Rainy night monuments

I’m not sure if it’t the rainy day, the cold I caught somewhere or that they switched time to winter time today, but I’m just so sleepy today. And I slept most of the day also. Still sleepy though. At least it’s Sunday and I had nothing else planed anyway.

But still, here is a quick update to the blog with a new photos. The one for today, is from Astana Kazakhstan, and combines the Expo 2017 sphere building, with the crazy abstract monument right next to it.

This is a blend of three exposures. The base, a darker one to darken the highlight of the statue, and a brighter one to brighter the dark shadows on the building in the background. Edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

New free ultra-wide wallpapers

It’s time to again update the wallpapers section of this blog with some new wallpapers. Today it’s again a batch of 21:9 wallpapers, fit for an ultrawie monitor. All are again in 3440×1440 resolution and can be downloaded with all other available ones from the wallpapers page here.

And here are the new ones :)

Autumn colors reflection

By a coincidence, today’s photo is another long exposure. Even if it does not really look like it is. I took a photo at the Strbske Pleso lake in High Tatras, Slovakia. It was a bit windy day, so there were ripples in the water. To get around it, I used a 10 stop ND filter, to lengthen the exposure. This time I used the VFFOTO 10 stop circular filter, as when using the 70-200mm lens, it’s just easier to use one of these than a square filter. You can find my review of this filter here.

For this photo I used a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Passing clouds over Astana

Due to the weather I did not have time to take that many long exposure shots while in Astana. You just can’t use a filter when it rains. But the last day I had a bit of time and went to a great spot in the city center. Since the passing clouds moved quite quickly, it was a perfect time to do some long exposure shots.

For this one I used the 10 stop Formatt-Hittech firecrest filter, on a NISI filter holder, on the 12mm Laowa lens. Still, to get a long enough exposure, I needed to get down to ISO 50. I ended up using 60 seconds here.

The final photo is done from 2 exposures, one at 60s with the filter and one at 4s. Edited in Lightroom, blended together in Photoshop.

SNP bridge light beams

The restaurant at the top of the SNP bridge (or still refereed to as the New bridge) is called UFO. Quite the obvious name, as it looks a bit like a flying saucer. And during the White night event, with all the light beams coming from it, it looked like a UFO even more.

I ended up using 6 exposures here. Since there were people walking by I took two sets of 5 exposures, to have enough to be able to remove them from the final photo. I also did from -3 to +1 EV as the bridge was quite brighter in comparison to the surrounding area. I then combined 5 exposures into a HDR in Oloneo Photoengine and then blended that with the original exposures in Photoshop.