Taking few days off

After few months, I’m finally taking a little vacation from work and also from Internet :). So the next few days I’m completely offline. But as always, blog will be regularly updated with a new photo every day. Thank you wordpress for the scheduling function :)

Front page on Flickr’s Explore

For the fist time ever, one of my photos got on the front page on Flickr’s Explore. Thank you all who helped to achieve this :)

Small moon under the bridge

On this one I could have used so many more brackets. I took 6 shots, from -2 to +3 and created two additional ones in lightroom at -4 and +4, but still the castle is too bright and the bridge too dark.

HDR from 6 shots, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod.

After sunset in the Sunflower field

I really wanted to take a shot with the sun still above the horizon, but we were traveling on a highway, and could not stop by any of the fields, and by the time we reached this one, the sun was already down. But I still like it :). Everything is a little more blue, but still fine :). Photo taken somewhere between Trnava and Bratislava (I have no idea where exactly :))

Looking for Sunflower Field Wallpaper? See this photo in wallpapers section.

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod.

Number 1

Another beautiful veteran car. This was also taken by the Incheba exhibition pavilion, during a veteran rally.

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens.

Another photo in Flickr’s Explore

I couldn’t really believe my eyes :) I checked my Flickr stats in the morning and there was another photo in the Explore selection. This time it was the Tension photo from two days ago. It reached the position number 161 :)

Water & Rocks

I really like it when my posts are diverse, and there are different subject for each day. Sometimes it’s quite hard, as I don’t have the time to edit photos each day. So that’s why I selected this photo for to day, so it’s something different from all the shots I uploaded in last weeks :)

Photo taken earlier this year, at the Cunovo Dam near Bratislava. If you look closely you can see my shadow on the side :)

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod

Photo in Flickr’s Explore

Yesterday the Letting of steam photo got into the Flickr’s Explore selection. This is my second photo that made it there :). The highest position it had until now was 383 :)

Single RAW HDR

Most HDR’s are created from multiple shots, but from time to time, you have to use just a single RAW file. This is usually with a moving subject, or something like fireworks. Photomatix can directly open just a single RAW file and tonnemap it, but I prefer a different approach. What I do is that I export the image three times from Lightroom, always with a different exposure setting. Then I have my three photos, from where I continue as with a normal HDR file. From my experience, this gives me a better result, than if I only opened the RAW directly in Photomatix.

Btw. If you have a JPG file, you can still try HDR processing it. Just export it at different exposures and combine back in Photomatix. The results are worse than if you used a RAW file, but sometimes are really nice. Some of my older photos are created from a single JPG, because I wanted to edit photos I took before I started with HDR.

Just to see the difference, here is the original RAW file for today’s photo.

Reflected Fireworks

I really hopped I’ll be able to take new fireworks shots over the Kuchajda lake this year. But this year, there were none. I don’t know why as it’s kind of a tradition, but either way, it was raining so heavily that day, that it would be quite impossible to take any good shots. So this is one of the last years shots, when the weather was great and the fireworks were just beautiful :)

HDR from a single shot, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod.