A walk in the forest...

We went for a walk in the forest... with my fiancée...

So I took pictures of her...



and pictures of the forest...





and picutres of her in the forest...




and after an accidental shot that became cool:


I stared to take pictures of everything! A fly on a flower:


the next one has a name: 'Our lost games'


Here is 'Intergalactic' - it just reminds me of a video clip from the Beastie Boys, dunno why, but I really love this picture. I loved it immediatly when I took it.


this one is called "Minnie is naughty"... guess why...


And I finish as I started... with my love of course :-)




Yes, what a briliant day... and so many pictures, I feel quite lucky to have a comprehensive GF that allows my compulsive behaviour. I am not at the "Japanese tourist level" taking pictures of what I eat (and what people around me eat)... or at least, not toO often ;-)

But from all the pictures I took (around 250... in one afternoon, no joke... :-( sick...) I selected 5 to enter the "100 snaps Challenge" Panthéon... More about these shots tomorrow.

P.S. I feel very bad not to have managed a small place there for my "intergalactic" or the last picture of Jana. We will see, they will maybe enter it one day. After all, nothing is set in stone.

Oh, another nice blog ;-)

Surfing around I found a really, REALLY, nice blog.

Here it is: http://www.mdavid.com.au/photography/photography.html

Enjoy.

the 13 P6 shots

Some news of my German BigBoy !!!

As sad in a previous post, I walked around Prague a few hours with my 2 kg BigBoy. I shot a bit of anything actually just to test the framing and "how" good I am to take shots using my S95 for light measurement. I was afraid that the Pentacon curtains might be slow so I always put the setting a bit faster: what a faithless little creature I am! This copy is just perfect in all possible ways. Can't wait to shoot the next roll.

BTW: This is the first roll I shot with my P6 but I used one before to test the framing with the "B mode and pen technic" and it is confirmed : my P6 delivers 13 beautifully framed pictures! :-)

Here are the 13 first:

Not edited snaps : the "almost"good enough ones

As said, I went for snaps that I would not edit at all. I did some interesting experiences and came back with some shots. Here are the ones I like but that, for a reason or another, didn't do it to be in the "100 snaps challenge":

Playing around with the shutter speed, this one is called "Pablo knows":

Untitled, an urban Bokeh trial:

Another Bokeh shot called "Bokeh wheet 2":

A trial with exposure down and flash. What a dramatic effect, I love it! It is called "Flash wheet 2":(once again, I did not retouch the colors at all!)

To finish, two shot of flowers in the Letna Park, above Prague:


and now, the 5 that made it...
.
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The cone'helicious story

Walking to work (already the second picture I take on this journee...) I saw this lovely, creepy cone. It was slightly raining and the colors were so beautiful that I decided not to edit this picture. But once at home, when I uploaded the file to my computer... OMG, no contrast, not much brightness neither: a flat photo actually.
So I turned on my little "pocket b..." and wow: a very nice looking picture! on the S95 the picture looked really great.

So I finally edited it, trying to get as close as possible to my S95's screen colors, contrast, brightness and sharpness. It took me about half of dozen tries but I am really happy with the one posted here.

I just added a bit of progressive blur around the cone to give it a hint of Bokeh, that's it, the rest is really just to try to represent what I see on my LCD screen. But there is still quite a gap between edited and not as you can see on the following picture: (not edited on the left and edited on the right)



P.S. I was still not satisfied as the screen is too high in contrast and saturation, which is good for visibility when used outside but not as a setup for pictures... Hmm... I decided to cut the apple in two mixing both pictures with 50% transparency. The result is visible in the "100 snaps challenge".
I think I will start to look at postprod like Coco Chanel was looking at her creations: “Always take off the last accessory that you put on.”

P.S. nr.2: I also did a very strongly edited version that I just found back (today is Saturday the 4th August).

Cone'helicious (Color Burned Mix):

Metrostairwayflora - The Making of...

As it is raining outside, I have a bit of extra time for my blog. So, here are the story and the steps of this shot :

The story:

I saw two very interesting stairways' pictures these last weeks and I think they inspired me. The first one is a shot of Eric Kim (that you can see here http://erickimphotography.com/blog/2011/02/street-photography-interview-on-shuttersalt/ ) and the second one is a snap from "ph5050" on Flickr (here it is http://www.flickr.com/photos/76342081@N06/6850695145/in/faves-81607369@N04/ ). I love the reflexions on the "stairs sides" on Mr. Kim's picture and the SciFi atmosphere of ph5050's picture. That's for the story of what inspired me that shot. I should actually add the fact that there was this girl doing this position just in front of me too... The charme of Street photography, sometimes things just happen.


The different steps:

The picture as you can see it is quite far from the original shot, so let's see how it evolved.

(click to enlarge)

1. the original file
2. picture's straightening, light and contrast corrections
3. overlay of the same picture but in BLACK & WHITE to "boost" it
4. horizontal flip, mask layer and blur effects to "dramatize" the scene and put the focus on the subject
5. a "bluish" color filter to give it a "space odyssey" look and here we have our final image!

The "commercial poster shot"

This is what I consider to be a 'street photography' classic : you use an advertisement and build your shot around it. It can be quite funny sometimes, but it is a bit too cliché for my taste. Anyway, I did one of these shots last week and started to retouch it a bit :



- First I cropped it to square
- Then I worked on the colors and contrast to offset the "tungsten" lights effect

Here are these two steps :



But as I was still not really satisfied I decided to turn it to B&W... and I quite like the outcoming. In any case, enough to believe it deserves a second snap for my snap collection.