoot. I think there could have been a nice theme developed if I had the time as opposed to shooting a bunch of what may be interesting views but no connection.

Shooting black objects, unless it is documentary in style, will tend to focus on the abstract in design. There is not much colour available and at best you are probably only going to capture any reflected colours in the objects.


Off-camera flash set on the ground and to my right. The light from window was not striking this area and I wanted more contrast in objects and lines.

I decided to use my SB-800 off-camera and wirelessly triggered in the hope that these extra reflections on the shinny black generators would give more interest.


I would lay my flash all over the place on any other piece of equipment to see what kind of effects this would give.

One thing I did notice is that when the flash was behind me, there was not always enough reflected trigger flash from the camera to overpower the ambient light and the flash would not fire.


Photographing black objects is not much different than photographing any other object but there are a few hints that will make every shot more likely to be successful.


Correct Exposure

First, your camera, whether shooting RAW or Jpeg, will want to make everything mid grey. This means that if your image is mostly black with no specular highlights, it will turn the black object a nice mid grey. This is less of a problem with digital cameras as it is easier with digital editing to lower tones as this doesn’t introduce noise as opposed to white objects when you have to increase tones.

The downside, if not corrected, is that some of the information is lost when clipping occurs.

Camera RAW is very forgiving and in many situations any exposure and colour temperature corrections can be adjusted later.


Do check the histogram if you can. If the subject is shinny then it is ok to have some of the highlights clipped if these are only the edge or point reflections from light source.

Normally reducing by 1 ½ (-1.5ev) to 2 (-2.0 ev) stops should cover most situations.

Colour Temperature

Is the black object you are capturing really black? Black is not really a colour but the absence of colour. This can be achieved by no or little light coming from a coloured object or it could be painted black. I know from my oil painting experience when I lighten what are labelled as black paints with white I get nice blue, greens and browns.

If there is no reasonable areas of reflected light source, your camera may interpret some of the lighter black tones with a colour cast due to the true black colour.

This image has 2 light sources, Bounce flash on the left, which gives natural tones to rust and the blue sky light from the right which adds blue highlights to those edges.


Artistic Merit

For a lot of black items, the focal point will be the abstract lines created by the sources of light striking the object.

Taking images of mechanical or even architectural features may be great if that is your passion but for many others it can be boring if they are not connected in a theme or story. These individual images, since they are not ravaged by time, do not tell a story in themselves but only by connecting them together is a story told.

The direction of bare rock outcropping and shadows help to re-enforce the downward direction of the cascading water. By having the trees block some the bottom of the water we are not completely drawn out of the scene.

What is not apparent from this image is that the waterfall is less than half of the canyon wall. These canyons are very deep.

The power plant is situated half way up the canyon walls and this image captures some of the houses on the other side of the valley that are built precariously (at least for those venturing out late on a dark night) on nooks and outcroppings along steep cliffs.

Niels Henriksen

Heddal Church Norway - D300 at ISO 6400

The completely wooden Heddal Stave church just outside Notodden Norway gave a good opportunity to test out the capabilities of the D300 at iso 6400. I did bring my tripod with me but for the many day excursions it was a lot easier to just attach the Nikon 18-200mm vr lens and increase the iso to compensate for low light situations.




These Stave churches were built from the early 11th century to the 15th century. At one time there were approximately 800 to 1,000 of these churches built and now only 25 remain. Since these are built entirely of wood many were easily destroyed by fire.

iso 6400, 1/40 sec, f4.5, 24.0mm

This is a view from inside the main chapel. There is no electrical light in the church and it is all lit by the window openings at the top and a few candles near the altar. It is extremely dim inside and a perfect test for the camera capabilities. The metal tubes you see in this image are part of the current sprinkler system to prevent it from being burnt. On the outside along the entire roof sections are other sprinkler nozzles.

Being all wood it was easy to limit the colour noise by de-saturating the colour a bit and then adding a light reddish brown layer set to colour to bring out the warm tones. In Adobe Raw I did set the colour and noise to almost max settings.

This is the Heddal church, built in the12trh century, is a triple stave church and is now the largest remaining church.


Close-up view of the outside hand cut shingles covering all the roof and wall sections.

