Straight up

Whenever I visit a building – especially historic places with a grandiose architecture or abundant decoration – I will make sure to have a good look upwards. More often than not that will result in pictures of domes, ceilings and other ornaments.

Some friends that regularly accompany me on photo explorations by now have quite a collection of shots showing me lying flat on my back, camera pointed all the way up.

Brussels, Egmont Palace

Antwerp, Central Station

 Turnhout, Church of the Beguinage

 Sint-Truiden, Abbey, Emperor’s Hall

Brussels, Church of Notre Dame du Sablon

A wide angle lens of course is the default glass choice, and many times my fisheye will end up on camera. Sometimes I will use the distorted picture ‘as is’, other times I will de-fish (using PTLens, or more recently through Lightroom’s built-in lens correction). All depends on the original lines and curves of the construction.

Equally often, I will take a few bracketed shots and combine them with Photomatix Pro’s Exposure Fusion feature, to deal with the extreme dynamic range (sunlit windows through deep shadows).

Gear notes: D700, 16/2.8D, 24/2.8, 17-35/2.8D

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Happy Blogday!

Exactly two years ago I started this modest photoblog of mine.
It has proven to be a challenging commitment – and an excellent incentive to go out and shoot more!

Thanks to all visitors, nearby and far away, friends or unknown passersby! Your comments and critiques are always welcome.

This blog has shown little activity during the past few weeks, for a number of good (and more often silly) reasons. that’s about to change, there’s some nice projects underway.

Come visit again soon!

App-Art

More than a month without new posts on this blog, I feel quite embarrassed… It’s just that I haven’t been shooting much (that I could share) over these few weeks, but that should change for the better soon.

So now for something completely different!

The popularity of the iPhone as a camera-to-go has caused a flood of tiny apps that do ‘creative’ things to your quick shots. I wouldn’t call the end results great photography, but at least these apps quickly provide a fresh look on otherwise uninspiring pictures… We all (should) know about the more famous tools: Hipstamatic, Plastic Bullet, 100Cameras and the likes. I ran into a few other equally fun ones.

Released very recently, Tiny Planet Photos warps your images into small stereographic projections. I actually moved some older archive shots to my iPhone first to run them through this free App.

No doubt inspired by this App-wave, we’ve seen the first desktop utilities to make similar creative edits to pictures. One that you too may like very much is Lo-Fi. A more than funky user interface alone makes it worth looking at that one.

No fresh pixels to play around with? Get your creative juices flowing and have some fun with your image libraries!

(Note: I did apply some minor Lightroom tweaking afterwards, for instance to crop, adjust levels or add a white vignette effect).

Gear notes: various smoke & mirrors

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