Followed by...A Rose by Any Other Name

Must be sweeter than those toes...

Fun with Fungi

Somehow I should be able to come up with a good caption for this photo. It seems Maya has a bit of a foot fetish....I'm open to ideas, so send me a comment :)

Blagaj - Source of the Buna River

With the Dervish House peeking out on the left.

This is another one that I'm not sure where to go with. I took HDR sets in landscape and portrait orientation as well as different framing options. I generally like all of them. This particular iteration is a fairly complicated (for me) combination of two different HDR merge techniques (to keep the water from "blowing out" to pure white while keeping details in the cliffs) combined using an opaque layer mask (first time I've ever done the opacity thing on an entire layer). Topped off with a saturation layer and a curves layer adjustment (to get the colors "right", whatever that means to you:). This is one that definitely looks better viewed large.

Devish House at the Source of the Buna River - Blagaj, Herzegovina

Ćevapi

I saw this sign and framed it with the flowers at the cafe where we stopped for a drink in the new old town section of Mostar. One of many shots I was pleased with yesterday.

Ćevapi

Light at the End of the "Tunel"

Elesa's parents are visiting and we've gone out and about a bit. One stop was the "Tunel" Museum where they got to see the remnants of the tunnel built by the Bosniaks under the UN occupied airport. The tunnel was used to get supplies into the besieged city of Sarajevo (and people out), past the Serbian snipers and the "neutral" UN forces. At the museum you get to watch a video which is pretty much wordless. The pictures and the TV footage of the war say plenty all by themselves.

I've taken lots of photos recently. I photographed the tunnel from a couple different angles and in HDR sets. Not really sure where I want to go with it, do I want to use HDR to emphasize the wood and grain? or go with the dark tunnel accented with highlights from the bare bulb? This particular photo is pretty much straight out of the camera leaning towards the latter.

Tunel Museum - Sarajevo

Theme for the Day - Graffiti

Please click on photo for a bigger and better "experience!"

Two Windows




Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test

Crossroads

An HDR merge from the other day in Veliki Park next door. I don't know if it was the wind or very slight camera movement that sort of gives it a subtle dreamy texture, but I like it. This is just a minute or two in photoshop (after the merging part), someday I'll have to find the time and do it right....I think I've said or thought that before :)

Dog Show

There was a dog show in town, a big one with international competition. Elesa and I got to discussing how all the various extra-curricular things/hobbies people get involved in (usually with their children) have their own culture. It is especially noticeable with those that have competitions and big events. Judo, ice skating, Little League Baseball, dog shows, gymnastics etc. To an outsider, much of the proceedings make no sense, outsiders don't see the differences so "obvious" to those in the know. By the time I got to the show and joined up with Elesa and Shelby, it was to the part where they are judging between bests of breeds to determine the best of the groups and eventually best of show. All the %&(^ had gone home as one lady put it. Since I know nothing about dog shows, instead of photographing the competition parts, I took photos of the dogs "hanging out" and waiting their turn. So I guess this was like trying to take photos of ugly competitors at a beauty pageant...

This is a GOOD Hair Day


A Little Bit of Tongue!


I'm So Pretty


Things are Looking Up!


Best of Show - Shelby and Maya


Maya managed to draw a fair amount of attention even here among the "big dogs". She also certainly accounted for almost all of the cultural diversity among the doggies, singlehandedly representing more bloodlines than the other 100+ dogs combined!

The Power of Peace

This photo borders on illustration. It is a merge of two different HDR interpretations of the same three photographs. I used one interpretation to make the human form of the sculpture "glow". The second interpretation I used for everything else in the frame to even out the tones in the bright sun and add some "richness". I then combined the two images using layer masks in CS2. Last, I did some serious perspective adjustment to straighten it all out. I really should have taken the photos with the 24mm Tilt/Shift lens that I don't have :) And very last, you rarely ever see this sculpture looking anything like this anyway...I felt like I waited forEVER for the pigeons to get off of his head! I've heard, but can't confirm that this is some sort of "peace" sculpture (hence the title).

Sculpture on Liberation Square (Trg Oslobodenja)
Along Ferhadija - Sarajevo



Saborna Crkva, Largest Orthodox Church in Sarajevo in the Background

Another One

Suleimania Mosque aka "Colored Mosque" Travnik, Bosnia

So What Do You Actually Do...

with 4165 photos? (as of today). I mean really, how many will ever really be printed or even seen (by someone other than me)...for that matter most probably aren't worth seeing. And that is basically just one years worth, I hate to guess how many slides and regular photos I have that we've taken over the past 20+ years. Here goes a few more:

"Texture on Blue" Travnik, Bosnia

Rapunzel

I think this plant will eventually "let her hair down" in the form of seeds...








Castle
Above
Travnik,
Bosnia

Lions - Why are They Always Sad ?

The Lion in the Wizard of OZ... (sorry, no photo)

The Lion in the cemetery by Koševo Hospital here in Sarajevo



The Lion of Lucerne, Switzerland. (From my archives:)

More Cemetery Photos

The first photo is one I promised earlier. A Muslim "new" cemetery from the mid-90's siege of Sarajevo. All the obelisks neatly in rows, with dates primarily from '92-95. In some cases, what are entire families, three generations worth right in a neat row. I'm really not sure where to "go" with this photo, but in this iteration, I "blew out" the white on one side of the obelisk to empathize the angles. To see the details in the marble on the side of the obelisk facing the camera, you need to click and view the larger iimage.



This second one is from Veliki Park, and literally right outside our door. It is an HDR image, but again I've purposely blown the whites of the obelisk gravestones from the war in the background. Compositionally, my idea is to draw the eye from the old to the new...



This is a different angle, time of day etc. but many of the same gravestones as this earlier photo.

Springtime = Flowers

so here's a flower photo, one of the pansies on our patio.

Night Time HDR - City Living

Reading Sean Duggan's recent blog entries on night time HDR in Las Vegas prompted me to mess around a bit on my own. Last night I took shots of the "eternal flame" and the National Bank Building. I didn't realize at the time how much I would have to compensate for the vast difference between the bright light of the flame and the lights the bank sculptures hold respectively, so I'm not real keen on my results. Photos like these are beyond the capabilities of the camera's generally very good evaluative metering I'll try again soon. In the meantime, I decided to make sure I understand, and get it right next time. So I took shots off our balcony in "front" and out the "suicide door to nowhere" in "back". Here are the results. The "front" photo is a combo of 7 shots, the "back" is a combo of 9 shots. The "back" shot especially, combines some of my favorite things, HDR, night photography and mixed temperature lighting. I may have to try this at night in Veliki Park to add gravestones to the mix!

FRONT


BACK

Black and White

I always liked black and white darkroom work. I think it is an art in and of itself, in many ways separate from photography. I never really liked color darkroom work. It was too much like work to get the color balance correct. Photoshop sort of gives me the feeling in color that darkroom gave me for black and white. But I've not really done much in Photoshop with black and white...I miss the magic and aura of putting that piece of paper in various liquids and watching a photograph magically appear...and then get to see if my dodging and burning and whatever other voodoo I tried actually gave me the effect I was aiming for. Photoshop results are more immediate with easy and fast "retries". All this leads me to...someone had suggested one of my gravestone photos would look nice in black and white. I really think the photo he referred to looks better in color. It got me to thinking though, I and thought this one



looks pretty good in black and white.

Abandoned

...in a bed of flowers.

Shelby Competes

This had to be tough for Shelby. Her first judo competition in about 3 years....and it was in a foreign language! As you can imagine, she was a little nervous. We didn't know how we would know which mat to be on and when. She was unfamiliar with the venue, the fighting style and the refereeing style. She lost her match, but it was hard fought. Shelby did not look nervous or timid. She attacked well and confidently. Shelby used some of the techniques she has been working on for use against taller competitors with longer arms (which is most of her opponents). In today's match, even the winning throw, both Carl and I thought Shelby was going to be able to reverse it and win as they were going down. I'm sure Shelby's opponent would never have guessed that it has been so long since Shelby's last competition.

Some Things I didn't Consider

in my blog entry yesterday.
The lighting can and will change with weather, time of day and time of year
The background or foreground can change because of artificial and/or natural reasons.

And how and why I now know these things you ask???
Today I went back...
It was at a different time of day, midday today, vice late afternoon last week,.
This resulted in the blue being much more noticeable in the sculpture. The change was so dramatic, I checked my prior photo to make sure I didn't do something drastic to affect the color balance while I was processing it. And this time,
there was a nasty looking truck in the background, but I adjusted my position to eliminate it