Wow this was such a huge amount of birds. I have been in Prague many times, but never seen so many of them there at once. In one moment, it looked like the completely covered the Vltava river, from side to side. And since there were many people feeding them in this areas, they concentrated really close to where I stood.

It was quite a spectacle, just too bad the weather was not a bit better, more fit for photography.

The bird invasion in Prague

For this photo I had to decide to either go with a quick exposure at hight ISO, to freeze the motion, or with a slow shutter speed and blur it. Of course I did both and got few shots in both setups. When going throught the photos afterwards, this is one I liked the most. It has a nice balance. The movement is there, but its not as much so one doest not see the birds anymore. It’s just enought.

This is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

VFFOTO

VFFOTO is a smaller manufacturer of photo filters, based in the Czech republic. They mostly specialize on circular filters, but offer also some square ones. They kindly provided me with two filters from their range for a test. The GS ND 1000, which is a 10 stop ND filter, and the GS ND 2000 which is a 11 (!) stop ND filter. Both circular, in the 77mm size.

You can see their products on their official Czech site www.vffoto.com.

I tried both on the Canon 24-70mm F2.8 lens with the Canon 5D mark IV. I also took the same shots with the Formatt Hittech firecrest 10 stop ND filter, for comparison.

VFFOTO GS ND 1000

So let’s first start with the GS ND 1000 filter. This is a 10 stop circular filter. The build quality looks great and it has a very thin profile, to avoid vignetting. Here you can see how it performed compared to the Formatt Hitech firecrest square filter. All photos have the same ISO, aperture and white balance. The only change is the exposure time. The first one, without any filter has an exposure time of 1/30 of a second. The filtered ones are both at 15 seconds.

Here is the first series of photos:

No filter

Formatt Hitech

VFFOTO ND1000

And here a second one, focusing more on the water.

No filter

Formatt Hitech

VFFOTO ND1000

As you can clearly see, there is quite the difference. Where the Formatt Hitech pushes the color quite a lot towards blue/green, the VFFOTO has a much smaller effect and the final color is more towards yellow/purple. The VFFOTO is also much more closer to the no filter exposures. On the other hand, the VFFOTO filter introduces more vignetting, but I presume that is due to the difference in filter types (square filter is bigger, therefore less vignetting).

When looking at sharpness and chromatic aberrations, I can’t really say I seen any difference between the no filter shots and the ones taken through the filters. It looks about the same in all of them.

Overall I think the result from the VFFOTO filter is quite good. It needs a bit of tweaking, as with all ND filters, but it’s quite close to how it should be.

VFFOTO GS ND 2000

This is a more unusual filter. Most companies darkest ND filter is a 10 stop, not a 11 stop one. One tends to stack the filters to get them as dark as this one. As I did not have a second one, I had no filter to compare it with. So what I did, I took the exact same shots as with the 10 stop filters, but of course with double the time. Here you can see both of them, both taken with a 30 second exposure. The results came out very similar to the 10 stop ones.

The color cast, sharpness and chromatic aberrations look all the same as with the 10 stop VFFOTO GS ND1000 filter. It is really impressive how much you can stretch the time with a filter like this. From 1/30th of a second, to full 30 seconds, without the need to change any other settings. It makes for some buttery smooth photos. And to show you that, I tried one at full 4 minutes. To be exact, I did it twice, one at ISO 100 and one at ISO 400 to get a +2 EV exposure. And here you can see the final blend. It was not a very colorful evening, but it does show how nice and smooth everything is.

Overall, both filters create some very nice results, and I can’t wait to use the more, once the weather get a bit better.

Trying out Plotagraph Pro

For the last few days I have been experimenting with the Plotagraph Pro. I wanted to try it earlier, but I did not want to pay for a full year without trying it out first. And since they introduced a monthly plan recently, I thought I will give it a try.

I have to say, I’m enjoying it quite a lot. It’s quite fun to add a bit of movement to a photo. It makes it look quite mesmerizing in a way. I already edited quite a few, and I still want to try it on more photos, so I will share with you some in the following days and weeks.

Please note, I’m sharing the plotagraphs as looping mp4 videos, not as gifs. The reason is that I can get a much smaller file (10-20 times smaller) and of a comparable or higher quality with MP4 than with a GIF. So if you are on mobile, or are using an older browser, it may be that you will see a static image, instead of the motion. I’m looking into how to make it work on all browsers, but have not found a way yet.

I have been updating this blog for almost 7 years now, with over 2000 posts and pages. And to keep the site fresh, I like to updated it every 1-2 years with a new, hopefully better, look. And you may have already noticed, if this is not your first visit, that yesterday evening the site changed again.

New look for 2017

This time I went with a more open look, with bigger photos, full screen sliders and more. The biggest change I did, was to return the full blog to the front page. While I liked the way it was showcasing all different content from around the site before, I noticed that a lot of things got last that way. As I like to include all the new stuff in daily post, it was missed by those that only visited the frontpage. So like this, with this latest update, it is right there in the center.

The return should also bring back the easy way to look over recent posts. Lets call the last years theme an experiment. While there were things I liked, and I will keep, there were also ones I did not like. You know how it is. You may like something on the first look, but over time you start seeing faults.

So I hope you will like this new look, and you will enjoy visiting my blog more than you did before :)

And as always, please note that there may be some errors here and there. I did tweak the theme I use quite a bit, and while I tested it for over a week on my local server, it’s never exactly as on the live one. So some problems may arise. I try to correct all I find right away, but as I mentioned, there are over 2000 posts here, and I just can’t go over everything.

RAWs from Canon 5D mark IV

As today I’m sharing with you a photo from the 5D mark IV for the first time, I thought that you might find it interesting to have a look at the RAW files. So from here you can download the two RAW files I used to crate this panorama.

Feel free to check them out, but as always, please don’t use them for anything else without my permission.

The bridge in Vienna

As I mentioned yesterday, I already wanted to try out the 5D mark IV. But since the weather is still quite bad and everything looks quite gray, I needed a spot where this would not be such a problem. I decided for the hill Leopoldsberg above Vienna. Since I would be taking photos of a city from far away, I will not be able to see how the trees have no leaves and similar. Just the colors of the city.

And as the weather played along, this is what I got. The shot came out a bit less colorful that I hoped, but I let it be. This is close to what it actually looked like. This is a two shot panorama, combined in Lightroom, finished in Photoshop.