What are you listening to?

I had this discussion with few photographers, and always got a response, that when they are taking photos alone, they are listening to music. Strange that I never do that :) I always listen to audiobooks. But never books with a story, they are always from the non-fiction category. Right now it’s the Packing for mars by Mary Roach. Really quite insetting book and makes one think different about space exploration.

So what are you listening to? I’m just curious :)

Clear sky over Dubai

With the weather being really horrible last few weeks in Bratislava, I’m inclined to edit more sunny photo. It just has been raining almost every day for the past three weeks. Sometimes I feel like not even getting out of bed in the morning :)

So for today, I chosen a photo taken right around lunch in the Dubai marina. Actually this was the first photo I took there :) My plane to Dubai was 3 hours late, and since the arrival time was 11pm, I arrived to the flat I was staying at, at 3 in the morning. So getting up at lunch was the earliest I managed. Actually I got up so late almost every day, as we were shooting usually until very late at night :)

This is a HDR from 5 exposures, crated in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop. Btw. the ISO 400 was a mistake. I change it so rarely, that I forgot to check it before taking the shot.

Photo shared by Huffington post

It always cool to see a photo of mine on home bigger page, and this time one was on the Huffington posts page. It was in an article called “Proof That Prague Is Europe’s Prettiest City”, so of course it was one of my Prague shots. For those who want to see the whole article, it can be find on their page :)

5 more days

5 more days to join my photo contest, sponsored by Oloneo. If you haven’t done so yet, now is the time :) Go here for details.

The huge crossing

This is one huge crossing, and looks just so interesting form high up. And so busy :)

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

Since there is currently a contest running, where you can win a copy of Oloneo Photoengine (more here), I though in this process post I show a photo where I used Oloneo Photoengine. This is one of the photos I took in Dubai, from the top of the Burj Khalifa.

So we look at how I got this result:

I took 4 exposures, from -2EV to +1EV (usually one does not need the +2EV, and it just takes too long, so I sometimes skip it). I loaded them all into Lightroom, where I corrected the white balance, applied lens corrections and chromatic abberation removal, and corrected the horizon line. Then I export all in full size as 16-bit tiff files. I usually don’t compress them at all, as I will delete them when I don’t need them anymore, and I use the ProPhoto RGB for color space.

Here you can see the original 0EV exposure:

From there I loaded all these brackets into Oloneo Photoengine. I actually changed only two things. The strength and the HDR contrast. That actually all I change most of the time there :)

And here you can see the Oloneo Photoengine result (also saved as a 16-bit tiff)

From there I loaded everything into Photoshop. The Photoengine result and also all the original brackets. There I did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up)
1. the Photoengine result
2+3+4+5. the original exposures. What I did was select the light parts and blend in the moving cars into the HDR, so I remove ghosting. In few ares I also hand painted small parts that I found too strange in the HDR
6+7. added glow to the photo (check out the glow tutorial here)
8. high pass sharpening
9. added more contrast to the whole photo using curves
10. changed the color balance for highlights (made them warmer)

And that’s all I did with this image. To find out more on how I edit, check out the guides and before after categories on this blog, or check out my video tutorial series here:

While taking photos of the Burj Al Arab was quite interesting. The light on top and on the nearby hotel changed quite often, and as many lights in Dubai, were very bright neon color. If you ever took a photo of something neon, you know how big a problem is to catch a nice color there. It just oversaturates everything a burns out any detail. But as I captured everything shining with a purple light in this photo, I decided to tone the whole photo in purple.

I was also thinking what to do with the very saturated top. In the end I only recovered it from one of the exposures, doing no desaturation on it. I think you can have one saturated color in a photo, as long as its not covering the whole photo. It creates a point that draws your eyes, but one also has to have less saturated part, for the eyes to rest. And I think it worked on this one (at least on my screen :) )

This is a HDR from 4 shots, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

This is a little teaser for those who still haven’t gotten my eBook on how to take fireworks shots. This are the first 4 pages of the book (it’s 26 in total) an it free for everyone. To get it, you just have to sign up for my newsletter, and in the confirmation email you get a link for download. And you don’t even have to be scared that you get a huge number of emails, as I usually post one only every 1-2 months :)

So check out these pages, and if you would like to read further, head over to the newsletter page to subscribe :) (or it can be done in the right sidebar).

And don’t forget about the contest, still 8 days to join :)