Follow me on Ello

For the last few days I’ve been hearing about the new social network ello.co, so I thought I give it a try. My first impressions, are really very positive. Very clean UI, no visible compression on the images, nice responsive design. If you compare it to Facebook, it’s like comparing Google to Yahoo. One is clean and simple, the second is a huge pile of random stuff. Ello is currently invite only, but I hope they open it up soon.

So since I like the style, I will be posting to it for some time, you can say on a trial basis :). Let’s see where this network goes. You can find me there under https://ello.co/miroslavpetrasko and if you already have an account, feel free to follow me.

Blue hour in Zurich

Somehow, my photos from Zurinch are not that great. Somehow the light was just not the best. And since I was there only 2 days, I could not really wait for better one. But still, with a lot of tweaking, there will be few nice ones. There always are.

So for today, here is a blue hour shot taken in the center of Zurich, one, with a nice reflection to it. This is a HDR from 4 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

Behind the scenes in Dubai

These are two behind the scenes photos, taken earlier this year while I was occupied with taking photos :) They were recently posted by Marek Kijevsky (check out his photos on his Facebook page) who joined me for most photo shootings there. But I should give credit to his lovely wife Julia, as she took them :)

Btw. I’m the one on the right in the first photo, and on the left in the second :)

The curvy road

There were so many nice spots in the Alps. Just going along the road, we had to stop few times, so I can take more photos. Same here. I really liked the curvy road, even if I could not find a place that was high enough to see ti better. Still, it creates a nice path for the viewers eye to follow into the photo :)

This is a HDR from 5 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

I missed the opening hours in Basel Munster by few minutes (that happened to me a lot in Switzerland, everything just closes so early), but since the Cloister was still opened, I managed to get few photos there. I really liked the shapes the sunlight was creating on the floor, so that’s why I chosen this composition. Of course that made it a little more difficult in post-processing, and no HDR software works so great with such huge dynamic range, but overall, I’m quite happy with the result :). I also quite randomly took a behind the scenes shot while taking this photos, so I’m including it.

This is a HDR from 6 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

I was a little late when arriving to Zermatt, so I missed the last rail car by 10 minutes. And since I was not really in the mood to go up by foot, I stayed in Zermatt, taking a lot of photos from there. And luckily, the weather was just great, even if the sun was exactly next to the Matterhorn, so right in my shots. But since one still can get a nice shot into the shun, when using HDR, I managed to get a lot of nice shots. And here is the first one.

I used the technique of shading the sun with my hand here. You can read more about it in by How to remove Lens flares guide. Or just look at the Lightroom screenshot I’m including here, to see what I mean. For this one, I took two series of 5 exposures, one for the sun, one for the foreground. I created a HDR from both in Oloneo Photoengine and blended them together in Photoshop afterwards.

While in Zurich, I was thinking about going out for the sunrise. As I was there only for 1 and a half day, I wanted to get the most of it. But you know how it is, if one needs to wake up very early. So I set up my alarm for 5:30 am. And in the end, I woke up at 4:30 :) It’s actually quite great to be so early in the city. Almost nobody there, nobody in your shots, nobody in the way :) And the photo today, is one taken at around 6:30 am, right before the sunrise.

In the shot, the Grosmunster cathedral. This is a HDR from 4 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.