I’m just crazy busy this weekend, as I’m taking photos at the Bratislava Sensual Dance Festival (you can see them on my personal FB profile), so I had absolutely no time to edit photos. So for today I chosen another photo of the lovely Alexandra, which I edited few weeks ago. Will try to get back to the landscape shots on Monday :)

This is a single exposure edited in Photoshop and Lightroom.

New wallpapers

I liked my recent photos with the lighthouse so much, that I thought I will add them to the wallpaper section of this blog. And so here they are. I hope you will like them as I do, and maybe some of you will use them :)

In the middle of the day

When I started taking photos, most of my shots were taken in the middle of the day. But now, as more I shoot, I almost never take any photos at that time, and rather focus on sunrise, sunset and blue hours. But that’s not always possible, as sometime you are at a great spot during the day, and you just can’t miss the opportunity to take some photos. Same here, on the Hinterhaus castle ruins. A spot that I need to revisit again, but next time for the sunset :)

This is a HDR created in Photomatix, and then blended with original exposures in Photoshop.

Photomatix Pro 5

For those who missed it, HDRshoft released a new version of Photomatix Pro recently. Photomatix is one of the most popular HDR software available, and the new version brings few new algorithms to combine photos. I’ve been trying them out recently and they really bring Photomatix more towards the realistically looking results, which I think is great.

For those who already bought the Photomatix 4.0 or later, the upgrade is free, for those who are new to Photomatix, you can get the trial version on their download site. And if you want to buy it, don’t forget to use the code “HDRSHOOTER” for a 15% discount.

To see more about how to use Photomatix, feel free to check out my HDR tutorial.

Crazy skies

I had to check the original RAW few time to be sure that the sky was really like that and I made no error in the processing. But the clouds were really this crazy. They were broken up into small pieces and stripes and with the long exposures I needed, it created this. Still this was one stunning sunset.

I edited this with the new Photomatix Pro 5, with the new Contrast Optimizer algorithm. It gave me a nice even image to start my further edits from. I of course replaced most of the sky and the water from the original exposures, as combining removed all the details from there. After that I finished the image in Photoshop.

Capture PRO v2

I just received my Capture Pro from Peak Design. This was the second project I backed on Kickstarter, and the second one that delivered. It looks quite promising, and I really hope it works as suggested. I will be shooting at an event this weekend, so I will have a lot of time to try it out. I plan to write a review of it after that, so stay tuned :)

More info about this can be found here: Peak design , and here are few photos of it.

The bridge lions

At first I thought I will discard this photo. While I was taking it a group of people passed next to me, so the whole walkway on the left was one big ghost. But than I thought I would give it a try, as I really like the two lions here. So the result is a little darker than I usually prefer, but I still like it.

This is a manual blend from 7 shots. A little done using luminance masks and most just hand painted to blend the exposures.

Tweaks to the blog

Maybe some of you noticed, that there were few small changes recently to the blog. I’m tweaking it almost constantly, always trying to make it better. Recently there were two bigger changes. One is that I made the menu smaller (finally I found out where I have to edit the code to change it :)) and secondly I changed the way comments are handheld. As there were problems with people not being notified about comment replies on the blog, I was searching for a replacement. I thought about Facebook or G+, but in the end I decided for Disqus. It seems to fit the most and it lacks all the limitations of Facebook and G+. What do you think? Is it better?

The bridge arch

It’s so nice when you can get under a bridge. It gives you a great view of the bridge and for a lot of people its a view they never seen before. If you think about it, most people just cross the bridge, so they only see it from the bridge, or somewhere from the side. But never from under it.

This is a manual blend from 5 shots, taken in Maribor, Slovenia.