2 New Wallpapers

2 New Wallpapers

I haven't updated Wallpapers section of this blog in a while so today I added two new free HD wallpapers from my recent trip to Mexico.

Please note that at the same time I decided to remove 2 other wallpapers from the list because I found them of rather poor quality and not matching my current standards. For this reason I will probably substitute several other wallpapers pretty soon.

You can see both new wallpapers on the right (and to download them just go to the Wallpapers section and follow the instructions there). They are:

• Scarlet Macaws,
• Sunset in Paradise.

I hope you will like them!

In fact I use the first of them as a desktop wallpaper myself - it really looks great in large size. Colours of those macaws still amaze me. It's amazing how beautiful the nature can be.

Daily photo - Before Storm

It's time for a Daily photo. Today photo was taken during sunset in Mexico just a few minutes before severe storm. Initially it looked like a regular and in fact quite promising sunset (there were sun rays and clouds had interesting shapes) but out of a sudden clouds and light became rather surreal and dangerous (I will post another image later) and then the storm began. And it started to rain. Heavily. So unfortunately I needed to evacuate from the beach in order to protect my photo gear.

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Warm sunset

50.000 views on SmugMug

It took me just one month to reach very first milestone on my SmugMug account. As for today my photos on SmugMug has been viewed 50.000 times. Although it's not that much (some of my photos on Google+ has more views on a single day...). it gives more than 1500 views per day on average which isn't bad result at all. Also just a small subset of my photos are available there - out of a few hundred images posted to this blog, just about 80 - 90 are available on SmugMug at the moment. So I expect that the figures will increase pretty quickly as I upload more images there.

Daily photo - Warm sunset

Today photo was quite difficult to get the way I wanted it to look - I tried various things but couldn't get it right for some time. For this reason, I eventually combined two techniques: exposure fusion and manual blending. First I opened 9 bracketed photos in Photomatix Pro and fused them using Fusion/Real-Estate method to get the shadows and highlights right. Then I manually blended result from Photomatix with 9 other bracketed photos - mainly to achieve smooth water effect and to fix the sky which looked a bit artificial.

If you want to learn how to create such images yourself, make sure to read my free HDR tutorial. If you prefer to download it or print, I suggest you take a look at the PDF version.

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No more daily posts

No more daily posts

When I started blogging here almost 3 years ago, one of my many goals was to write a new blog post every single day (apart from holidays where I usually don't have internet access). However, the longer I run this blog, the more obvious it becomes for me that it wasn't the best idea. Preparing interesting and good quality content everyday is virtually impossible, so I sometimes end up uploading photos that I don't like that much or just write a sentence or two because of lack of time. And I don't like sharing boring content.

So from now on, I won't be blogging everyday. But fear not - I still hope to write new post 3 to 6 times a week (sometimes 7, sometimes only 2 maybe) but without forcing myself to do so when I don't have anything interesting to share. I also hope that this way I will have more time to prepare interesting tutorials as when I'm writing daily I don't always have enough time to share tips. And there are so many subjects that I would like to write about!

Daily photo - Sea at Midnight

Time for a daily photo, today is titled Sea at Midnight. It wasn't really taken at midnight (it was 10 PM or so) but this way it sounds more dramatic, doesn't it :) ?

It's a long-exposure HDR image created from 6 exposures. Shortest one was 5 seconds (to restore details in brightest highlights) and the longest one - 120 seconds (to properly expose for rocks and sea and sky).

By the way, night landscape HDR photography is one of my favorites as you can't really predict how the final photo will turn out. It's a bit of a guessing game. The colours our eyes see at night are completely different from what our cameras see - we see in monochrome; cameras - in colour. For us everything has this very dark blue tint, but not for the camera. For us everything is very dark, but with long exposure a lot of details are restored. You can see other night high dynamic range photo from me here.

If you want to learn how to create such images yourself, make sure to read my free HDR tutorial. If you prefer to download it or print, I suggest you take a look at the PDF version.

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Meet the Rainbow

Scarlet Macaw - living rainbow

Scarlet Macaw (ara macao) is probably one of the most impressively coloured birds in whole animals world. This beautiful, almost 1 meter long South American macaw, that you can meet in a wide latitudinal range from south of Mexico through Panama, Guatemala, Belize to Northern Brazil and Peru, has mostly scarlet plumage (hence its name) with wings covered in yellows, greens and blues and feathers on tail also being blue. Scarlet macaw therefore really looks like a living rainbow. Very curious rainbow I should add. That is interested in glasses and all sort of beads and bracelets.

Scarlet macaw is quite often confused with green-winged macaw, which is very similar, but is just slightly larger and doesn't have yellows in its wings.

Despite the fact scarlet macaw is more common than other aras (and for this reason listed as "Least Concern" by IUCN), its habitats are very fragmented and it's confined to small populations. Also scarlet macaw natural territories are getting smaller and smaller and they are also threatened by cage bird trade. Unfortunately.

Daily photo - Meet the Rainbow

Today photo isn't HDR image as you probably noticed. Instead something that suits the post a little more :) This couple of scarlet macaw birds was photographed in Xcaret park in Mexico, a very interesting theme park build near the ancient Mayan ruins.

