Behind the Temple of the Three Graces

This is a really lovely temple, and it even looks better from the front. But as there were too many people there, to make a really nice shot. So I went and took one from the back :)

In the shot, the Temple of three Graces in Lednice, Czech Republic.

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 7D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod.

Chateau Valtice

I’m really happy with the composition on this one. It took me 6 tries to get the whole chateau and the whole reflection into one shot. There were just 1-2 pixels between the top of the tower and the end of the photo. I had to add a little bit to the top and bottom, and fill it using content aware, so it’s not completely at the border.

I’m not 100% happy with other parts of this photo, as I could really do with a little more brackets, especially few brighter ones. The difference between the brightly lit chateau and the surroundings was just too much for only three shots. Maybe next time :)

In this photo the Chateau in Valtice in Czech Republic. The bottom part is the reflection in the fountain in front of it. It was turned off in the evening, so it was almost like a perfect mirror.

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 7D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod.

Great week on Flickr

I had a really great week with my photos on flickr. A lot of views, most of the photos in Explore and even two photos on Explore Front page. I had these in explore

• Night Bridge highest position 44
• Last Summer highest position 31
• Wheels highest position 128
• New day begins highest position 22
• Almost full moon highest position 15

 

Thank you very much to everyone who visited, commented and favorited my photos :)

Salsa Gala

I usually post when my photos are used somewhere, and this is one of those times :). DJ Steeve Belgium http://djsteeve.be/ is having a Salsa-Kizomba Gala on a ship in Bratislava and he used my photos for the promotional banners :) I have already seen photos, but I can’t wait to see them printed this Saturday, when I visit this event.

Event Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=144186068993339

Few moments after sunrise

It’s really worth it to get up early. This photo was taken just few minutes after sunrise and I can really say, I’m happy with it :) The one really good thing, about this place is, that you can get there with a car. So it only took few minutes to get there :)

In this shot the Stary Haj area, near Krupina in central Slovakia

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 7D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod.

Entry gate

I had another sunrise shot for today, but then decided to go with something a little different. This is the entrance to the Bzovík Fortified Monastery in the village Bzovík in central Slovakia. It’s mostly in ruins, but it still is a great subject for HDR (and a little bit dangerous as the sign after the entrance warns :)).

I used a little different HDR processing on this one. I created a tonemapped image and a double tonemapped one (you hit tonemaping once more, when you are done in photomatix). Then I merged this two around 50% from each and I used the center part from the once tonemapped image.

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 7D with Sigma 10-20mm lens from a tripod.

Almost full moon

My plan for last weekend was also to take photos of the stars, as the 7D has quite nice performance on higher ISO levels. But I didn’t account for the very bright almost full moon. It was so bright, that the stars were almost not visible. So I took photos of the moon instead :)

I actually felt quite stupid when I took this. The reason was, that the setup I used, the 7D with a Celestron telescope, could only capture something above half of the moon and you couldn’t zoom out. And it took me quite a while to remember, that I can create a panorama from multiple shots, to capture the whole moon :)

This is not a HDR shot, I took multiple exposures, but the didn’t align properly and the HDR from a single RAW didn’t look right to me. So I just created a panorama from two shots, removed the distortion and did few steps I usually do in HDR post-processing.

Panorama from two shots, taken with Canon 7D and Celestron CPC 1100 GPS telescope.