ISO 6400, 1/40 sec, f4.5 , 24.0mm

The above image is of the altar, which is mostly lit by candles and the top window light does not reach into the altar enclave.

iso 6400, 1/20 sec, f4.5, 24.0mm

In the image above you can see the rose painting covering the inside walls. This painting covers some of the more Norse Viking type scenes that originally decorated the walls. It was repainted with the new abstract patterns as the Viking images became out of favour and the Christian teachings and Viking mythology slowly disappeared.

You will notice how the WB has changed from the walls at top being lit by outside light and the post at bottom being lit by candles and therefore a redder tone.

iso 6400, 1/30 sec, f5.0, 24.0mm

Around the bottom of the church is a corridor that runs around the whole of the chapel and there are different doors to go in. This is part of the carvings that surround these giant 10 foot doors.



Near the church is a site where they have moved several log cabins as an historic site. You can see the brightly lit rose painting or rosemailing. This is the same as in the church but here we have many windows that provide more light into the interior.



This is a shed on the site but the larger log cabins are built the same method.
You will notice that the log cabin sits on stills and then there is a log split in half and with a flat side on the bottom. This is to prevent rodents from getting into the houses. Note how the steps do not attach to the building, which also keeps them out.

The D300 does a good job of image capture at the higher iso setting of 1600, 3200, and 6400. They are nosier than lower settings but still produce great shots. If you shoot with film and I think the highest was 3200 B&W, these shots would normally not be possible and if you did have very fast film the grain would be very pronounced. I do like the B&W film grain better as the luminance speckles were more random in size and tended to produce better patterns.

You do need to use the luminance and colour noise reduction to improve it. The use of sharpening is not recommended, as it will enhance the noise.

The best method is still to use a tripod and go for longer exposure, but when not possible having an image stabilized lens and high iso, you now are able to get very reasonable images that would not be normally possible.


Niels Henriksen

The Red Barn and Hay Fields

I was reviewing some images to select for this weeks post, which was to be on a beautiful wooden 12th century Norwegian Heddal Stave Church. While playing around, undertaking serious fine-art editing, I thought that maybe the image I was working on would be worthy of a few comments on why I was distorting enhancing the versions the way I did.

The main goal with the scene was to try and recapture some of the magic that seemed to permeate the air.

We were on our way to see the huge wooden church just outside of Notodden, Norway. As we got out of our cars in the parking lot there was this large red barn like building that had in front of it a field of late afternoon sunlit hay. These brightly lit fields glowed with a late summer ochre hue. Very warm and dreamlike, at least that’s how my memory recorded the event.
In an earlier article,
What I Saw, My Camera Captured and What My Mind Thought it Saw , I discussed how our perception of events and not what really is there can be locked in our mental image.


The above image is the one I like the best so far. I am not sure that it really captures the memory but I seem to now like this version. The B&W image, further below, does show the glow in the grass better, but for this image a little bit of colour ties with the memory better.

The basic editing these 2 versions was to take the RAW file and adjust for reasonable white Balance. This is the image at the right at 5500K. The sky was too pale and washed out so I changed the WB to 6000K and inserted this as a smart object layer in Photoshop. The reason I use the smart-object layer is because once I mask out the grass and background I can adjust the WB to better match the grass colours in the foreground, which I did in this case. Without the strong yellow it was easy to set the blue to cool.

The 2 Camera Raw version, each with a different White Balance. The warmer setting of 6700 to increase the yellow in grass and background and a WB of 5050 to darken and add more blue to sky.




The next 2 adjustments were a gaussian blur (7px) on a duplicate layer and the masked just for the grass portion. This layer was set this to overlay mode at about 36%. There was curves layer applied just to this blurred overlay layer to fine tune the glowing effect.

Next 2 new layers were added each with its own mask. One to lighten the central corridor to red barn. The other to darken the 2 outer edges of grass to better define this luminous corridor.



The B&W version uses a B&W layer with a darkening of sky (blue slider) and some lightening on the red slider.
The very top right image just has a hue sat layer set at –45 saturation

The 3rd image which my wife likes the best uses a slightly different technique.
It uses a Hue/Sat layer set to Overlay mode and a 2nd Hue/Sat to increase red sat and reduce the blue. The blurred grass layer is set to lighten and reduced so as not to over power the other overlay layer.



