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 Many Colours of Fall

I was visiting a good friend for a Thanksgiving weekend (Canadian), which in Ontario is just at the peak of the Fall colours. I brought my camera to get some photos of their grandkids playing around and maybe other images of the other guests celebrating the great friendships we have and of course, then sitting down to one of those great feasts that is spread end to end on large dinning room tables.



The photo has a special meaning for me and maybe that is why I have a particular fondness for this image. I do like the stark silhouettes set against the vibrant and brilliant sunlit fall foliage across the pond. There is just a suggestion of detail, the white stripes and the silver belt work and a small hint of skin tones that give them some depth. The 2 people seem to be gazing out over something. Also the red life jacket seems to add another element and its red colour being in the foreground harmonizes well with the fall colors in the background.

There was a third person in the original photo, but for my own reasons I only wanted these two.

It was a reasonably straightforward process to remove the 3rd person, except for the fact I took a slight detour down the path. Like driving a car, some routes are almost automatic. I at first decided I was going to mask out the person and using the same image below move it to another part of the reflection over the opening and using the transform tool to increase size to better fit the opening.

The 3rd person mask was easy, as it only needed to be slightly larger than the person. Objects like foliage with no clear structure blends well, as you can go over the mask edge to pick more or less from one side to suit the natural lines.

It was then I realized that by inverting the image I could use the original foliage and with a little blurring and sizing work make a perfect fit.


I marked 2 cross-hair style grids on the correct version and at a diagonal to each other to determine if there were any angle corrections needed in the inverted alignment.


The bottom part of the image shows the inverted image and how it was compressed vertically to fit the size of the reflected pond.

The inverted image was set to a blur of 5.9 to match the level of blur in the pond surface. Now the new blurred part matched the removed person cutout, but the colour tones were way too smooth.

When I examined another section of the pond I found that the noise was not just speckled but had short vertical patterns also.

The above pattern was created by creating a new layer and adding noise
Add Noise: 200%
Motion Blur: angle 90; distance 26.
Add Noise: 10%
Add Noise: 125% and fade to 8% as I wanted a little more of a building block texture

This layer was set to overlay and reduced to 4%, which seemed the best match the area beside the masked 3rd person.





The above image shows another angle overlooking the pond and a clue as to what the lifejacket was meant for.


Niels Henriksen

A Photographers Adage


The difficulty with color is to go beyond the fact that it's color – to have it be not just a colorful picture but really be a picture about something. It's difficult. So often color gets caught up in color, and it becomes merly decorative. Some photographers use [ it ] brilliantly to make visual statements combining color and content; otherwise it is empty. -. - Mary Ellen Mark,, Mary Ellen Mark : 25 Years by Marianne Fulton , ISBN: 0821218387 , Page: 5

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

Your Body of Work or Life Long Project

How many of you are aware that you might be creating a Photo legacy, a Body of Work or Life Long Project(s) by documenting what may appear to be ordinary and commonplace today?

There are several reasons I ask this.

The first is what got the idea going when I was reading one of the photography book reviews on the blog The Online Photographer , I came across a sentence “

His elegiac black-and-white images of America's heartland railroads, bridges, small towns and farms quietly document a world that is passing out of sight.


These people were documenting the places and moments frozen in time, that they love and most likely did not envision at the time that the life they were depicting would disappear in the future.

I suppose maybe some were visionaries and did foresee the disappearance of certain qualities of our everyday life.

With the images of trains I took in Norway I came to the realization that I was collecting images that maybe in the future, many years form now, would form an extensive collection on a specific mode of transportation. The Train. Not that this was original, but for my own pleasure, I was collecting a body of work.


The 2 train engines above are the same model as the 2 that sank in the bottom of this deep lake. The ferry was blown up in WWII by commandos as the Germans were transporting their heavy water back to Germany for nuclear research. At each end of the lake were ferries and at this end there was also a collection of old train cars from the same time period.


It did not start out this way. My first goal was to create a sixptych (3 over 3 images) of trains. I haven’t yet exactly determined the final composition. It will mostly be whole cars and sections of trains. The final mix is not there yet as I still need more to choose from.

It occurred to me since I was compiling and collecting train images that if I were to continue for many more years that one day I might have a good assortment of images that would form a good gallery collection or a photo book on the subject.




There are many things around us today that in 20, 30 years from now, maybe even sooner will disappear or not be in the same mode that we presently enjoy.

I think the traditional gas station might be such an entity. If we continue with the development of alternative source of fuel and if one day we all plug in our electric cars at home, then why the need for gas stations.

What about the music record stores? Especially the old media formats with the LPs, tapes and now CDs?

Do you have any ideas for such candidates for life long photo projects?

Please share your ideas. It might help inspire you to discover a hidden interest.



Take the time to look at the images you have already been collecting and see if there are any subjects and trends that might be a possible theme.

If you’re just starting out compiling images and no project identified, I don’t think that trying to second-guess our technology landscape should be a primary driver in your choice of theme. It should be just plain old curiosity about the common nooks and crannies that we see around us. It should be the need to explore how you or others interface, communicate, ignore, or adapt to the ever-changing society we find ourselves in.






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

The White Cliffs of ….. Mons Klint?

On one of our daily excursions while on Sjealand we headed to the most south-eastern part you could get to on this main island of Denmark. In fact you have to cross a bridge to get to the island of Mon, which is just a kilometre off shore.

This area has spectacular white chalk cliffs that are just overpowering in beauty as you walk about along the shore.

The image below demonstrates one of the classic photographic adages that is, you should always check behind you. More a joke here as it’s hard not to gaze around while walking along the beach.


This is one of my favourite images for several reasons, at least from those attributes I find intriguing. For most of us, there is always this special fondness for ocean scenes and if you can include that surreal luminous tropical turquoise, well what’s not to like.

