Day 26 - Through the Château Windows

The trouble with tourist hot sports like Château de Chenonceau is that if you go inside, so did a lot of other people. With crowds like that it's very hard to get a clean shot of the pretty interiors, and even if you do manage to get one, you seldom have time to compose them in an optional way. As I was wandering though the many lovely rooms of the chateau I thought I had managed to get a few really good shots, but as I looked though them on my computer at home I cringed at some of the mistakes I had made, like cutting off the top of a statue's head or not noticing a busy background element. It's much harder to get great photos on the go in a chaotic environment... I wish I could have gone there all alone with my camera, like I had the good fortune of doing in Cathédrale Notre-Dame d'Amiens. My best shots of the chateau are of small details, like this one.

/MrsHjort

Day 10 - Details, Details, Details

The top picture shows some of the wonderful artworks inside Cathédrale Notre-Dame d'Amiens. In terms of color the interior not as lavish as the churches in Rome, but nonetheless beautiful (although I noticed one of the motifs are a bit morbid). There are so many wonderful aspects to this cathedral it's a marvel to work with as a (in my case, hobby) photographer - so many interesting viewpoints and ways to work with perspective. I found this spot especially interesting because of how the Gothic arches work together in both the foreground and the background, and in the art as well.

The bottom picture is from one of the chapels that have yet to be renovated. As you can see it has seen better days but I though it charming nonetheless. I have a sore spot for old faded things and don't mind flaking color or worn wallpaper, in the right environment that is, and this is one of those places. It was interesting to contrast it to the other areas of the cathedral.

/MrsHjort

Day 51 - View of the Tiber

We have finally reached the end of my shots from Castel Sant'Angelo. There have been quite a few of them and that's not so strange when you take into account how versatile the museum is. There is a lot to shoot, from the architecture of the castle itself (both exterior and interior) to it's statues, furniture, displays of weapons and armor, various cannons and the like, as well as the view from its walls and terraces.

This shot is not from the top roof terrace like that other one that I showed you a few days ago but from a balcony a bit farther down. The Tiber is in the foreground and in the background you can see the Altar of the Fatherland (distant, to the left).

/MrsHjort

Day 35 and 36 - Water and Stone

These pictures are, as some of you might have figured already, from Piazza Navona, right outside the Church I've been showing you pictures of the last few days. Here you'll find yet another Roman obelisk, but it didn't make into my choice photos because of background problems - I'm very picky with what pictures I keep and even more picky with the ones I choose to edit. That's the way you get, for bad or worse, when you've been an eager aspiring hobby photographer for... has it been seven years already!? Wow, where did the time go... Being picky is both great and not so great. It's great because it keeps you on your toes and makes you think about your shots in a way that makes you a better photographer, but it's not so great because you loose that spontaneous element of photography - the "point and shoot" without any preparation. So called snapshots really have their own charm and I like how they capture "real moments" rather than choreographed or planned ones, if that makes sense, but I digress.

Anyway, You'll find three fountains at this square and these are pictures of the largest of them - the Fountain of the Four Rivers by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. It displays four river gods and represents the four continents to where the papal authority has spread by depicting famous rivers - the Nile (Africa), Danube (Europe), Ganges (Asia) and Rio de la Plata (South America).

I'm beginning to find my footing with the gloomy pictures I think. A comment from my favorite sarge got me thinking a bit, and I tried something that I haven't done before in the middle picture. This is where it all gets a bit nerdy, but it occurred to me that the flat look you get out of photos shot on overcast days can be overcome through selective editing. So, I faked things a bit and edited the statue and the background differently from each other when it came to color. In real life, the color of the stone fountain and the church in the background is much more similar, but I wanted the statue to stand out more, so I edited it accordingly. It's still a gloomy picture, but I like it a lot more with the faked interplay of foreground and background. It may not be entirely honest... but then most photos aren't. From mobile photo filters to "Photoshopping"... everybody likes to enhance their shots :)

/MrsHjort

Day 19 - Marble and Stone

Continuing on with the Vatican Museum theme, here is another example of what the interior looked like. I find rooms like these quite tasteful - discrete natural colors and nothing too excessive. I absolutely love the classical style and I also like the subtle differences in the colors of the stone. (We'll save some examples of "sensory overload rooms" for tomorrow). 

The statues in the museum are beautiful, but it was not easy getting a clean shot of them as there are a lot of visitors in the museum every day. This was one of the very few clean ones that I managed to get, and the one that I like the most personally. It was the angle he angle that caught my eye, and the lighting, though admittedly statues like these look great in just about any lighting. The interplay between background and foreground was interesting as well but I wish I had brought my 55-300 mm lens so that the background would have become a bit softer. That's the price you pay for convenience I guess, but I doubt that I would have been able to get the composition right with it, since it would have required me to stand farther away (I don't think there was room for that). Also there's the light issue. More zoom requires more light or you'll get a slight motion blur, so I guess it was for the best in the end... you can't have everything, and lugging around gear is not that practical in a museum like this where there are a lot of people - the smaller you are the easier it is to make your way through the crowds.

Unfortunately, I don't know the name of the top statues, but the bottom one is of Laocoön - a figure in Greek and Roman mythology - a Trojan priest who was attacked, with his two sons, by giant serpents sent by the gods. The statue is larger but I really like this close-up of only Laocoön. It makes you notice some really nice details like the veins in the arms and torso. The statue was made somewhere around 200 BC but it's likely a copy of a bronze original. In turn, this marble version may not be completely original, as it shows signs of heavy restoration. Nonetheless, it's
considered a masterwork.

