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.

That was fun and instructive!

Ok, it is just a "childish" effect but does it mean you should snob it? Actually every picture for which you try to do a bit more then pressing the trigger can teach you something and it worked for me.

1st, we saw it already, I saw the dramatic difference the sun can do. Ok, everybody knows it, but there is still a gap between knowing and experiencing something.

2nd, the angle in which you shoot. To give this "model" effect I had to be over my subjects as if the would be Playmobils seen by the eyes of the child playing with them. It made me see the city I live in since a while now from a new perspective. And this was fun.

3. I took consciousness of the difference between an eye and a camera. Indeed, I had to be careful not to show buildings in their integrality because then the walls start not to be streight any more. Phenomena that exists for a camera that doesn't have a real "Tilt" lense but not for the eye. This comes from the fact that our eyes are round so our "lenses" and our "sensor" have opposite shapes, but this is not the case of a camera that has a flat sensor... Hehe, I even thought about anatomy... not that bad, what do you think ?

So for my shots I had to be over my subject, to avoid strong light, and to be careful with the buldings in background of the subject. One picture tho doesn't obey to these rules (or at least not to all of them) but the result is still quiet good. It is the panorama of Prague. I think that the result is not bad because 1.the shadows are not very visible 2.if not really "over" the scene, I am still quiet high 3.I am really far of the buildings so the distortions are not visible and 4. trees always look superb for this kind of pictures, I find them so fake (lol).

So you see, who cares what you're shooting... as long as you do.

In the next post I will show you some other shots I took. They are not in my "Challenge pictures" neither are they really miniature shots, they are just little experiences I did while trying to shot my miniatures.

Quiet late now... broubrou.

89...88...87...86...85 left : The Fives

As they are miniatures I thought I can put five of them together ;-) Also if you click on one of them you will be able to pass them like diapos which is practical too. Anyway, here are The Fives:

Tilt-shift... Fake...

Where to start... Yes, I found another very interesting blog, it is called "31+ days to better photography" (if not done yet, pass the cursor over the name of the blog I just wrote for you and it becomes a link! This is not magic... no, I just learned how to use this blog actually).
So, what did I say... yes, this blog is really nice, but in it, Mr.Peter West Carey speaks about a Compact camera he has or bought for someone - poor memory of mine -and the Miniature function he found there, and: NOT TO USE IT.
Well, I understand his point of view but as often in my life, I did not obey and I am happy I didn't because I learned a lot of things!!! And it was even fun...

First I learned that if it is around noon during a sunny day, the shadows are so strong that it becomes difficult to work around it. And that strong shadows donc look very natural on "miniature style" shots.

Rule nr.1:
YOU SHALL NOT FIGHT AGAINST MOTHER NATURE

Here are some of these shots:


I "Photooshoped" one of them to show how the shadows play against me:


In this other exemple, I went back to take the snap again (when the evil sun was finally covered by the holly clouds). More then just the shadows, notice how all the colors and contrasts are much easier to deal with...


I still have a few things to tell you and write you but time is time, and this is mine... See you in a futur post...

What is Tilt-Shift ?

To go forward in my photography knowledge I decided to proceed a bit differently :

I will not take random shots and then select some to put in this blog. Nop. From now on, I will choose a theme for the following five pictures. This will help me to get more control about what I am doing as limits push the creativity.

The first theme will be: the Tilt-Shift effect. I could try to explain what "tilt-shift" is but it would probably take me a lot of time and it might still not be very clear so to get what it is all about you can just follow this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HRYlJUwzYA

OK, so that was an introduction to tilt-shift lenses, but I don't have a tilt-shift lens, I just have the "miniature" effect on my S95 so I suppose that it is more of a shift than a tilt... Let's try out!

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: