On the street

If you ever seen a photo from Hallstat, it was probably from this spot. It gives the best view of the town. You will always see other photographers here and quite a lot of tourists taking snapshots. But it never to me, that there would not be a spot where I could put a tripod. Most tourist are there just for minutes, so it always changes. Just be careful of traffic, even if there are only few cars passing during the day, the street is quite narrow.

The bus stop

Right as you get into the tow, before you enter the walking zone, there is a buss top on the right. This spot gives a very nice view of the town. Completely opposite the first spot. Again there will be quite a few people here, but again, it changes quickly. There is a boat dock in the way a bit and you can’t get on it, but still the view is nice, especially if you zoom in.

Also if you want a photo with a swan in it, there are quite often around this area.

Parking area above the town

When you go through the city, you will notice signs pointing to the church that is a bit up the hill. You have to follow them, up a covered staircase to get to the church. Once you there, turn 180 degrees onto another walkway with another covered staircase and follow it. You will get up onto a parking area that is above the roofs of the town. The view is quite different to other spots here.

Down at the ship dock

If you want to get a bit closer to the water and get a photo of the front of the town, go here. Just know, boats dock here quite often, so especially during the summer, the view can be blocked. Not much issues during the Winter though. You can also see swans here quite often.

Five fingers viewing platform

Ok, Five fingers is not it Hallstat. Actually you have to go to the neighboring town of Obertraun, to this spot. From there you take two cable cars to get up to here, and you still have to walk about 20-30 minutes to get to the spot. But the walk is not that hard, as it’s quite even. Once there, you will get the best view in the area you can get. Just don’t go onto the Five fingers platform if you are scared of height :)

Elisabeth bridge in Budapest

The Elisabeth bridge is not my favorite bridge in Budapest. It just looks so plain in comparison. And the old bridge it replaced looked so much nicer. Too bad they changed the style. Still, I always looked for a nice composition with it.

I took this photo already few years back, but when I edited it afterwards, I did not like the result. So it was still in the photo library, but never finished. But few days back I tried to re-edit it again, and this time I liked the result. So here it is.

This photo is was taken from the Liberty bridge. Normally that’s not the best place to take night photos from. The bridge, as almost all bridges, shakes from the traffic, especially the trams. But the day I took this, the bridge was closed for traffic. It was full of people and there was some dance performance in the middle. I have no idea what the occasion was, but I was glad as I could take a nice photo because of it.

This is a three shot panorama, each shot from three exposures. Blended, combined in Panorama and finished in Photoshop. I did not use anything else here. It ended up being a 96Mpix photo, as I used the Sony a7R here and that makes for some large shots.

And here are few details:

New 4K wallpapers

I’m starting this page with these four 4K wallpapers, all with the same theme. This time they are all from Dubai. I will be updating the selection soon, as with only 4 it looks a bit empty. But until then, feel free to download these here.

Snow covered

I posted a similar photo last week, but I liked them both so here is another one. As snow is not that common in Bratislava, in the last few years, I had to take as many photos as I could of it. I don’t think there will be much more this year. And snow covered rocks at the Danube make for such a nice foreground subject.

As I mentioned, this is a blend of three exposures. It’s a vertorama where the top part is a blend of two exposures, and the bottom part is a single exposure. I combined them manually in Photoshop. It’s pretty simple, as the middle is a river, so you just blend them using a layer mask and a bit of painting with the brush. You can’t use any panorama software if you want to do a focal blend, as they will not align the photos that way.

Using SyncToy to locally backup photos

So how do one use it? First, decide on a folder you want to backup. Then, decide where you want to back it up too. So either a file-server, external drive or a second drive in your PC. In my case it’s a file-server, that is attached as a mapped network drive in my PC.

Continue by creating a folder pair with Create folder pair button. You can see in the screenshots, I have multiple, split based on whats in the folder.

Choose the folders, choose the type of synchronization, add a name to the pair and confirm. Since it’s a backup, use Echo as synchronization method. This will mirror you computer folder onto the backup folder, but not the other way around. So if you delete a file from your computer, and sync, it will be deleted also from the backup. Of course if you delete it accidentally, don’t sync, and just copy the file from the backup :)

Once the folder pair is done, you can just click on Run to sync them. But I prefer to first hit on Preview, that will list all the changes it will perform first. Like this I can quickly see what it will do. Once that is shown, I hit Run to finish the Sync.

Now just run this each time you want to run a backup and you are done.