Two lives

Sometimes I feel like I live two lives. I spend the last few days in front of my computer and Photoshop, and in few days I will be running around and taking photos somewhere in Netherlands. This are just such extremes in comparison. Like switching between two different lives :) When I had an office job before, it was much less eventful and calmer. But I don’t think I would like to go back to that.

Sunlit view of Spitz

I went quite light on editing on today’s photos. I try and try to move more towards more realistic and less destructive editing, and maybe one day I will be get there. So for this photo taken from the top of the castle ruins in Spitz, Austria, I just played with brightness and contrast of different areas, until I got what I wanted. After that I just needed to de-saturate the greens a bit, as they were, and still a bit are, very colorful. But I think that is fine for a midday shot taken in the middle of summer :)

This is a blend of two exposures, one for the base, and one to get some detail in the deep shadows.

Making mistakes

It’s funny, that even after years of taking photos, and knowing exactly what I have to use when, I still do mistakes. And one of course does not think about that until one gets home and loads photos into Lightroom. Let’s take today’s photo for example. I knew I wanted to use f22 to get a bigger sun-star. I know I wanted a sharp photo. But I forgot that at f22 I get refractions, and I should do also a shot at around f11 to f16, so I can blend them together. And I forgot about that.

Is the photo good? I think so (I would not share it otherwise :)). Can it be better? Definitively. Even if only I see the difference, that is enough. And I do see it.

A bench with a beautiful view over Hainburg

This is one of my favorite spots around Bratislava. Hainburg is not far away, and one can get to the spot with a car. The sunset was quite nice yesterday, as it rained the day before, and I thought I maybe get some nice photos from there.

For this I had to take quite a few brackets. 5 for the shot and another 5 with the sun covered, so I can remove the lens flares. In the end I used 5 exposures. One as the bas, one for the sky, one for the foreground and two to remove lens flares. All manually blended in Photoshop.

You can see a before after comparison with the base exposure on the side. There you can quite clearly see, how hight the contrast between the sun and foreground is.

While in Linz

As I mentioned yesterday, I did not have much time to take photos while I was in Linz. I got into the city to take photos only for about a hour in total during the whole week. But on the other hand, I visited few nice places there.

One of them was the Ars Electronica museum in the middle of the city. There I saw the Deep Space presentation, which is something like a 3D movie, projected onto the screen, but also on the floor. Seeing a space simulation (something like Google Earth) or a psychedelic 3D animation is quite interesting and worth a visit.

Ars Electronica in Linz

And the photo today is also of the Ars Electronica, during the blue hour. The museum (same as other buildings in the city) light up with bright colorful neon light in the evening. It makes for a nice view, but it’s a bit hard to capture them properly with a camera sensor.

This is a blend of three exposures, done in Photoshop.

Destination Linz

I’m off to Linz in Austria this week. This is more of a business trip, so while I will be taking a lot of photos, nothing that I will be sharing. I will of course try to keep the blog updated every day, but hard to say if I manage. If not, I will be back to updating by the weekend.

Vineyards over Spitz in Austria

And since I am at the topic of Austria, here is a shot I took there about two years ago. This is taken from the vineyards, above the small city of Spitz. It’s a really nice area. You can drive with your car almost right up to this point, and the vineyards are not closed off. So you can go in and take as many photos as you want :)

This was during a very sunny day, which is not the best for photos, but I needed some daytime shots from here, so I took them. I returned here for the sunset, but with no clouds, it was nothing special. I’m again including a before/after screenshots, for those who are curious. If I remember to do so, I will maybe share that with more posts from now on :)

This is a blend of two exposures. A darker one for the base and a brighter one to open up some of the shadows. Edited in Photoshop.

Kong: Skull Island

I have not been in a cinema for very very long, so when I saw the trailer for the new Kong: Skull Island, I just had to go. I prefer to go to the cinema for visually stunning movies, and not really because of a story. And I have to say, Kong really did not disappoint. It was exactly what I expected it to be. An OK story, with no surprises, but with stunning visuals and cinematography. I look at it probably differently as an average viewer, but I just have to say I loved how they composed and post processed the shots. I really enjoyed it a lot. Strange that the reviews I seen were not that spectacular. Did they really expect an Oscar worthy story from this?

And I even enjoyed more, that the character in the movie, who was a photographer, held the camera like she knew what she was doing and even used a tripod for a long exposure shot. Who would expect such realism from a Kong movie? It sometimes funny to think, that on the set of a movie, there are so many people who work with cameras daily, and then in the movie the characters have no idea what they are doing.

So would I recommend this movie? Of course yes. Just don’t expect anything spectacular from the story, and just enjoy the show.

A summer day in Hallstatt

For todays daily shot, I’m sharing with you one of the few daitime shot I have. I really have to do more. This one is from Hallstatt in Austria, which I think was named the most beautiful city in the word some time ago, or something like that. And it really is a beautiful place. To bad it was a bit cloudy they day I visited. But it’s on the list for this year, so I hope it works out :)