Bonus - Messing with Perspective

This one was tilted because I was shooting up and from the left. I corrected the tilt in Photoshop, but I'm not really sure it works. It somehow looks wrong to me.

Goat-Head Man

I wonder if the Rolling Stones saw this one?

Twins? or at Least Sisters

Stone People from the Austrian Times

One of the neat things about Sarajevo and other cities where "east meets west" is that the culture in the form of architecture can make for some neat mixes. In this region, after the Ottoman-Turk Empire faded, the Austro-Hungarian Empire dominated until just after the turn of the previous century (remember World War I started here:). It shows in the buildings, the faces, creatures and just plain fancy designs that peer down on you as you walk the city streets. One Saturday a couple months ago, I started a project to take photos of the various things I see on buildings. Eventually, I plan to do a whole portfolio, in the meantime, here are three (well, five since two of the photos have two faces each) of the people that watch over us here in Sarajevo.

more of the graveyard

A couple more photos of the headstones in Veliki Park, Sarajevo taken in the fog at night.

The first one had three different light sources, all at different "temperatures" or colors. This made it fun to play with in Photoshop changing the hue, the saturation, adding a curves layer, using gradient masks etc. Most people would consider the result shown here as significantly different from the original out of the camera.

The second photo, with the silhouettes, was more straight forward; a temperature change, minor curves and some sharpening.

Novo Stari Most - Mostar, Herzegovina

We went to Mostar for a day trip Wednesday. Mostar is famous for the bridge...the "Stari Most" Old Bridge. But the bridge was destroyed during the war, now it is the "New Old Bridge" and the only UNESCO "World Heritage Site" in all of BiH.

The "old town", the Muslim portion of which is on the left, isn't so old anymore either.

Source of the River Buna - Blagaj, Herzegovinia

Not too far from Mostar...just like the source of the Bosna is just outside of Sarajevo. I think this one is a lot more water though. If I remember correctly, I read that 43,000 liters per second were coming out of the cave at the bottom of that cliff.

Blast From the Recent Past - Volcan Pacaya

Fired up my printers and scanners today, the first time since the big move. The Epson C80 printer isn't real happy, I must have cleaned the nozzles a dozen times, but it should be good enough to print letters, homework and such. The Canon i960 photo printer, which we use primarily for photos, seemed to work fine on the first try. Then I fired up the scanner, the Konica-Minolta DiMage Elite-5400. It made horrible grinding noises and wouldn't load the slide or the negative carrier. This has been a problem before, but it is now way out of warranty and Konica-Minolta is out of the camera and scanner business. I took it apart and could see nothing obvious wrong. Then I did a heap of research on the internet to see if I could find any reference to someone fixing this problem themselves. It was no trouble finding reference to the problem, but besides those who sent it back under warranty, solutions were so rare as to be non-existent. As I was giving up hope, I found an old forum posting and discussion, and tagged on at the end, relatively recently (Sept 06) the original poster with the problem came back to say that pressing control,shift and "i" as the scanning software loaded solves the problem. I was skeptical, since the grinding gears etc all seem to be clearly hardware problems...but try it I did...and shazaam! it cleared up the problem. Above is one of the slides I had loaded in the scanner. It is also my first scan using Photoshop CS2 vice the merely the scanner software and a little bit of Elements 2.0

Catching Up - Source of the River Bosna

As I get more comfortable with Photoshop and remember what I learned in August, I'm starting to go back over the photo's I've taken in the past 8 months or so. Above are a couple I played with today of the source of the river Bosna, just outside of Sarajevo. It is pretty neat to see a river basically coming right out of the side of a big hill. The moss was all very green, yet the leaves were for the most part off of the trees and finished with their color. Again, feel free to click on the photos to see a larger version.

Sarajevo Castle

Taken a few weeks back. As we came into the city, the sun was shining on the castle and rock faces with the ominous clouds in the background. Photoshop work centered on emphasizing that. This definitely looks best if you click on the photo to view it large.