City Park

Today, I saw this on the way to take the photo that follows. Again it is HDR, my current "phase". The photo still needs some work, for instance I'd like to work on making the graffiti draw the viewer's eye a little more. I'm happy with the composition though, and the way the slide seems to encircle one piece of the "urban art".

The Last for now ...

National Bank of Azerbaijan - Baku (Image 1446 taken 30 September 2006)

continuing...

Cemetery Statue - Sarajevo, BiH (Image 1296 taken 4 September 2006)

...and...

Bird House - Santa Fe, New Mexico (image 1093 taken 4 August 2006)

Yet Another

Jahorina - Bosnia and Herzegovina (Image 2330 taken 4 Nov 2006)

An Early One...

Volcán de Fuego Erupts at Sunrise - Antigua Guatemala
(Image 0032 taken 14 April 2006)

Another...

Evening Storm in New Mexico (Image 1182 taken 5 August 2006)

The First of a Few

Image number 0001 on my digital camera was taken 12 April 2006. It is now almost 11 months later and yesterday I took image number 3632...the equivalent of 101 rolls of slide film. At $10 per roll counting processing, that would have been over $1000. I didn't really "save" that much money though...I have 4 memory cards at a cost of $540+. I'm set for a while longer there, but digital photography has not been cheap. Or I guess to be more accurate....I have not done digital photography cheaply...I'm going to post a random sampling of some of the photos taken along the way that haven't made it to the blog up to this point. I hope you enjoy them.

Krka National Park, Croatia (Image 1638 taken 8 Oct 2006)

Helicopter

I'm sort of at a loss for a title. I've been wanting to take photos with HDR in mind of this abandoned helicopter for quite a while. Today was another unseasonably warm and sunny day, so I walked over late this afternoon and took a series of photos. To get there from our apartment, I walked through an area of the city which is still devastated from the war. I passed by a couple blocks of burnt out, bombed out buildings, some with portions people have made "livable" with cloths hanging out to dry. It is all a grim reminder of how destructive and long lasting the effects of war can be. So I'm left without a clever title...

Bosnian Helicopter


Close-Up


Another gentle reminder, all the photos on my blog look best when clicked on for a larger view.

War is Cool...

Among the many scars that remain in Sarajevo even 10 years after the war, is an abandoned, graffiti covered helicopter. I'm told it was the entirety of the Bosniak Air Force at the time. Some of graffiti suggests that many of the scars that remain are more than just physical.

Shelby Does Stuff Too...

She didn't get any snowboard/skiing recognition, but besides starting with a local judo club this past week, she has also been taking riding lessons since we've been here.

The Photographic Truth

I went snowboarding for my very first time with Ryan and Carl today. I went down the whole mountain one time after a little bit of practice on a tiny hill at the bottom of the slope. It seems to me to be a pretty big mountain, Sarajevo’s Mt. Bjelasnica. I think the chair lift is like a 15 minute or so ride. It seemed a little longer, since I'm not keen on heights. These first five photos are complements of Shelby and Carl who had the sense to grab my camera as I came down the last 1/4 of the mountain or so. I'm in blue and on my feet...you might notice Ryan, in red and on his butt in every photo :) There is NO alteration of these photos in photoshop...this is the way it was...







According to spectators and eye-witnesses such as Shelby, Carl and Elesa, the reality was more like this:

Jeff on back

...apparently I spent most of an hour this way, because that is how long it took me to get down the mountain, Ryan spent most of that time sitting down watching.

Ryan on the go


And of course my posed photo opportunity!

Dubrovnik, Croatia

Just got back a few hours ago from spending a weekend in Dubrovnik, Croatia. It is another UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its pretty empty this time of year, but I can imagine it is packed during the summer vacation months. Took HEAPS of photos, here's a real quick look at a few.



The City Walls at Dusk


Not Every Church is a Grand Cathedral


Mighty Baby


The Old City Through a Window in the Wall.

At The Edge of Civilization

Right Time, Wrong Place

Here is what the sunset looked like Saturday night. This photo is a jpeg straight out of my camera with no help from photoshop. I have my camera purposely set to keep the colors a little muted and less saturated compared to typical digital cameras and film. So it may be hard to believe, but the oranges and reds were actually more intense than displayed in this picture. A photo I took of Ryan with his camera made it look like he was standing in the middle of an inferno.



Unfortunately, from our balcony, deck or whatever you call it, there was nothing interesting for a silhouette or foreground. I couldn't pass up the intense color though. So it certainly was the right time for a great sunset photo, but our apartment was probably the wrong place :(

Too bad I wasn't a couple miles away, at the east end of the city looking west...like here!

Cemeteries

If you've looked through the photos in my blog, it is probably obvious that cemeteries are my favorite or at least most consistent photographic subject. Cemeteries say something about the respective culture of the area of the world and the people buried there...what it is they say or what it means I'm not sure...but the brightly colored above ground crypts in Guatemala's central highlands tell a totally different story than the neat rows of white obelisks in the modern Muslim cemeteries of Sarajevo. Here are a few photos of a Muslim cemetery outside of Baku.







The cemetery is in a pretty stark, basically desert environment and the sunlight when I was there was a bit harsh too. However, the headstones and graves were incredible in their variety. I'll post some contrasting photos of the Muslim headstones from the mid 90's war here in Sarajevo later.