Normally I would show you 3 versions of the same image but when I showed the samples, everyone had there own favorites.
Let me know which image, if any, you enjoy. I would be curious to understand how you see images like these.


Niels Henriksen

Up the Fjord to Oslo

My vacation to Denmark was a chance to visit family members I had never met before and until a few years they never knew I even existed. There are three very warm and loving nieces and nephew living in Norway. They treated us like royalty and the feasts if not to die for, were at least to gain weight for.

My three brothers also wanted to join my wife and I on the trip to Norway as the 4 boys had never traveled together and yes in someway we were like little kids again. They thought it would be exciting on the trip to take a ferry from Copenhagen and head up the largest fjord as we sail into Oslo.

The ferry is not the type of ferry I am used to in North America as it has 14 decks, with 2 swimming pools and a hot tub, movie theatres and numerous restaurants and a grat area for young kids.



As we leave, you can see the bridge that connects Copenhagen to Sweden. You can also see a few of the wind generators that are located in this sea and now make up almost 40% of Denmark’s electrical power needs. For some reason the caption did not want to back up the ship so I could frame the imager better.

We rented 2 cabins, one for the boys and another for the 2 wife’s that also joined us.
These cabins are not large and since I can suffer form claustrophobia went it is warm, dark and I am laying in bed, I was not able to get any sleep during the night. At about 3:00am I decided to get up and roam the decks until our scheduled breakfast at 6:00am.

The ship at night is a lonely place and with the constant rain outside even the open deck on top became a problem. I did find one overhang that provided about 3 feet of dry space for a chair. During my sojourn I only meet 2 cleaning persons and 2 deck officers.

The main reason that the ship leaves late in the evening is so that the passengers can sit in the restaurant in the morning and gaze out the windows and watch the spectacular scenery unfold and we head up the fjord. Being up early ensured that I was first inline when the restaurant opened and we got the front row, center seat and we were therefore able to see the vista on both sides of the fjord.

With a long telephoto lens (300mm effective) I was able to compress the distance and have the ferry behind us appear more realistic in size to the tiny lighthouse on the small island.


It appears that many other large ferries also have departure times that coincides with arriving early in the morning to be in the fjord.




It is somewhat strange to see towns high up on the cliff sides and almost no housing along the waters edge. The main reason is for some coastlines, is it is too steep and only access would be by water.

The image below is just as we are starting to head into Oslo, which is through the opening in the islands ahead of us. While it rained all night it just stopped a few minutes before breakfast, the skies remained overcast and occasionally the sun would peek through and provide a natural paint with light landscape.

Below is one of the islands just outside the harbour of Oslo and from the high vantage point on the ferry, it almost makes the houses seem like Legoland structures. The red ship is a ferry that goes to Oslo and if you look closely it is bringing oil to this tiny community. Not many trees to heat with.

We only stayed part of a day in Oslo and while other members were doing the shopping thing I had to do what I do best or is it incessantly and that is my photography. There was a small canal that ran through the city to the sea and I enjoyed the reflections created in the water.

If you have read my other posts you may realize that I have a strong affinity for the abstract and when I saw these colourful patio tables, I just couldn’t walk by without getting an image.

The windows below is one of my favourite abstracts or close-ups. The rich yellow wall is being complement by the warm purple windows. There are several diagonal lines formed by the wall trim and in the opposite direction with the window frame elements. Even the standard grouping of three comes into play.

It was a bit hard trying to select only a few of the images taken for this post as I wanted to provide just enough for enjoyment but not to inundate the readers with too many similar type scenes.


I have now converted the almost 1,000 better RAW images into jpegs and for my family, a DVD should be arriving soon. I didn’t use automatic conversion but decided to hand tune each slightly and I averaged about a minute each. These images represent me and something within me drives me to always make each photo the best. Even if I only send them to other family members. You never know when they will get posted somewhere else and I only want one standard for my work and that is the best I can do.


I still haven’t had a chance to really review and work any photos to the quality I want for saleable prints. This trip should provide me with enough material to keep me busy for years.


