I just could not fall asleep yesterday. It’s possible it was due to the full moon shining directly into my bedroom window. But as the sky was very clear yesterday I got up and set up the camera on the balcony of my flat. Just for fun, to see what I get. And I was pleasantly surprised with the result. Even while shooting in the middle of a city, I got very nice star-trails. This gives me a lot of ideas where to try this next time :)

This is a blend of 86 exposures in Photoshop. The big bright line on the top is of course the moon. Looks almost like a falling asteroid, like in the movie Armageddon :)

The Narrative clip

Yesterday, finally after a year of waiting, I got my Narrative clip camera. For those unfamiliar with it, its a small wearable camera, that automatically takes a 5Mpix photo every 30 seconds. It also stores the GPS location into every photo. The main purpose of a camera like this is to document your complete life. I personally don’t plan to do that, but I will like to use it when I take a photo trip to a new city. I’m usually preoccupied with looking around for good photos pots, and this camera will make a very nice behind the scene documentation.

I tried it a little the last two days, and it’s mostly what I thought. The quality of the photos is on par with a last years phone and as they say, around 5% of the photos are ok. Many of them are blurry, but with the number of photos taken, you end up with enough good ones anyway. I will try it more on my next trip (probably the Dubai one) and will post a review and more sample shots later.

Two towers

Some photos are exactly how I would like them to be. Like this one. It’s nicely sharp, the colors are saturated, but not over-saturated, there is a nice clarity and it feels real, like if you were standing there. To bad not all my photos are like this yet, but I hope more and more are. There was this slogan in a commercial a long time ago “not always, but always more often”(does not sound as good as in the original German :)) and I try to have a similar view of my photos :)

This is a manual blend from 3 exposures.

Taking photos at the same spots can get quite repetitive. One tends to see the same compositions and it’s sometimes hard to find a new one. So for this classic view, I though to use a little bit of framing. And I also wanted to cover up the boring sky, so it worked out quite nicely :) I actually behave quite stupid here. I seen the composition, but then I walked across the snow. And I really wanted no footsteps there. So I had to find a new spot with the same view.

This is a manual blend from 4 photos. I took 10 in two series of 5, one focused on the castle, one on the tree. I then blended only those I needed.

Planing my first trip for this year

As I mentioned few posts ago, I need to plan some trips for this year. And just today, I started planing the first bigger one, as I bought a ticket to Dubai :). I still have to wait a month before I go there, but I already can’t wait. It will be 7 days filled with photos, photos and more photos :)

A little bit of snow by the river

I like to tone my photos more towards the blue, but I really liked this soft yellow/red cast this one had, so I let it be. I could even make this shots from a single exposure, but in the end I used there. I’m just so used to blending, that it’s sometimes easier to do it, than to get more from a single photo. And blending usually results in less noise anyway.

This is a blend from three exposures, created in Photoshop.

I just started planing my first trip for this year, but as that’s still quite a few weeks away. So until at least the weather gets better, so I can get some new photos, I have to do what I always do :) Look through my old ones to choose which one to edit. It’s really not that easy to have a daily photo blog. Especially in days like this, when I have so much other work, and no time to edit. But I haven’t missed a day in over three years, and I don’t plan to :)

So for today, a HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine and finished in Photoshop. For those who don’t know this bridge yet from my photos, it’s the Apollo bridge in Bratislava.