A Difficult Subject (Photographically Speaking)

Sometimes I see something that is really cool, or a beautiful scene and I take some photographs. When I get a chance to go back and look at the photos, something is missing or they just don't look that great.

I first learned this when I got a wide angle lens back in the early 90s. I took many boring "grand vistas" and eventually it taught me a huge amount about composition, especially foreground/background, leading lines and "rule of thirds". As I got better at it, the 24mm lens became my favorite (on a normal 35mm SLR). I learned about using longer lenses for subject isolation and open apertures for selective focus a while later, but generally I shot with either the 24mm or a 90mm lens (which I did tend to use wide open).

It wasn't until relatively recently that I started using my longer lenses with any regularity and now my 70-200 2.8L with image stabilization is my clear favorite. I frequently use it to isolate a subject, by focus and by zooming "close" to select an interesting aspect of the overall scene. Sometimes resulting photo still comes back missing something, or maybe just a bit boring.

As I've been going back through the photos I've taken in the past 8 months organizing, key wording etc. I've also started to realize how many UNESCO World Heritage sites I've been too. Walled City of Baku with the Shirvanshah's Palace and Maiden Tower is the only one in Azerbaijan, and I was there this fall. The Maiden Tower photos I have are basically tourist snapshots, I didn't come up with anything interesting or some new perspective, unusually interesting light or anything, and I knew it at the time.

Just a block or so away in the walking area though, there is a neat fountain. I took some photos of it and I thought they would be interesting. I ran across these today and messed with the best in photoshop. Quite frankly, I was disappointed. The photo is too "busy", with the subject of the female sculpture just not standing out enough against the rest of the fountain. What do you think?

In the "olden" days...

Ceiling of the Mosque of Mohamed Ali, Saladin's Citadel Cairo

When you came home from a vacation, you dropped the film canisters off at the local grocery store, or maybe a photo kiosk and got your 24 or 36 4x6" prints back anywhere from 1 hour to 1 week later. You brought them home, to the next extended family function, and maybe to the office to share.

Sunset, Hyatt Regency Na'ama Bay Sharm el Sheikh



People would thumb through with maybe some "oohs" or "aahs" thrown in. If you were an organized person, they get filed away or put into a little album labeled "Vacation 1996" or something. (if you were me, they got dumped in a box :)


The Sphinx and Pyramid, Giza



With the advent of digital cameras, the equivalent is coming home, downloading the photos to a computer, maybe emailing them to friends and family, posting on a blog or a photo share web site such as flickr, pbase, yahoo etc.

Sunrise, 30 December 2006, Mt. Sinai



In either case, not many people take the time to do much editing in the form of throwing out the boring, the out-of-focus, or incorrectly exposed photos. Only if one or a few photos were chosen for reprinting and "blown up" was any effort made. I was one that usually made the effort to cull the worst shots, the ones that look the same as the others before anyone thumbed through. So by the time people saw my photographs they saw only my better shots. Usually they saw less than 1/2 (sometimes much less) of what was taken. One result is that I have received a number of complimentary comments over the years along the lines of: "Your photos are really nice".


View of Cairo and Giza from Saladin's Citadel with the Pyramids in the Distance



First, I'd suggest that if you throw out the worst 50%, everyone's photos will look better. Second, this was the long way of saying I've finished going through our vacation photos. I ended up "messing with" 35 out of 289 that I took. People that got to see all 35 saw a mere 12.1% (less than 1/8) of what I shot...I sure hope they look good :) These were a few more of my favorites...

Mt Sinai Sunrise

Sunrise from Mt Sinai
Shelby on the Hike Down

While in Sharm el Sheikh, Shelby and I took an overnight tour that took us out in the desert of the Sinai to climb Mt Sinai and visit St Catherine's Monastery. Mt. Sinai (or Mt. Moses as it is called there) is the site where Moses received the 10 Commandments. St. Catherine Monastery (another UNESCO World Heritage site) is supposedly the oldest Christian monastery in the world and is said to sit on the site of the "Burning Bush" of old testament biblical fame.

We climbed Mt Sinai by flashlight. It was cold, I had the hiccups and felt terrible. The "hike" was about 7 kilometers (about 4.3 miles) one way with 750 "steps" at the top. The steps were covered in ice and snow, which was actually more of an issue on the way back down. I wore two t-shirts, a long sleeved shirt and a baggy sweater (which I loaned to Shelby most of the time). Shelby was better prepared for the cold, but I think she felt colder than I did. It was cold enough that when the nice scarf she had bought to wear inside St. Catherine Monastery got wet, I told her to wave it in the now risen sun...it froze into a solid sheet.

I'm not sure I would have gone if I realized ahead of time, how far it was, how cold it was, and how bad I would be feeling. Above are a couple of photos from our trek. Unfortunately, I didn't feel well enough on the way up to get good photos of the streams of people and their flashlights winding through the desert and up the mountain.

One of Those Memories...

We saw the pyramids in Egypt on our much needed holiday vacation. The tour guide did his best to keep me from getting the photos I wanted. Rushing me, not stopping the van at a critical moment, (we were private customers, it wasn't like I was holding up the group). I still managed to get a couple good shots, including this one of the smallest of the three Giza pyramids, Menkaure's Pyramid. A storm was brewing over Giza and Cairo in the distance while the sun going down in late afternoon behind us. My memory of the pyramids will always be flavored by the "helpful" guide. It makes me smile now, but I was grumpy at the time!

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.