/MrsHjort

Day 16 - Mediterranean Morning

CCC - September: Cool

These vines are actually from our garden, and no, they're not in a green house or in any other protected place. They're totally unshielded from the elements, right in the middle of our back yard, growing in a beautiful arch! Who would have thought it possible? Not me anyway... I never knew there were vines this hardy before - I do live in Sweden after all, but these vines are not only surviving, but thriving.

On to subject of photography... Back when I was a beginner I used to search for pretty subjects, groan at stuff that ruined the composition and move on (or shoot anyway and hope for the best). But experience has thought me that nature shots can be every bit as arranged as still life photography. This is one of those pictures. Grapes may be beautiful but it's super hard to find a perfect ones, and finding two perfect bunches of grapes right next to each other is next to impossible, especially when you need an exact angle, or the DoF will ruin one of them. Yes, I could do focus stacking, but I'd rather not! Fixing things the natural way is faster. So, the bunch of grapes on the left are really growing there, but the ones on the right are not. I hung them there after I picked them from an other part of the plant. Also, that little leaf above them both was placed there, in order to hide an ugly twig. And, last, but not least, I tugged at the leaves in the background to create a pleasing set of lines. It took som coaxing, but it turned out nicely. This picture even won my second golden CCC challenge trophy :)

/MrsHjort

CCC - July: Partially Cloudy

I just realized I've been so busy with the DaPP challenge, I've totally forgotten to update my blog on regarding the Calendar Challenge! This is July's picture, taken in my backyard. It was one of those annoying days when the clouds got in the way all of the time, so I had to wait and wait whenever I chose a new subject. I didn't want to shoot when the sun was behind the clouds because it automatically makes the colors look washed out and the contrasts become flat. Sure you can always fake it, but the real thing is always better! After waiting for what seamed like an eternity the sun finally showed at last... for about 2 seconds, and then it hid again. I gritted my teeth at it at the time but took a bunch of shots anyway - because the light still shone through a bit. Funnily, those shots ended up being the best of the bunch. They had just the right amount of light to blow life into the colors, and at the same time, not too much light as to make stuff too "contrasty". So, partially cloudy it was. Yey!

/MrsHjort

Day 19 - City View

The sun finally peaked out, as you'll see in this picture. My second day in Edinburgh was the opposite of the first. The previous day was as you'd expect; moist, cold and a bit windy, with a bit of rain... But this day... this day was an absolutely wonderful summer day. Quite uncharacteristic for the city according to the locals.

I shot this from the roof of the National Museum of Scotland, that's why there is a tiny bit of foliage in the shot down by the lower edge. Usually I'd clone it away, but in this case, I actually don't mind it that much, I'd even go so far as to say that I wish there was more of it :). It ads a little something to the scene.

The museum itself was a great experience. Mr especially had a ball there, the history lover that he is. He went everywhere to gander at all sorts of olden things. I much preferred the the more science related stuff myself though, the space section in particular was very nice. Check it out if you're in the city. it's definitely worth a visit.

/MrsHjort

Day 5 - The Ladies

Yey! Things are moving forward! I've had two epiphanies since yesterday - I've figured out a new way to reduce noise selectively using the Nik Collection, and a new, much faster way to fake a narrow DOF.

Let's deal with the noise first. Sometimes, the name of a thing can blind you to the effect is has. The Nik Collection includes a filter called Dynamic Skin Softener that reduces texture in, you guessed it, skin tones. But, you have the ability to redefine what should be accounted as "skin", which means that you can soften any color you like by using the pipette tool. Neat huh? That helps a lot when changing a portion of an image drastically, like say when you use the Detail Extractor to bring out a sky and it becomes "too noisy". I wish I had figured that out sooner.

Next, lets talk about the fake DOF. Before, I used do that in a very time-consuming way. I used the lasso tools to select the portion I wanted to keep sharp, copied it and put it on a new layer. After that I  went back to the base layer, cloned the areas close to the "copied part" and painted over it to minimize the bleed effect that blurring an image creates - otherwise I would end up with a give-away fuzzy "halo" around sharp area. Today I figured, why not simply cut the subjects out instead? That way there would be nothing left on the base layer to bleed from. As you can see, it worked beautifully! Tough, I had to copy the base layer three times, blur three of layers and keep a sharp one in the back so that there wouldn't be any "sharp bleed" or transparency (am I making sense here? I hope I am).

So there you have it. My two new methods, I hope they're useful to you too.

/MrsHjort

Day 4 - L'artillerie

This was the high-point of the day at the market for Mr. They fired off several of the cannons at noon, and he loves that sort of thing. Him and every other man, teen and boy at the market. The crowd was very exited.

Unfortunately, I didn't get there in time to get a good spot, so I had to resort to holding my camera up and using my rotatable display to try and get a decent shot. I like my height, 170 cm isn't bad, but man, sometimes I wish I was a bit taller... A lot of heads got in the foreground of the shots despite my best efforts, even the perfectly timed one that showed a boom in full bloom. It would have been a slam dunk, but what can you do? It made me ground my teeth a bit, but you can't get everything I guess...

Fortunately, the knights stuck around after the show and I managed to get a few decent shots of them despite everything, I just wish I had gotten that one perfect shot...

/MrsHjort