Wild East vs Wild West

It's been a long time, since I posted a new blog. My only follower must have been bored shitless :) Well, here I try to catch up the lost months....

This first one is a documentary video I made from the pictures I took when I was in Egypt during the revolution in February 2011. If you like it, you can watch the higher quality version of the video at http://vimeo.com/20159122

For me, it was a strange feeling of getting old...by witnessing history as it happens.

The second post is about the beauties of the Earth.....more precisely it's about the beauties of the North American continent....even more precisely it's about the beauties of the wild west of the U.S.A. 

I heavily used 20mm f/2.8 Nikon lens with a circular polariser.

Background

Three more weeks and the year is over. I had promised myself to take 20,000 frames this year. I could only do 17thousand so far, but I'm happy, because I took at least one thousand pictures every month. And taking pictures frequently helps developing some extra skills and speed. For example, you know your camera better, you switch things quicker; or you recover from mistakes quicker.

This time around - with my large audience of a single follower :) - I wanna share the importance of background in (especially outdoor) portrait shots. Here's one I like:

The halos in the background are called 'bokeh'. Apparently boke in Japanese means blur. And 'boke-aji' is the blur (or de-focusing) quality. I'm sure you can reach more precise and detailed knowledge-base about the origin of the word on the net. The contrast of focused and de-focused areas on the picture make it more striking.

In this second example, there is no bokeh, but the background, again, is all washed out. This is best done with zoom lenses, as their focal threshold is shorter and when wide aperture is chosen, then background becomes a soup of colors.

A couple of important points need to be watched:

1) If you're using, let's say a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens and operate at 2.8, in order to get the best of the background blur, then you may also get some de-focused areas on the face of the subject. So be careful about what exactly you want to focus to. You don't wanna miss the eyes.

2) Keep your subject further away from the background. However, you also need to be careful with too much distance, because then you start losing light reaching your camera from the background, which would make it dark and dull.

In the third photograph, there are again focused and de-focused areas, but this time it's not in the form of background versus foreground. This time there are two different focus areas, which makes one go around in the frame.

I hope my large and uncontrollable audience is going to have a healthy, happy, wealthy, peaceful New Year with full of laughter.

Power Of Light

It's been a while since I updated this blog. I've been lazy with it, but I have been very hardworking with shooting bit. I shot about 13thousand frames so far this year. It will be difficult, but I will try to reach my resolution.....20thousand frames in 2010.

The more I mess with off-camera flash thing, the more I realize how difficult it is to deal with all those equipment out on the field, where there is practically seconds of availability. I cannot even imagine how more difficult photojournalism or being a war photographer can be.

Taking this pretty and serene view needed luck.

 I had an old,  really old, Vivitar Series I 70-210mm f/3.5 manual focus, manual everything, non-VR lens on a D700, pushed to ISO 1600 to catch the ambient light, but yet to maintain relatively faster shutter speed.  So focusing a few kilos without a tripod in a jeep is tough. It becomes impossible, when you add the hand-held flash unit to it. So I needed either a clamp or a human to assist me position and keep fixed the SB900 with a flash-beamer attached to it for longer range (which ended up unnecessary and bad quality light.) For some I used a Justin-clamp to attach the flash to the roof bar of the jeep and for some urgent moments, I asked my friends to hold the flash. Exposure was 1/60, no aperture was recorded in the Exif, as  it was manual. But I would guess at least f/8.

Hope to update this more often....not that anybody reads it, but for my own sake :)