Stellenbosch Campus in the morning sun
Stellenbosch University is often abbreviated SUN; so e.g. including the FQDN and email addresse add nicely up to rainerkeller _at_ sun.ac.za [1]. SUN is the proper abbreviation alright, when walking along campus as the Sun was reaching up over the horizon. There’s this one moment, the sun started hitting the roof of the building. This is shot exactly here at the statue of J.H. Marais.
So walking towards campus with the morning fog rising, I was walking right into this scene here.
Shooting photos into the sun is always a bit tricker/riskier. Playing with exposure time, now is much simpler, then it used to be; and even more so with this nice custom firmware 400plus that’s now on the Canon D400. Works very nice, e.g. to make Automatic Exposure Bracketing with the wink of the hand in front of the camera’s IR sensor.
This allows to take multiple shots, e.g. for HDR without a proper tripod but rather placing the camera on the roof of a car.
V.O.C. Kruithuis
Now, HDR is possible of course with the mobile phone’s internal camera; when not zooming, they even make decent pictures, like this one of the V.O.C Kruithuis shot right here, straight into the sun.
The old powder used to be the amory of the Dutch East India Company (V.O.C.); now the house now belongs to the Stellenbosch Museum. BTW this shot with the Samsung Galaxy S4 (GT-I9505) nicely shows, what the HDR can cope with and what not… Having this very same shot with the Canon and a -2/+2 bracket would have provided more detail; but then again, the Samsung was able to lighten the churches walls.
Franschhoek valley in sunset.
Last week-end (having a car) I did this trip to Franschhoek — that is the “French corner”: Huguenots, whose presence is still visible today. French street names or written as house names in Franschhoek, French last names. Also the names of the wineries like “La Motte” or “Provence” reminds one of their heritage. The valley is beautiful too. And it being evening, it allowed a shot otherwise not possible in Stellenbosch (as the valley opens up towards the West). This shot was stored as RAW and then converted using RawTherapee.
As said, the Stellbosch is situated basically between two hill ranges and the entry to the valley of Jonkershoek. Driving towards Franschhoek, one has to traverse the mountain pass — and coming back from the trip to Franschhoek I was driving right over the pass into the sunset. That was an amazing view — and hard to capture on camera. While some of the single pictures turned out “nice”, only a stitch of HDR can capture the view from the top of the Graff Wine estate down to Stellenbosch. Enjoy.
Sunset over Stellenbosch from Graff estate.
[1] Now incidently, me having typed many more UK- than ZA-email addresses so far, this led me to store a colleague’s address as sun.ac.uk — and send him dozens (well almost) emails — which all were discarded in the World-Wide Wasteland somewhere. No reply, no unknown address, etc.