In fact Xcaret park is something more than a regular theme park - it's also a place where they apparently really do care about ecology and natural environment. Regarding macaws, they have a breeding program that won them a Guiness record for greatest number of macaws born in one place. From the leaflet I got I read they bred 700+ macaws there, but information online mention that even 1000 macaws were born in Xcaret in just last few years. No matter which of them is true - the results are impressive. Some of these birds are then reintroduced into their natural environment, eg. they reappeared near Palenque in Mexico after being extinct there for almost 50 years!

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Where the Eagles Fly

Eagles in Chichen Itza

I have already mentioned pyramid of Chichen Itza, Temple of Kukulkan in this post. It's an enormous building that many of you are familiar with I guess (it's one of the New Seven Wonders of the World after all). However, Temple of Kukulkan is something more than just another ancient gem of architecture. It shows to what extent Mayas understood various optical and acoustical phenomena.

Probably almost everyone heard about Chichen Itza 21st "March magic" - every year on this very day (which is spring equinox what isn't accident but shows that Mayas had really great knowledge about astronomy) Kukulkan, one of the Mayan gods, makes its descent from heavens into the jungle. And yeah, I mean it literally. The feathered serpent deity crawls on the steps of a temple in a form of a shadow from temple on the top of the pyramid until it reaches ground. I bet it must be amazing thing to see, I'm yet to witness it. You can read more about it and see some photos, eg. here.

Another, less-known but in my opinion as impressive, illusion is sound one. Just stand in a right place in front of the pyramid, clasp your hands several times and wait. The sound of your clapping will travel the pyramid up, bounce off the temple on its top and come back to you... as a sound of an eagle! I was a bit sceptical about this until I tried that on my own. Yeah, it really sounded like an eagle! And why eagle? Well, eagles were one of the most important animals & symbols for Mayas. And they are even for modern Mexico - emblem of this country is an eagle eating a snake - symbol that comes directly from Aztec legends (Aztecs were another great ancient civilization that lived in the borders of Mexico).

Daily photo - Pyramid in Chichen Itza

As I already mentioned in this post you can't use tripods while in Chichen Itza. For this reason I took only 3 exposures at 2 EV spacing. I also decided to go with black & white conversion to show amazing contrast of this scene.

If you want to learn how to create such images yourself, make sure to read my free HDR tutorial. If you prefer to download it or print, I suggest you take a look at the PDF version.

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In the Moonlight

Daily photo - In the Moonlight

Sunsets were beautiful during my stay in Mexico. But some blue hours and evenings were as gorgeous. So today I would like to share a high dynamic range photo taken approximately 1.5 hours after sunset and already after moonrise. The Moon was full so its light was quite strong and it was enough to lit the scene. Also thanks to the Moonlight, which is much cooler than sunlight (around 4000 Kelvins compared to 5500 of sunlight), the scene has very beautiful colours, dominated by oranges in the rocks and blues in the sea and sky. I mentioned this numerous times but oranges and blues are complementary colours and thus they look very appealing to the human eye when used together. So if you can find them both in one scene - make sure to use that to your advantage.

For this image I decided to blur water to give it smooth look and in order to achieve that I used Cokin ND X neutral density filter which allowed me to use exposures as long as 30 seconds. This was enough to achieve this very smooth effect on water.

If you want to learn how to create such images yourself, make sure to read my free HDR tutorial. If you prefer to download it or print, I suggest you take a look at the PDF version.

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Post-processing workflow: Hotel at Night

It's been a long while since my last Post-processing Workflow post so it's high time for a new one (for more comparisons like this one go here). In case you want to buy image from this post as canvas print, you can do it here.

BTW to learn more about HDR photography, read my HDR tutorial.

Today a High Dynamic Range blue hour photo I took in Mexico in the gardens of the hotel in which I stayed - Barcelo Maya Resort in Puerto Aventuras. It has many advantages but one of the greatest are its beautiful gardens and pools. After shooting sunsets I was wandering through them during blue hours and evenings taking even more photos. This specific image was taken on the Valentine's Day during which the bridges in the resort were decorated in hundred small lamps.

In this case Before image is image from Photomatix Pro after using Fusion/Real-Estate method and After is a finished image after applying luminosity masks adjustments in Photoshop.

Below you can see 0 EV photo from my bracketed sequence:

As you can see the image is quite nice, however, it's too dark and there are some highlights (like palm tree trunk) that are completely blown-out. To restore both highlights and shadows I needed to capture as many as 9 exposures at 1 EV spacing in this case. The longest exposure was 30 seconds, while the shortest one - just 1/8 s.

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How I almost killed Sony NEX-6

How I almost killed Sony NEX-6

As you might know when I was in Mexico I had only one camera with me - Sony NEX-6. There were many reasons for it, one of them being that I wanted to travel light that time. It worked very well... for the first two days out of fourteen I spent there.

