Learning Japanese

JapaneseHow are you goals for this year coming along? Maybe you remember I mentioned mine at the start of the year, and it was to learn Japanese language. And I’m quite happy, that I’m still sticking to it, just finished the first book from the Japanese from Zero series, and onto the next one. Still so much to learn. But it’s really nice now, when I watch a Japanese TV show or a movie, that I already can understand something here and there. And when sitting in a bus or train, the word repetition through Anki just make a trip fly by.

So what about you? How are you goals coming long? :)

Panorama at the Danube

This is another panorama I took last Monday down at the Danube river. The Danube was actually quite calm. This made the reflections nice an visible. I used steps that are at the shore there, to get completely down to the water and took a photo from there. There were few more spots I wanted to go to, I just could not find the steps there. There are multiple there, but under the snow, it was a bit dangerous to get down to the water, and I did not want to risk it. It happened to me once already that my foot slipped in between the rocks there, and that was without the snow. Better safe then sorry. One has to be always careful.

This is a three shot panorama, combined in Lightroom, edited in Photoshop.

Panorama at the Danube, Bratislava, Slovakia

And here are few details:

Panorama at the Danube

Focus blending

I wrote about focus blending a really long time ago, but as today’s photo is a really nice simple example, let’s shortly go over it here. With one part really close to the camera, the other far away, it’s really easy to blend them together if there is only water in between. The water will mostly not be sharp anyway, so you can just do one shot focused on the back and one at the foreground. Then just load both into Photoshop and using a simple graduated mask, blend them together.

I did the same for today’s photo, just with a small difference. I did it as a vertorama, where I changed focus between the shots. Some panorama programs will not merge a photo like this, but as I said, it’s easy to do it manually.

Snow covered rocks at the Danube

Behind the cameraIt was snowing quite a lot in Bratislava on Monday, but as the evening came, it all started melting. So I just had to go out to take few snowy photos before it all went away. I wanted a new nice photo of the snow cowered rocks at the Danube, and as the river is quite low right now, I got them.

This is a two shot vertorama, where I used two exposures for the top part (because I needed to tone down the bright lights of the castle) and one shot for the bottom part. Edited in Photoshop.

Snow covered rocks at the Danube

Under the snow

Today’s photo is a bit less colorful that most of my other photos. No surprise there, as when I was taking it, it was snowing, and really heavily. There were no big snowflakes though, so you can’t really see it that much.

Funny thing, while typing this post, the T key on my keyboard just stopped working suddenly. For no apparent reason. This is the third keyboard in a matter of months I’m having problem with. This is getting so annoying :/

This is a three shot panorama, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Under the snow, Bratislava, Slovakia

Orange fireworks

I had one more shot of the New Years fireworks already edited, so how about we close up the first week of 2019 with it. I promise I won’t post another fireworks photo for a while now :)

This is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Orange fireworks, Bratislava, Slovakia

Winter panorama

I’m quite happy I went out to take photo when it started snowing two days ago. Already it’s more raining than snowing, so I don’t think the snow will stay for much longer. It’s all melting already.

This photo is a bit softer than I would like. The problem was a very strong force wind on top of the SNP bridge. I had problem even standing still there, as it would push on me so much. A lot of photo I took came out completely blurry as the wind moved the camera. But some are nice.

This is a three shot panorama, merged in Lightroom and then edited in Photoshop. You can see the photo I took few minutes before this one here.

Winter panorama, Bratislava, Slovakia

And here are few details:

Winter panorama, Bratislava, Slovakia
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