This might get you the initial “wow” appeal but only momentary. It’s the subtle detail of all the black cormorants on the posts and that there is this almost ghost-like sailing ship that looks like a duplicate of the central sailing ship.




The sign at the beautiful treed landscape up top says, 1.2km and 580 steps to the bottom. On the way down it doesn’t seem such an onerous task even though when you watch the people coming up you can’t help but be concerned about their overall health, as it sure doesn’t look good for some. Thankfully about every 50 feet there are these small 8x8 extension on the wooden stairs where there are benches to sit and rest. These are also great spots to take in some of the landscape.


Sometimes it is good to have a good sized pixel camera as you can make large prints with fine detail, as shown above, with the close up of the people along the shore,




Once you start the descent, there are no detours until you get to the pebbly shoreline at the bottom. There are so many steps that even going down took a while.

The cliffs are made out of very soft and easily dissolved white chalk that rise almost straight up. Threading through this white surface are curved black lines of solid mostly black rocks, which is left to form the beach..

On a sunny day, the powerful brightness of the white cliffs is hard to capture on film as with all these white cliffs around, you are constantly being bathed with the luminous glow of heavenly light. With the power of this radiant wall of light, it feels like you are in a studio with all those light (reflectors) shining on you.


These cliffs are about 425 ft high. The group thought that they would take the shorter stair set of 480 steps that was about a kilometre and a half along the beach. What we didn’t realize was the up and down hilliness of the forest on the way back. Even this set of stairs proved to be a long journey with many scenic opportunities to sit and gaze.



The image above shows the net-fishing poles from a higher perspective than that shown in the first image. I have darkened the poles to make them stand out better in the small image.




These cliff faces are pure white with the odd bit of other rocks strewn amongst the layers. I thought I would, through the use of a B&W image, capture a bit of the brightness and still retain the interesting texture in the cliff face.


The ocean side can also provide good photo opportunities with the four colours of white, turquoise, purple and blue.




After an exhilarating day of hiking around, we decided to stop in the old village of Stege on the way home to find a restaurant. One of the storefronts didn’t appear to be a restaurant but a meat and deli store, as you can see from the image below. But upon entering, there was a huge room on the other side with dining tables.



It turns out that the restaurant offers an all you can eat buffet of salads, cheeses, hot items and other assorted prepared platters. You would order from the counter the meat, fish, poultry or other specialty items, at a price per kilo and they would cook it for you.

It was a special pleasure to eat in a building that was more than many hundreds of years old, with its high ceilings and the outdoor treed courtyard. The warm summer breeze helped to a complete a perfectly visual day.


Niels Henriksen

Copenhagen Bicycles

Since I had been to Copenhagen before, I new I wanted to capture a few camera images on cycling in this city. Cycling is a way of life in Copenhagen and the city planners have done a great job of integrating the bicycles within the urban and vehicle structure of the city.

On the wider streets there are separate lanes at the edge of the road that is separated by a curb that is for exclusive use of the bicycle and the few motorcycles (less than 30km/hr). This means that the traffic doesn’t mix and should there be an obstacle on the road, a car will not suddenly swerve over to go around and accidentally hit a cyclist. Also, the traffic lights provide a few seconds of advanced green for pedestrians and cyclists.



The first thing that impressed me besides the vast number of cyclists is that most bikes were the basic black with only 3 speeds (internal hubs). Bikes were everywhere, not just on the road and in the downtown area they were lined against the building walls. Many had simple locks for the rear wheel only and most were not locked to any immoveable objects.

Trying to photograph bicycles in an urban setting is not an easy task if you want some drama or punch in the image as there is way too much clutter on the street that just distracts from the main subject.


I had to rely on other items in scene providing interesting colour or backdrop to simplify the image. In the image above the bus right behind the bicyclists provides such a backdrop. There were a fair number of these 3 wheel bicycles with the 2 wheels and carriage upfront. These include a canvas cover for the many times it rains in Copenhagen.


On sunny days these carriages are exposed for all of us to view its contents.

These special bikes become chariots when one is driving his well dressed lady friend out for a fine dinner on a warm summer evening.

Occasionally, as you wander about you will find opportunities with simple scenes where you can use colour to harmonize the image.

And if you are really lucky, the city will provide better photographic images that have stronger elements.

I decided to make this a center-focus image because the orange bike was playing off the orange garbage container with the man sitting in the middle. The bright colours on the background help to anchor the vividness of the orange. The bike lying down creates a bit of a story as the bike does not seem to be connected to the person except for its proximity.

In the downtown core, there are several large parking lots, sections of streets that are reserved just for bicycles. It’s hard to capture the true size of these areas. In the image below, the bikes go all the way back to the red object.

There were only a few of the wilder styles, but as with most bikes only locked, if at all, to themselves.


Every now and then you would run across an old bike, a veteran from the days when there were work horses at the local grocery stores.



Keeping your camera permanently glued to your body allows you to stumble onto images that are just a little different than the rest.

Or come upon a fellow tourist, who has rented a local bike and then he is out photographing as well.

I found the image below interesting only for the fact that the red was all tied together with the hydrant, spokes, “runes” letters on stones and writing on window.

It’s not easy trying to collect very good images of bicycles over a 2 day period as the great ones really depends on being at the right place at the right time. I am sure that if I lived there that over a period of time I would be able to get a few great images. But it was worth the effort to see what I could capture and a few of them I do like.

Niels Henriksen



Photographers Showcase.

The following site Cycle Chic - Copenhagen Girls on Bikes provides a good photography of bicycling in Copenhagen with a focus on girl power. It has been described a social documentary on high heels.



This site Copenhagen Magazine provides videos and photographs of cycling within and around Copenhagen Denmark.