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!
