New Smugmug

Today it will be a little longer post :). So first thing. Smugmug changed it’s look recently so I also changed the way my portfolio page (www.hdrshooter.net) looks. I think it looks better now, but I still have to do a lot more customization to it, so it look less generic. But all takes time. But one thing they added, which I really like, is that you can change the order of the photos in a gallery. Finally :)

1 000 000 photo views

When on the Smugmug topic. I checked my statistics there and I just reached 1 000 000 photo views as counted from the 1st January of this year. Big thank you to all who visited my potfolio, and I hope you will again find reasons to take a look at it :)

Top 5 spots in Paris

Also maybe some of you noticed a new addition to the Top 5 spots category. This time I added the Top 5 photography spots in Paris. As I’m not yet such familiar with the whole of Paris, please take this more as a top 5 must visit spots there. All give you great photo opportunities and should be visited.

View from the Aggstein castle ruins

And finally the daily photo. Today it’s the view form the Aggstein castle ruins in Austria. The view from there is just stunning and you don’t even have to walk up there, as the road goes completely up to the castle :) I could spend hours here. If you are ever close by, I definitively suggest a visit.

This is a manual blend from 5 shots.

I got a little behind on uploading a new post, as I took a short photo trip to Austria these last two day and got home only very late at night. So for now, here is the first edited photo from Durnstein and there will be more to come.

This is a manual blend from 5 shots.

Today I have for you another photo process post. This photo of the Bojnice castle is one of the most popular photos I ever posted, so I think the way I edited it would be interesting to you. So to get to this final image:

I used luminance mask to combine the shots. To be exact I did the following steps (layers numbered from bottom up)
1. original 0EV exposure
2-3. -1EV and -2EV exposure to darken the sky and other bright spots
4-5. +1EV and +2EV exposure to brighten the foreground
6. -1EV exposure once more to recovel some lost contrast from the blending
7. added contrast to basic midtones
8. added detail using high pass layer
9. darkened and added contrast to the brighterst parts of the image
10. added more local contrast using the Color efex Tonal contrst preset
11. added more contrst using the Color Efex Pro contrast preset
12. removed noise in the foreground elements
13-14. added glow using a blured layer
15. additional brightening for dark areas

To see the original 0EV exposure, please continue to the full post

I haven’t taken many new photos recently. The very hot weather just makes me tired and lazy. I think that’s probably same for most people. But for the next two days I’m taking photos in Austria, so hopefully I get nice weather and some good locations. If all goes right, there will be some new photos from there later this week. But for now, one from last year, from the Kuchajda lake in Bratislava

This is a manual blend from 5 shots.

My usual composition for a place like this is to find the exact center and go for a nice symmetry. But when I’m done with that I try for a different composition. So here I tried to have the light as a nice foreground object. It was a little higher up form the place where I was standing, but still it changed the feel of the photo completely.
This is a tonemmaped image created in Photomatix Pro and then edited further in Photoshop. Photo taken from the stage of the opera in Budapest.