Brackets

With each HDR photo, there is a question, how much brackets should you take. For this photo, I used 7. For 90% of all my shots, I use only three shots. This is mostly due to convenience, as taking more on a Canon camera is not so straightforward (and usually not practical). But from my experience, I have noticed a difference between three bracket shots and 7-9 bracket shots. The HDR’s from more shots, are in my opinion, better. The added data really helps to bring out all the detail in a scene and the transitions between dark a light areas, are more gradual, making less problems.

But there are still scenes, where there is no difference. If there is a small dynamic range in the scene your’re photographing, there is no use for the additional shots. But scenes like this, where there is a very high difference between the dark and light areas, it’s really better to go with more shots.

The beauty of Nature

I just love how this one turned out. It even is my current desktop wallpaper (and I never use my own photos as wallpapers :) ). This was such a lovely sunset last weekend. All the green colors, with the sun shining through. It was just beautiful. The only thing I regret, that I forgot my IR filter, because I think that It would create great results in such light. Maybe next time :)

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

Old Castle in Banska Stiavnica

I spend few hours recently in Banska Stiavnica. It’s a very old mining town in Slovakia, and exaclty at the time I was there, they had a festival so the city was full of people. At the end, this worked out great, as the castle was almost empty :)

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

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.