Returning to old places

I took a very similar photo about two years ago (this one – which one do you think is better?). But with the new camera I like to go back to my favorite places and try to take even better photos. And this is one of my favorite places for blue hour photos.

It’s not that close, as you have to walk across the bridge from the other side, continue a little further and then return back. And standing on the rocks near the water it’s also quite dangerous and cold. But I think it’s worth it.

The sunset was quite colorless, as the sky was very clear. So I knew I had to wait for the blue hour, to take a nice shot. I used 7 brackets here, trying to capture the Bratislava castle without it being blown out. For anyone interested in my Photomatix HDR tonemmaping settings, check out my Facebook Fan page. I posted a screenshot, taken right before clicking on process.

The Red Ferrari 599

Could be very interesting to drive one of these. But who would let me do it, probably no one. But at least I can take photos. I had to play with the red in this one quite a lot. As it was inside a building, the interior lights gave it quite a yellow color. But with a lot of masking and hue/saturations adjustments, I think it looks as it should. I took 5 brackets for this HDR, as it was quite enough. If you look at the before/after you will see, that there was not that much of a dynamic range in the scene.

Desktop Wallpapers

So with the update of the page, I updated also the wallpapers section. There are some new ones there, and all have been updated with a 1920×1200 and a 1600×1200 version.  As always you can find the link in the sidebar or directly here.

Moving clouds over the St. Martin’s Cathedral

It’s quite nice, that they already removed the scaffolding from the St. Martin’s Cathedral in Bratislava. The tower looked quite bad in all of the cityscape shots. I went with 7 shots for this one. The tower is very white now, so the surrounding light makes it very bright, and I wanted to have detail in the whole photo. Also the long exposure of the +3EV photo captured this very nice movement in the clouds.

In front of the School in the Nature

For this one I went up to 9 brackets, from -4 to +4 EV. The reason for this was, that I wanted the sky and also the inside of the building to be nicely visible. And I think it worked.

Promote Control remote review

After a week playing with the Promote Control remote, I have written down my first impressions of it in a review. I will expand it as I work with it more.

I have included also some test bracketing series taken with the help of the Promote, one taken during a sunny day, one at night.

You can find the review here: Promote Control remote review

Decorated ceiling

A lot of people from Bratislava will not recognize where was this taken. I wouldn’t either a few weeks ago. But now I know, that this is the ceiling in the historical building of the Slovak National Theater. The light in the middle is also very interesting. It’s created from hundreds of old style light bulbs and can be switched into different configurations, of which ones are turned on.