New wallpapers

The desktop wallpapers page on my blog is one of the most visited, and was the most visited before I put up my HDR tutorial. And so there is a bigger reason to visit it, I added 4 more wallpapers to it. I’m also thinking of adding some dual-screen wallpapers to the site, I just can’t decide on the resolution. Any suggestions are very welcome.

Two statues by the entrance

I really like all the compositions that got together in this single photo. You have the symmetry of the chateau, the statues almost on the thirds and the horizon on the golden ration line. I took this photo in Valtice, in Czech republic. I was there only for a while, so I will definitively go there again this year.

HDR tutorial part 2

I went to sleep really late last night, but the second part of my HDR tutorial is online. This time the theme is preparing your photos in Lightroom and combining them in Photomatix. You can acess the tutorial either from the side menu, or directly here: Using Photomatix Pro

Hope the tutorial is helpful and all feedback and questions are very welcome.

The next part will be about correcting the most common HDR processing problem with the help of Photoshop. But that will be sometime later.

Last moments of sunset in Madrid

As you can see, my luck for days without any clouds stayed with me also in Madrid. For a moment I was thinking of cropping the sky, but I could get myself to remove even the smallest part of that beautiful sunset orange.

As the sun sets behind the rocks

It’s great how all the leafs get a gold color when the sun shine through them. The whole trees look like they were glowing. I hope the colors are alright on this one, as my Ipad show them really red. It actually shows all my photos, which have a lot of yellow and orange in it, as really red. I’m not sure where the problem is.

New Lightbox

Maybe some of you have already notice, but from now, when you click on a photo, you are no longer redirected to smugmug. Now you directly get a lightbox with a bigger version of the photo, and you can use the arrow keys or click on the big photo to go through all the photos on the page. I think that this is much simpler and more convenient way to the old one. I hope you will like it.

Open-Air Museum of folk architecture

I went with a very old photo today, over two years. It’s from the Open-Air Museum of folk architecture in Bardejovske Kupele in eastern Slovakia. There are many of them in Slovakia and also a huge number of wooden churches scattered around the country. I think it would make for a great photo series.

The original photo was horrible, and I tried to pull as much as possible from it. Check out the comparison, to see what I mean.

From the top to the bottom

It’s stunning how much you can get into one shot by using a wide angle lens. I set up my tripod low and close to the seas, so I could have the seats and also the ceiling in a single shot. And it worked. I used the Canon 16-35mm lens here, at 16mm. It created quite a lot of distortion, when you are so close to your subject, but I don’t mind.