Thursday, May 29

Brno at night

I've posted a photo topic everyday since Monday, and today will be no different. (Although tomorrow probably will, I can't afford to spoil you like this. :-P I'm just emptying my photo buffer.)

This was one fine evening out with Jana, though she probably wouldn't agree -- although I was planning to explain everything to her, and make her as involved as possible, it turned out that I had a lot on my plate as it were. Perhaps because it was my first time out with a tripod, I kept tweaking it all the time, while trying to find optimal manual settings for each shot, including the white balance and other pleasantries, so I paid too much attention to all that stuff which likely bored her to death. :-/ Not to mention the timed triggers and repeating some shots multiple times. Sadly, I am a mere man, and real multitasking is something I have yet to learn.



Petrov is as fine as churches in minor cities get, I like it much more than St. Martin's Dome in Bratislava. At least some fine architecture came out of the dark ages, when secularity meant heresy and heresy, in turn, meant that you could expect the Spanish Inquisition... if only it wasn't entirely unexpectable. :-P



It's a true landmark in Brno, and some of the alleys around it are pretty nice, especially at night. Not quite as nice as the ones in old town of Bratislava, though.


Eerie. :-) And this one is pretty rare, as this tower is only cleanly visible from a little spot and is usually lighted during the night -- not this night for some reason.





I really do like this city. :-)

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Wednesday, May 28

Shooting my friends...

...would be pretty gory, so instead this post is about capturing the light they reflect. :-)

Most of you have probably already seen these, but they never made a blogpost, and as it's the exam period, I have way too much time on my hands, so now's the time. :-D

These photos are from three rather nice sessions -- the Bryndza session, SlavCon, and Grill session. Many thanks to Kubo for organizing the two, they were most enjoyable.

I took a lot of photos those days, so they each made a separate gallery:
And here comes a handful of rather random picks, that link to the galleries as well...











Stay tuned for Brno night shots, coming tomorrow. :-)

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Tuesday, May 27

Stormshooting

Just a few snapshots from my balcony one fine day...





It was a magical moment indeed.

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Monday, May 26

Fireworks... yeee!

Long time, no photos! Well, I didn't have too many excuses to go out and shoot recently. However, Ignis Brunensis changed that, so I borrowed a tripod and tried to give it my best shot. As I never photographed fireworks before, and lacked a remote trigger, I am not entirely satisfied, but hey, they are not entirely bad and at least I have learned some lessons for next time.






As for the last one - I have ruined many pictures because of blur, like this one. I was pretty far from the scene and had to use long focal length. The tripod was fairly small and unstable for my huge lens, and whenever I pressed the shutter the camera started to shake. All of the shutter times were over a second long, too - there's no way image stabilization can compensate for that.

Some other photos from the night are here.

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Monday, May 19

Shut up already!

Slashdot reports: "An editor for the Telegraph, Roger Highfield, recently volunteered to allow a UK researcher to shut off the speech center of his brain with a high-powered magnetic pulse. Regular speech is controlled by a section of the brain called Broca's area. Once the precise location is determined in the subject, a magnetic pulse can temporarily disrupt speech without impairing other cognitive functions. The link contains a video in which you can watch Highfield stutter and twitch while attempting to recite a nursery rhyme. A later test shows that he's able to sing the rhyme without difficulty, since singing is controlled in a different part of the brain (as you may remember from Scott Adams' speech disorder)."

Cool. I wonder who will be the first to commercialize this technology and advertise: Now it costs only $79.99 to save your marriage!  ;-)

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