Black & White

I was feeling a little more artistic with this one :) With all the snow it looked quite interesting in B&W, so I went with it :) Btw. if you click on the photo, it will be opened with a black background. Looks much better with it.

Frozen reflection

Another very soft blend. I blended this photo from three images, but I only used a +2 exposure to brighten the middle and the ice a little bit and a -2 exposure to darken the windows. Worked out very well :) Btw. this photo was taken a year ago. Lake Kuchajda is probably frozen right now, but there is no chance for a blue sky :)

First blended panorama

I’m continuing my attempts to learn manual blending of images. This time I went with a manually blended panorama from 4 sets of 6 brackets. Didn’t even take so long to blend, just the final touches took a long time :)

Most asked questions

I get asked a lot of questions about my photos, and they are usually the same :) So here are my replies to most asked ones :)

How do you edit your photos?

I mostly use HDR tonemapping using Photomatix and finish up my photos in Photoshop and Lightroom. Check out my HDR tutorial to see the details

Where did you take that photo?

To see the (almost) exact location for all my photos added this year, just find the relevant post on this blog. Under each photo you can find the location on Google maps. If you click on the Google logo, it will open a new window with Google maps and that location centered.

What camera and gear do you use?

I currently use a 5D mark II. For the complete list of my gear, check out the My gear page.

What were your settings with this photo?

If you want to know what were the settings, just find the relevant post, open it and under the photo is a list of all the camera settings. Or you can go to my smugmug portfolio, and there if you hover over a photo, you get a Photo information button. Click on it and all the relevant exif data is shown.

How many brackets do you take?

Simple answer, as many as I need :) But usually it is 7, that’s my default value :)

Earth vs. the Flying Saucer

Looks almost like a view from an UFO, invading Bratislava :) Actually it is a view from a restaurant called UFO :) This is another of my experiments with manual blending. Here I used two images, which were combined using masks in Photoshop, with some additional steps done after that (contrast, noise reduction, sharpening). For the comparison, here are the two original shots, that I used:

and here is the final result

My largest photo yet

I went a little bigger here :) It was more of a test than anything else, just to try out how to edit a photo like this. This photo is 200Mpix big, around 18000×10500 pixels :) It was created from 85 photos, 17 sets of 5 shot brackets (should be 18, but I missed one, good that it only was on the sky, so I could correct it). The composition here is a little off, still can’t really visualize how a panorama will look after stitching, still need more practice :)
Photos tonemmaped in Photomatix, then merged in PTgui.

Check out the small photo on the right, it is a 100% crop from it :)