As I take quite a lot of photos and visit some cities fairy regularly, I decided to put together few lists of my favorite places to take photos from.

So if you are going to visit any of them, and want to know some nice places from where to take photos, check them out.

I’m including a gps location to also show where the respective photo was taken (or where the general area was) and also if tripods are allowed or not. I focus on publicly accessible areas and prefer the ones with tripods allowed.

The lists are also available in Japanese, and you can find those here トップ写真スポット.

Wachau Valley

If you are from any of the respective cities, and know a great place there, feel free to leave a message in the comment. I will try to check it out next time I’m visiting :)

Top Spots

The top spots pages keep on being the most popular part of the blog. They now make around half of all visits to this blog. I’m very happy that so many of you find them useful :) Here are the links to all the ones you can find on the blog, hopefully there will be more soon.

Night in the city

I should get more photos of Bratislava. Somehow, with all the travel, I’m not in the mood to take photos when I’m home. It even crazier, that I never ever took a sunrise photo here. I should definitively do that one day soon.

This is a two shot panorama, combined in Lightroom, finished in Photoshop.

Updates to wallpapers page

I have been slowly updating the formatting on multiple popular pages on the blog, mostly the top photography spots ones. But today, the time has come for an update for the wallpapers page.

So you may find a bit of a new formatting, aligned with the rest of the blog. Also, since the number of wallpapers got quite big over time, I split the page into two. The 2736×1824, 3440×1440 and 3840×1200 resolution wallpapers are where they used to be, and the other, 1600×1200 and 1920×1200 resolution wallpapers, can be now found on this page. Should help with the loading speed quite a lot :)

New 21:9 – 3440×1440 wallpapers

And so it’s not just new formatting, here are also new 21:9 wallpapers at 3440×1440 for you. As always, you can get them from the wallpapers page, they are free to download and share. Just if you post them somewhere, please link back to this blog and don’t use them commercially without my permission.

Reading list

I posted last week about what books I’m currently reading/listening to. And I was thinking, of maybe doing that a regular part of the Friday update. But probably only when I had time to get through something new. So what did I read this week?

While returning from Germany last Sunday, I finally got through The Martian by Andy Weir. I started it once long time ago, even before the movie came out, but I only got halfway through. Now I finally goth through the whole book in one go. And yes, it is a great read. I also read his other book Artemis not long ago, but that one is not as great.

Additional I returned to The Fold by Peter Clines. This and some of his other book dealing with alternative realities are just perfect if you like scifi stuff.

In non-fiction I got through Minimalism by Ryan Nicodemus, Joshua Fields Millburn which was very disappointing. The book was not about minimalism, but more of a biography about the authors. At least it was so short.

And that’s all I got through this week.

GDPR

To comply with the new GDPR law in the EU, I had to change the way the newsletter subscription works and also you may have noticed a small cookie banner in the bottom of the website. Not that I track anything outside the standard site analytics, but almost everything you need to use for a website tracks something. There is no way to get around it. So I hope this is not too distraction or annoying for you.

I would prefer to not have to do it, but I don’t have a choice.

More Dandelions

Today’s daily photo is another one from Dubai. And it’s from one of my recommended spots there. This was taken right under the Burj Khalifa, with the 12mm Laowa lens. I was standing maybe less than 50cm from the left dandelion, and you still see so much of it. The 12mm really is a wide lens :)

These dandelions are a part of a permanent art installation around Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Mall, and change the color of the lights every few seconds. They really work nicely as a foreground object for the huge Burj Khalifa in the background.

This is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Phone wallpapers

While editing today’s photo, I noticed that it’s almost a perfect 1:2 ratio. And that’s exactly what most of the recent mobile phones screens have. So I cropped it into a wallpaper. And so it’s not just one, here are few more.

These are 1080x2160px in size. Will maybe add more in the future if you like them.
 

The tallest reflection

So many people take photos of the Burj Khalifa. And with that, it really is not easy to get a unique photo here. But of course I tried. And one I have not seen before (not that I seen all photos of Burj Khalifa :)), is one with the full reflection of the tower in the nearby pool. So I tried to get one.

It’s not really that easy though. The tower on it’s own is already huge, so just getting it into the shot you need a really wide lens. For this photo I needed even more, so I had to go with a vertorama. To avoid some crazy distortions, I went with the 17mm tilt-shit lens, in vertical orientation. Like this I could shift it up and down, instead the usual left to right. Like this, I could fit the whole Burj Khalifa with it’s reflection into only two shots. I still needed to do some perspective correction, but not too much.

This is a two shot vertorama, combined in Lightroom, finished in Photoshop. For my recomended spots to take photos in Dubai, check out the Top Photography Spots in Dubai list.