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Bratislava, Slovakia

Hidden rock under the SNP bridge

March 23, 2017 No Comments

Trey Ratcliff’s European Photo Walk

Today Trey Ratcliff, from stuckincustoms.com announced his plans to host multiple photo walks across Europe. And as one of them is really close, in Vienna, I will probably attend. It of course depends if I’m at home at that time, but right now it looks that I will. Could be fun to meet up with other photographers from all over. So if any of you are joining, you may see me there :)

Hidden rock under the SNP bridge

I feel like I have not posted a photo from Bratislava in a while, so here is one :) This is a view from under the SNP bridge. You can get here quite easily, as there are stairs going down close by. But it’s only possible when the level of Danube is quite low. And also this rock in the middle, is only visible when the water is really low.

This is a blend of three exposures, done in Adobe Photoshop.

Austria

Sunlit view of Spitz

March 22, 2017 No Comments

Two lives

Sometimes I feel like I live two lives. I spend the last few days in front of my computer and Photoshop, and in few days I will be running around and taking photos somewhere in Netherlands. This are just such extremes in comparison. Like switching between two different lives :) When I had an office job before, it was much less eventful and calmer. But I don’t think I would like to go back to that.

Sunlit view of Spitz

I went quite light on editing on today’s photos. I try and try to move more towards more realistic and less destructive editing, and maybe one day I will be get there. So for this photo taken from the top of the castle ruins in Spitz, Austria, I just played with brightness and contrast of different areas, until I got what I wanted. After that I just needed to de-saturate the greens a bit, as they were, and still a bit are, very colorful. But I think that is fine for a midday shot taken in the middle of summer :)

This is a blend of two exposures, one for the base, and one to get some detail in the deep shadows.

Austria

A bench with a beautiful view over Hainburg

March 21, 2017 No Comments

Making mistakes

It’s funny, that even after years of taking photos, and knowing exactly what I have to use when, I still do mistakes. And one of course does not think about that until one gets home and loads photos into Lightroom. Let’s take today’s photo for example. I knew I wanted to use f22 to get a bigger sun-star. I know I wanted a sharp photo. But I forgot that at f22 I get refractions, and I should do also a shot at around f11 to f16, so I can blend them together. And I forgot about that.

Is the photo good? I think so (I would not share it otherwise :)). Can it be better? Definitively. Even if only I see the difference, that is enough. And I do see it.

A bench with a beautiful view over Hainburg

This is one of my favorite spots around Bratislava. Hainburg is not far away, and one can get to the spot with a car. The sunset was quite nice yesterday, as it rained the day before, and I thought I maybe get some nice photos from there.

For this I had to take quite a few brackets. 5 for the shot and another 5 with the sun covered, so I can remove the lens flares. In the end I used 5 exposures. One as the bas, one for the sky, one for the foreground and two to remove lens flares. All manually blended in Photoshop.

You can see a before after comparison with the base exposure on the side. There you can quite clearly see, how hight the contrast between the sun and foreground is.

A bench with a beautiful view over Hainburg

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Moon over Dubai Marina

March 20, 2017 No Comments

Moon over Dubai Marina

Still crazy tired today, just can’t catch up on sleep. So for today, one of the photos I already had ready. This is view of the Dubai Marina in Dubai, with a moon still quite low in the sky.

This is a blend of two exposures, created in Photoshop.

Austria, Linz

Ars Electronica in Linz

March 19, 2017 No Comments

While in Linz

As I mentioned yesterday, I did not have much time to take photos while I was in Linz. I got into the city to take photos only for about a hour in total during the whole week. But on the other hand, I visited few nice places there.

One of them was the Ars Electronica museum in the middle of the city. There I saw the Deep Space presentation, which is something like a 3D movie, projected onto the screen, but also on the floor. Seeing a space simulation (something like Google Earth) or a psychedelic 3D animation is quite interesting and worth a visit.

Ars Electronica in Linz

And the photo today is also of the Ars Electronica, during the blue hour. The museum (same as other buildings in the city) light up with bright colorful neon light in the evening. It makes for a nice view, but it’s a bit hard to capture them properly with a camera sensor.

This is a blend of three exposures, done in Photoshop.