Soldier at Dukla

This photo is from the Dukla Pass war memorial in eastern Slovakia. It’s one of Red army soldiers who fell in World War II. I took this photo last summer. This was actually my second visit to this memorial (what is a big shame on me, since it’s like 40km from where I lived). First time I was there when I was about 6-7 year old. I remember the memorial being so big :)

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

Brackets

Since in my todays post I also mention the HDR processing steps, I though I also show the original brackets :) So here they are:

Also the Photomatix setting I used were: Strength 86, Color Saturation 70, Luminosity 2.5, Microcontrast 5.9 and Smoothing at 3.2. All other settings at default.

Green house in Brno

This is my favorite house in Brno. Each time I’m there I have to take few pictures of it :). They are currently restoring it, so lets hope it keeps this nice, classic look.

I vent quite light on the post-processing on this one. All I did, is they I combined the shots in Photomatix, and then removed noise in the sky and added a little more detail with Tonal Contrast in Color Effects Pro (but only at around 30% opacity). A little more contrast before the export and thats all :) I wanted a more realistic, not oversaturated look. I think I quite succeeded :)

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod. Photo taken at Brno, Czech Republic

So much green

Did a lot of masking on this one, mostly to get back some shadows into the trees. Also I played with the green color allot :) Trying to get a really nice shade. I’m quite satisfied, so hopefully it looks good :)

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod. Photo taken at the Open-air museum in Bardejovske Kupele in eastern Slovakia

Hidden Canoe

Another one from Sundays shooting at the Vajnory Lake. The lake was very calm, and I really liked the reflection of the canoe, but couldn’t really get closer to it from where I was standing. Still I quite like this composition, and I thought of the name immediately after I took this shot :)

I’m very happy how this shot turned out, as I was focusing quite blindly. It was already dark, and I saw almost nothing from the Canoe in the viewfinder. I opened the camera to f3.5 and pushed the ISO up to 200 (which I hate to do) and it worked :)

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

Sunset over Vajnory lake

I’m still not really happy with this one, I think the colors could still be better. But I tried all the techniques, I usually use, and I didn’t like any of the results. Maybe when I learn something new, I revisit this shot :)

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod. Photo taken at the Vajnory lake (Vajnorske jazero) in Bratislava at Sunset