What are you listening to?

I’m just curious :) What are you listening to while taking photos. I spoke to few photographers, and they all listen to music. But I don’t. I always listen to audiobooks (I am a big Audible user :)). You can even see what I’m listening to right now, if you check my Goodreads account (you can friend me there if you want :)). My goal for this year is to go through at least 100 books this way.

So am I the only one who listens to books? Or are there more of you :)

A castle vertorama

I started writing a guid on how to use a tilt-shift lens, but until that is finished, here is another vertorama for you. This one I actually took the fist day I bought the lens.

This is a two shot vertorama, taken from the little lookout area in front of the Bratislava castle. Edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Back from repair

Today my camera, the Sony a7R returned from the service, where it was for the last two weeks. Looks like part of the motherboard and the charging board were replaced, as the camera kept freezing and restarting in the recent weeks. Looks to work fine now, so I will see how it works out. But to tell the truth, I’m buying a new camera soon anyway. I just still haven’t decided which one (5D mark IV or 5DsR are my candidates :)).

Sunset Prague

For this next weekend I’m off to Prague, to spend the few day’s taking photos. I never been to Prague in winter and with a bit of luck, there still be snow there (there is in Bratislava, but it’s already melting away). I have two ND filters from VF FOTO to test during the trip (especially curious about the ND2000 filter), and I’m also taking the Peak Design Everyday Backpack for the first time, so the goal is to test that one as well. You will find my finding probably in an update next week.

And since I’m off to Prague, how about a photo from there, taken during one of my previous visits. This one was taken from Vyšehrad fort during one quite cloudless, but still very colorful sunset. This is a single RAW edit done in Lightrom and Photoshop.

Looking at my last year photos, I see that a huge amount of them are blue hour and night photos. Must be probably due to the crazy hot Summer we had in Europe last year. But I’m not that happy about it. So plan for this year is to try and do much more photos during the day and especially the gold hour.

But for today, another night shot, of fireworks above Budapest. Single exposure, edited in Photoshop and Lightroom.

For today, let’s continue with a shot from Dresden in Germany. This one is also one of my older shots, that I only edited now. It’s from a very hot and very rainy summer day. It rained three time that day, each time for about 30 minutes, and as quick as it stated raining, it always also disappeared. But of course not before I got wet :)

This is a two shot blend, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

New translations

I’m trying a bit of a experiment this year. For the most popular pages on the blog, which are currently the Top spots pages, I’m adding a Japanese translation (with a big help from my friends :)). I’m curious to see if this gets a good response, and more people will find the lists helpful. If it works out as I hope, I plan to add more languages, and expand the translations to other parts of the blog, like the HDR tutorial and similar.

For now, first 4 lists are available in Japanese, that is Paris, Dubai, Cesky Krumlov and Amsterdam. Others coming soon. All can be found here トップ写真スポット.

Night in Prague

This is another one of my older shots (I went through few recently :)), this one taken also around two years ago in Prague. This one is from the top of the Petrin tower.That evening I had luck. Usually, the tower is quite full, and using a tripod is not really allowed. But that evening, there was only me, a small group from Asia, and a very nice guide. And as I wanted photos, and they wanted photos, and there is only a small window open that points towards the city center, we changed places the whole time. I took a photo, they took a photo, I took a photo, they took a photo :) It worked out great.

This is a blend of two exposures, one for the base, second one to darken the bright areas.