As a side note I have now also started to paint with oils. I did have some experience with watercolors, but oils require new techniques and approaches and right now I feel like such a beginner. I do hope I retire soon as I am running out of time to get all the projects and artistic endeavors underway. I sometimes feel that it was a mistake to pursue a normal career and I should have just stayed with the artistic passion that drove me at an early age,




To others, if you have something that gives you passion, don’t give it up for the standard career. You might be poorer early on, but the riches (not necessarily money) you will gain from your artistic work will keep you a lot happier, unless you are one of these troubled artists. I now really regret that I put things on hold for way too many years.


Thanks for taking the time to drop by.


Niels Henriksen

My Stay in Denmark, Norway and Trip Through Sweden

I have been back almost a week now and I am now finally adjusting to being back home. The hectic pace of being on the go for the month of August creates a vacuum in activity levels when you get home that make you wonder what to do next. Then at the same time there is the tendency to overdo the do nothing feeling and just relax.

The vacation to Denmark, Norway and Sweden was a family holiday, in fact a chance to see new family members who until a few years ago did not even know I exited. It was really great and special to meet all the gang and they treated my wife and I like visiting royalty. Every breakfast, lunch and dinner was a feast of great local delicacies that filled the entire table. There was extra weight brought back and not just in the suitcases.

For not being a photography holiday, I did take a fair bit of camera gear with me. See previous article for a list of items. If you need something, it is too far away to get it to you.

There was a last minute change in that I did take my tripod and I was glad I did and I left the gorilla pod flexible tripod behind. When I decided to test the gorilla pad on table for steadiness, it wasn’t that great for long zooms. I could have used the camera with the mirror up but this seemed too much work in trying to steady it. In all the years I have owned it I have not used it for one real photograph. I find with the new vibration reduction or image stabilization lens and the good high iso on the d300, I don’t need the tripod as much for low light settings.

Except for the few flower macro shots (Tamron 90mm di) I used the Nikon 18-200 f3.5 vr exclusively. This allowed me to carry with me at all times a camera in a small bag.

The images that I am showing in this article will each be, on its own, a photographic scenic essay.

Nikon 18-200mm vr @62mm (93=35mm), f11.0, 1/500s, iso 200

The white chalk cliffs on the south eastern part of Sjealland at Mons Klint, Denmark



After a review of the images (a rating system I use) I have 1001 images that are 2 or higher and 99 that are 3 or higher with a total of 1638 images and a storage capacity of 32GB.

Nikon 18-200mm vr @ 157mm, f5.5, 1/1160s, iso 400

Copenhagen is a city that is fully adapted to the bicyclist. Notice the separate roadway that has a curb departing the road. These end just before each intersection, but bikers have first green signal before cars can go. Also, no turning on a red light.


The old flashtrax 40GB storage device worked flawlessly in backing up all my CF cards. I highly recommend that, when on a maybe once in a lifetime adventure, there is some method to backup your images, in case something happens to the original storage device.

Nikon 18-200mm vr @27mm, f6.3, i1/1000s, iso 200

Old historic train yard and ferries from World War II.

Norway has a very special beautiful charm with its high rising treed cliff sides to tall snow capped mountains.

Nikon 18-200mm vr @200mm, f11.0, 1/500s, iso 200

I did manage one afternoon to get out by myself and explore the local shoreline in the small town of Nykobing Mors, Denmark.


Nikon 18-200mm vr @93mm, f10.0, 1/250, iso 200

This was my 8Gig afternoon were I decided I would fill up the card at about 18mb an image. This was easy to accomplish while shooting panos of the other coastline. It will be interesting to see how these will turn out. My nephew was hoping to get a B&W for his living room wall and I think that there is one that might work.

Nikon 18-200mm vr @50mm, f9.0, 1/800s/iso 200

Sometimes there are just interesting discoveries as you trek about. If you look closely, you will see a surfer on a kite sail. There were some good shots of them playing around on the surf.


Being near the northern oceans you can’t help but notice the intensity and strangeness that the sky and clouds can take on.




There were many good opportunities to capture a few images as we traveled around. There is this one spot near Rjukan, Norway were I kept the kind car driver on short notice as I would cry out “stop the car I just have to get this picture”. This was repeated almost every 10 feet it seems, as we traveled up and over the 5,600ft mountain ridge. This is where I may have gotten the one image that you think might have it all as I looked back at the rain entering one end of the valley town and the sun was shining through all this fine mist. You’ll have to wait for a future article to see this spectacular photo.


Niels Henriksen