God Must be a Hippie

This post is long overdue, because I just couldn't get myself to process the photos. As for the post-processing, I know these look unreal. But that's not my fault! There is no HDR applied, and color is not edited at all! Seriously, I have deliberately left all the Hue, Saturation, Luminosity, Vibrance, and other similar sliders alone. The colors are exactly as shot, and much less crazy than they were in reality. On the second thought, perhaps I should have made them more vibrant. :-)

So, being unrealistic enough on their own, that is sort of their selling point, because the sky was INSANE that evening. I went out and was like "WTF? The end is at hand, Sabaton has finally met Amon Amarth in the Final Battle." Seriously, whatever deity involved must have been stoned.

I only made a few documentary shots, nothing really artistic, so don't grumble about the composition, or stuff, I was being chased around by dad who wanted me to mow the lawn and his patience was getting thin. :-) Needless to say, I was moving it so that I was always facing the sunset. It turned even better later, but I couldn't go get the camera and reshoot, because he would probably break my lens with a spade. :-D

Bratislava under Siege

In early 19th century that frog-eating midget Napoleon thought it was a great idea to lay siege to Bratislava and bombard it and destroy a lot of valuable cultural heritage and whatsnot... well, some people obviously feel that is a reason for celebration and reenactment, and as little Filip wanted to go and see some of that, so went I and my camera. Sadly, we didn't get to see most of the program, so I only have a bunch of random shots. On the positive side, I feel like I've really improved my flash technique. :-)

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:

• Bryndza
• Slavcon
• Grill

And here comes a handful of rather random picks, that link to the galleries as well...











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

Stormshooting

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





It was a magical moment indeed.

Let it snow...

Snow is most certainly the photographer's good friend. Especially when it's fresh and forming pretty patterns, it's a great pleasure to just observe it wandering through the woods. Which is, by itself, quite a powerful experience, especially after having lived in the jungle of concrete, that is Chicago, for quite some time.
It was a lovely walk and one of the nicer family moments, and the dog was crazy and excited as well. The raspberry plant above obviously didn't get rid of its leaves in time.
One of the weaker points of my 70-20omm lens is the macro capabilities. With Canon 500D close-up lens it improves moderately, but the depth of field becomes extremely shallow. In
the following photo I tried to increase it by setting the aperture f number to 20, but even so, at 200mm focal length and close distance, the acceptable depth of field was only around one milimeter! Not only is this a problem when composing the picture, it is also extremely difficult to hold the camera so still that it doesn't move while you focus and take the shot. Other than that, I really like this photo.
At times, the snowy forest was offering really spectacular things to see.
I was also trying to shoot extreme macro, and this is about as close as I was able to get, pretty good for a non-macro lens, I would say, but the quality suffers:
And that's it for today, unless you want to see little Filip posing... oh, what a heart-breaker, who could resist? :-)