Sunny day at the castle hill

Just another view of the Bratislava castle. I took this one just yesterday. As you can see, the weather was just beautiful. And the light was so nice, that I could get this image without even using bracketing. I could get all the light into one shot, without having any black areas or any overexposed areas. I even took this one handheld :). I of-course did HDR processing on it, to lighten the hill a little and darken the sky a little. But not very much.

Btw. those little tents, you can see next to the castle, were a food festival :)

Falling towers

At first I did a straight on photo of the Three towers in Bratislava. But it looked quite boring with the clear blue sky. So I searched for something to fill the frame better, and this is what I ended up with. They say, that you should never have the horizon under an angle of 15 degrees, as then it looks line you made a mistake. So I think that with the almost 45 degree angle in this one, I’m on the safe side.

Also this is the first photo I’m publishing, which is not done using tone-mapping. I used exposure fusion on this one (second technique available in Photomatix). Exposure fusion can give more realistic results than tone-mapping, but it’s not so good if the dynamic range is very high. But it worked quite nicely on this one. If you would like to see my Photomatix settings, head over to my Facebook page, where I uploaded a screenshot yesterday.

Brackets to play with

Few days ago I released the source brackets from one of my photos on my Facebook page. It is so anyone, can try and edit them. There are still available for download, so if anyone wants to try HDR processing, you can easily download and use them.

They can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/xeaj3in493k5kmu/FysTgnR8XW

A little tip on processing. You should correct the white balance first, tungsten works great here. Please share your results on my Facebook page, and if you want to share it somewhere else, please don’t forget to give me credit for the photo and link back to this page. Thank you

The Eiffel tower in Bratislava

I had no idea there is one in Bratislava. I just stumbled across it one evening while shooting around the Kuchajda lake. I wish I also had photos of the big one in Paris, but since the last time I was there was in 2000, I had absolutely no photos of it.

Number 15

I took this photo two times. One at F2.8 and one at F9. I just wanted to see the difference. And in the end I went with the one at F2.8. It blurred the background a little, which made the bikes stood out a little more. Sometimes really having the whole image sharp makes it just worse.

Red sky

Just one more fireworks shot for now :) I can’t wait until I have again a change to take more fireworks shots. It’s not so hard to get nice ones, just the problem is that most will have a very similar composition, as you can’t really move that much during the few minutes the fireworks happen.