New look for the blog

Recently I felt that my blog needs a little visual refresh, so I’ve been working on it, and today I finally put in on the live server. I think you have all noticed the change already, so there is not much I can say about it :) I just hope you all like it. I changed a lot of stuff, including how the page scales in the browser window, so if any of you see any problem, or bugs, please let me know.

Light tree at the sunset

I really like winter, but with absolutely no snow, I just can’t wait for spring. How much could this photo look differently if everything was covered by snow. The tree would just not looks so out of place.

This is a 5 exposure HDR created in Oloneo Photongine. I then blended in a brighter tree, removed few people and added glow in photoshop. And that’s it.

I don’t do that much astrophotography, as most of my photos are from cities, and you can’t get any stars there. But as I was in a less populated area during Christmas, I tried to take few shots also of the starts. And the day I took this, we got to the cabin around midnight. Most of the day, the sky was covered by clouds, but just a short time before it cleared. And as it was not that cold, I had to take few shots. I’m just sad, that at that time I did’t know that there was a second cabin a little behind this one, which would give me a much better composition. I just found that out the next morning, when we were leaving the area :)

This is a blend from two exposures in Photoshop.

You want to learn how to capture fireworks and would like it to be in a nice ebook? Than this is for you. I put together a 25 page ebook, specially for those who want to lean how to take photos of fireworks. And with not so many times when you can get those, it’s always best to know as much about it as possible.

In this ebook you will learn:

• what you need to take fireworks shots
• what to look for
• how to setup your camera
• how to edit a captured photo
• see one of my photos from start to finish

And all in this handy pdf eBook. It perfect to read on a tablet.

How to get it free?

This ebook is for free for all newsletter subscribers. Just enter you email, submit, and once you confirmed you subscription, you will gets a confirmation email with the download link.

Subscribe here.

Here you can see a little preview, and few of my other fireworks shots I took using the method described in the book.

On this page I will share with you all the eBooks I have written. Only one for now, but everyone has to start somewhere :)

Capturing fireworks – what you need to capture fireworks, camera settings and more

Because of the New years, I missed this weeks processing post. But to correct this, there will be one today. And from next week, it will get back to a processing post every Tuesday. So for today I chosen a photo from Paris, taken from the Tour Montparnasse.

So to get this photo, I as always started in Lightroom. I corrected the white balance and the crooked horizon. After that I exported all the files as 16bit Tiffs and loaded them into Oloneo Photoengine. There I only changed the strength, as that’s all I needed. Using Bridge, I then loaded all the files into layers in Photoshop. From there I did the following tweaks (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. 0EV exposure to recover the shadows using a hand-painted mask
3. -2EV exposure to darken the sky even more
4. Color Efex pro contrast, to get more local contrast in the image. Of course I removed the effect from the clouds
5. Color balance on the whole image, as it was too purple
6. High Pass sharpening
7. Added more contrast through a basic midtones mask
8. Desaturated the blue channel on the most saturated areas
9. A little more pro contrast, I felt like I need more detail in the city
10. Added contrast by using curves

And that was all. Please continue to the full post to see the 0EV exposure and the Oloneo result or to the original blog post to see the exif info for this image.