Sun position

The site http://suncalc.net is really a great tool for any photographer. For any time and position, you can check the sunset times, and the suns position. Another great program, if you have an android phone, is SunDroid. I always check it when I choose times, when to go take new photos.

Blue hour in Bratislava

This is not my first photo called blue hour. Maybe I do a series, of photos taken with the bluest sky possible :). I have no idea whats the name of this building, but it has quite an interesting shape, so I had to take a photo :)

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod.

How to get your photos into Flickr Explore

I had a lot of my recent photos in Flickr Explore selection, and I got questions how I got them there. It really hard to answer, as Flickr tells you nothing about how they choose the photos. It’s mostly quite a surprise when a photo gets there. But here are a few tips, which when I started following, I got more photos into explore.

• Take good photos. The more views, comments and faves you get, the sooner you get explored. Also if the photo looks interesting as a small thumbnail, the more hits you get.
• Share links to your photos on other sites, as Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon and similar.
• Forget about Flickr groups. There is a penalty for adding your photo to a group. I never had a single explored photo, while I added them to a group.
• Add a single photo a day. Only one of you photos can be explored and you are maximizing you chance by adding only one.
• Add your photo in the morning. I usually do that at 10AM my local time (central Europe) which is sometime very early morning in US.
• Tag your photos with relevant tags. This will maximize you change getting views from searches.
• Geo-tag your photos. Again, this will help you get views.
• Be active on Flickr. Don’t hesitate to comment and fave other people photos. I already have few thousand favorites.
• Add a description to your photo. No description will make you look lazy, too much description and nobody will read it. Few lines is enough. The more interesting description, the more comments you will get.

This may help you, but may not. It will just make your changes greater. What helps the most is having a lot of Flickr contacts, as your photo will show up to them when they visit Flickr.

You can also check if your photos got explored here http://bighugelabs.com/scout.php or here http://lab.bernatcasero.com/?lang=en

Best luck to you all on getting your photos explored :)

Passage

Always when I see arches, I center my photos. I really like the symmetry in such shots :) Another thing what I did here is double tonemapping. It brought out really a lot of detail in the walls. I took this photo last week, while taking a little photo walk in Bratislava Old town.

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod.

Facebook page

I still cant decide, whats a better way to publish my photos on Facebook. I have booth, a fan page http://www.facebook.com/hdrshooter and a personal timeline page http://www.facebook.com/miroslav.petrasko 

I think the timeline looks better, but again, the page already has over 500 fans. I wish they would change the pages, giving a little more customization options (and bigger photo previews). What do you all think?

Path through the Botanical Garden

A simple photo, compared to the one I posted yesterday. But nice :). Something to remind us, that the summer is not so far away. Photo taken last summer in the Botanical Garden in Bratislava.

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, handheld.

Explore Front page

I would never thought, that the photo I took from my balcony will get onto Flickr Explore front page :). But it did :)

Entrance

So today I have a photo of the entrance to the Primate’s palace in Bratislava. As I took it at night, the HDR was really yellow, so I decided to remove a lot from the yellow color, giving it a more daily look :)

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod.

The Mystery of the Blue Train

That’s the book I’m currently reading by Agatha Christie. And in the middle of editing this photo I noticed, that this is also a blue train. What a coincidence :). I took this photo last summer in Bratislava at a train gathering Rendez. I went for a little different look here. This is also my first HDR in which I haven’t used Photomatix. I used Oloneo HDR software here.

HDR from three shots. Taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod.