Although nowadays I live in an urban area of my country, I grew up right between suburbia and the mountains, in an almost rural scenario.
One of the thing I miss most from my childhood is looking up and gazing the millions of light dots above me twinkling.
Light pollution is so strong that it can easily change the scenario of your picture even if the light comes from small cities or villages far away. The difference between the picture above and bellow was merely pointing the camera down.
If you look at the starts for a while you might even be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a falling star.
But in the picture above that is not the case, after I took the picture and looked at the LCD on the back of the camera I noticed the light trace. When I looked up to check the sky I saw it in the midst of a million other, moving across the night sky slowly. It was probably a satellite or the international space station.
I would have never noticed the "moving star" if not for the picture...of course it's all luck :)
Lately I haven't been having that much time to write on this blog, this is mainly because I've changed my Job and accepted a new challenge. It was hard to leave the job I had for 6 years and start again somewhere else and it's also very time consuming. But even though the lack of time I still take some time off to take pictures and most of all to post process them.
My latest finished sets are about the Lisbon area, I've been there, in vacation, last summer visiting some friends.
Lisbon is the capital city and largest city of Portugal. It's a densely populated and urban region, I like visiting other cities and tend to like street photography, but if you don't like cities it also has beautiful surrounding places like:
Bug - "(loosely) any insect or insect like invertebrate."
As a software engineer, I'm used to hear the word Bug all the time, only in a different context "Informal. A defect or imperfection, as in a mechanical device, computer program, or plan; glitch"
Although they are from very different realities, computers and Arthropod are so similar in many ways...
...and modern mechanics and robotics seam to mimic this animal phylum.
All my life I've been fascinated by science fiction, especially the Cyberpunk scene, the picture above is Tachikoma, an A.I. spider like multi-legged combat vehicles from one of my favorite fictional universe Ghost in the Shell.
It's so weird when reality start catching up with fiction.
But getting back to taking pictures, bugs are one of my favorite subjects, although it's not an easy task and requires special macro techniques and equipment, I quite enjoy it.
Unfortunately most people don't seam to enjoy it that much and some are even repulsed by the sight of spider pictures.
I can't understand why, they are such wonderful creatures.
I'll keep taking pictures of them and tagging then just in case there are some bug fans out there!
Cats are one the most popular things on the internet
I have always felt hypnotized by a cats' stare and ever since I was a little kid I always wondered what was behind those beautiful eyes...what are they thinking about when they stare at you like that...
Cats make great photographic models, unlike dogs that either get excited and move frenetically around when they see a camera or run away scared of the strange dark, rock like, thing you're holding in your hands, cats seam to enjoy the camera!
Even when you are playing around with them, they always seam to stop and stare at the camera...it's almost as if they understood what you are doing and wanted you to take their picture...maybe they're just plain dumb...
Or maybe they're just checking you out and planning how to kill you and steal all your territory and food. After all, beneath that shallow domestic look, they are wild animals!
I'll keep tagging some cats in my flickr account for all you cat lovers out there XD
I started taking pictures in the digital era so I never heard of the Sunny 16 rule. I probably never heard of it because I never took any type of class or workshop in photography.
It's the big advantage and the disadvantage of learning by yourself, you always skip to the part you really want to learn about!
I finally got the courage to go out and shoot 35mm but unfortunately I must have forgotten the light meter switch on and killed the battery I purchased for the Spotmatic.
So I said to myself "use your gut feeling, that should be enough" the result was 36 pictures with overexposure. If I had known about the Sunny 16 rule this never would have happened...stay in school kids :)
It was a bit cloudy and I tend to underexpose all my pictures, not only when I use manual lenses but even with the modern electronic gear I've got, so my gut feeling was to let more light in than usual.
They were not that bad and it even added an extra vintage look to them but it was not deliberate so it feels kind of cheating XD
I'll try to keep uploading photos on my 35mm set when I have some spare time for it and I bought a new battery and film, so I hope I'll get it right next time.
And, for all you purist out there, I edited them so they didn't look so bad...haters gonna hate...
It's a great site, it has an amazing live tracking feature of almost all marine traffic.
You can click on the boats to see what's their route, type, nationality and all kinds of specs, you can even upload pictures of that specific boat you clicked on.
You should also check out the gallery, since it has some awesome pictures!
But I don't like taking pictures of commercial jet planes, they all look alike... commercial boats look more custom made, they have a certain rusty vintage look from another century that I like. And passenger boats are just fantastic looking floating hotels, but most of the time it's commercial traffic over here...
Unfortunately it does not have the cute small sailing boats :(
But to catch them it's easy, every weekend if it isn't a stormy day, just check if there's some wind: http://www.windguru.cz/
You can check out more in my Boats set. I'll keep updating it from time to time...
This weekend I was visiting relatives and when I entered the living room Compay Segundo was playing on the stereo...it brought back some good memories!
Cuba is one of the most interesting places in the planet and I consider myself lucky enough to have visited it.
It's a very long trip from this side of the globe to Cuba, but it was worth it. I'd never took a plane trip for so long and had never seen islands like that from the sky, the Caribbeans are a mysterious and wonderful place.
I didn't take much thought about photography at that time of my life and in Cuba it was one the first times I thought about it. This was mainly because of two reasons: for the first time I felt unsatisfied with the pictures I took with my point and shoot camera. It was such a wonderful place and I just couldn't capture it in all it's color and life, the second reason was that I stumbled, in a souvenir shop with this book, and bought it:
I had read that Che was an enthusiast of photography but it was only when I opened the book that I realized that Che was really in to it, he appears in so many pictures holding several different cameras and lenses.
" 'I was a photographer before I was a Comandante,’ he once declared, and when asked the question after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, ‘Are you a revolutionary or a photographer?’ he answered, not surprisingly, ‘I am a revolutionary photographer’. "
There are even guys who have created automated systems for it, but I decided to do something a little more low tech.
I used some paper clips, a paper support to elevate the film, desk light, tripod and a 50mm lens on extension tubes.
Post processing was just inverting the color, desaturating, adjusting levels and removed dust spots. I used a picture that had lots of sky on it because it was the best way to know how mutch dust I'd get on the process.
But after scanning the original print I realized that part of that dust was
already from the picture itself.
What surprised me the most was that I got more with and height from my macro shots then the original printed picture.
I also found something in the back of the print that was quite common then and I kind of miss it in this new digital era, in the back of the picture was handwiten
by my wife “Vila Praia de Ancora 14 Fevereiro 2003” it was only then that I
remembered that beautiful sunny valentine's day.
I started taking pictures using a D-SLR about a year ago...became addicted ever since I opened that Nikon golden box.
"Of course it's all luck."
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Of course there's technike and equipment and a million other factors when it comes to photography but what you must really have is luck.
In the picture above I was on vacation in London just passing by and had my camera on auto because I was still learning the basics and was not comfortable moving around without the auto settings on.
I thought at that time I could miss an important moment by taking a bad picture using my own settings.
Looking back, I was right, I totally would have ruined this picture by trying to be a pro. Don't take me wrong, I'm not saying that you shouldn't learn how to take pictures or to use auto all the time.
It is one of my favorite pictures, the framing, the scenario, the people, the light...it really captures the moment and the feeling of being in London. Freezing that moment and feeling in time is what photography is all about.
Bresson was right, you know, that picture, was all luck.
I read somewhere in the internet that in photography you tend to take pictures of what you like the most...it's also true. The first picture my Nikon ever took was of my wife!
If you look at the starts for a while you might even be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a falling star.