Then at the end of sunset on the second day (you can see photo from this sunset below by the way) electronic viewfinder got really hot - I could barely touch framing around it - and a few minutes later both LCD and electronic viewfinder died and stopped to show anything. As you might imagine I was shocked, frustrated and sad because I hoped to capture a lot of great photos while in Mexico. But by that time I took only around 200 or 300 many of which were bracketed exposures. And that was first time in a few years that I didn't have backup camera with me... bad luck.

The most interesting thing was that everything else seemed to work fine. I could turn on flash, I heard sound of shutter after pressing shutter release button, I could navigate through the menu (I heard that specific "click" sound). The "only" thing that didn't work were LCD screens. Too bad they are quite important, especially when there is no optical viewfinder... after the camera rested and cooled down a little bit, main LCD screen started to work again. Unfortunately viewfinder doesn't work correctly until now (it sometimes turns completely black again).

I'm yet to find out what's wrong. I'm not sure whether camera got overheated (due to long-exposures perhaps?) or whether there is some factory defect in it. I hope Sony service will help to find this out (and more importantly get it fixed) within next few days. After that I hope to release my final version of NEX-6 review.

Daily photo - Blue vs Orange

Just a few days ago I uploaded a HDR photo of a very colourful sunset in Puerto Aventuras, Mexico. Today I would like to share another photo of a sunset. Orange clouds were really gorgeous and the fact that at the same time sea was blue created some nice colour contrast in the image.

If you want to learn how to create such images yourself, make sure to read my free HDR tutorial. If you prefer to download it or print, I suggest you take a look at the PDF version.

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Chichen Itza - New Wonder of the World

Chichen Itza - huge market or beautiful ruins?

Pyramid of Chichen Itza - ruins of the Mayan city from around 5th century AD - was named one of the New Seven Wonders of the World in 2007 (the other ones are eg. Roman Colosseum or Great Wall of China). Most of the people think that Chichen Itza is the biggest pyramid in the city. But in fact this pyramid is named differently - it's Temple of Kukulkan. Kukulkan himself, who was depicted as a feathered serpent, was a god who created the world according to Mayas' beliefs. I will write about the pyramid a bit more in future posts as it's very interesting on its own as Mayas mastered optical and sound illusions which they used to great extent when building this very temple.

Unfortunately there are some drawbacks of it being one of the seven wonders. With the title, came masses of tourists (around 1.2 million each year at the moment). And following them a lot of local vendors. Those Maya people (who are descendants of those who build the city) sell all sort of goods and souvenirs (like t-shirts, Mayan masks, calendars or some sort of whistle producing jaguar growling). Although I understand they make a living this way it's sad that they sell their goods inside the park (and not outside as you could expect). Wandering through Chichen Itza therefore resembles walking through a huge market where every single vendor sells exactly the same goods. You don't feel the spirit of the past that much there. And most of these goods aren't produced in Mexico at all. The guide which showed me around Chichen Itza mentioned that the park tries to fight with the vendors by kicking them outside... but they return every time. I wonder if it won't be possible to stop fighting and live in symbiosis instead. Why not to turn those vendors into artists, performers who would look and behave like ancient Mayas? This way the place would be free of rubbish and it would feel like in the past.

What's more it's not possible to shoot sunsets or sunrises there as the park opens quite late (a few hours sunrise) and closes rather early (4 PM if I recall correctly). That's why I was shooting it in the middle of the day (in fact it was around 3 PM so the light wasn't that terrible but still far from what I would like). And the tripods aren't allowed there to make it even more difficult for photographers. I tried to use tripod on the other ruins site in Mexico (Ek Balam) but I was told it's not allowed there. Reason I heard was "it's too professional". I only had Sony NEX-6 with me (expect the full review soon) so I wonder how they would react to me trying to use large 5D MK III with 70-300 L lens (which is quite huge and white what gives it this very professional look that seem to attract attention of guards all over the world...). I will probably never understand what's wrong in taking professional looking photos. If I upload them later on my blog and numerous social media isn't it free marketing that parks, museums and palaces get? Apparently they don't agree on my point of view unfortunately...

Daily photo - Ruins in Chichen Itza

In the high dynamic range photo below you will see some of the ruins that can be found in Chichen Itza. It's quite difficult to have tourists-free photo there as mentioned in the earlier paragraph but I somehow managed to do that although I needed to walk for a while, waiting patiently for a good moment. I took only 3 exposures here at 2 EV spacing. Additionally I used circular polarizing filter to boost colours saturation a little bit.

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Sunset in Paradise

Daily photo - Sunset in Paradise

There are quite a few rocks in Puerto Aventuras in Mexico (Puerto Aventuras is about 100 km from popular city of Cancun) there what created a lot of landscape photography opportunities. In many of my photos from there I used rocks as a foreground element what you will see in following weeks quite often I guess. Funny thing is that apparently I was the only one happy about presence of these rocks. Most of the tourists didn't share my enthusiasm regarding them as they made entering the water slightly more difficult (and a bit painful if you stepped on some sharp-edged stone) and there were some also lying on the bottom.

Today I would like to share a photo of a truly beautiful sunset in Puerto Aventuras. Warm almost golden light together with blue waters of lagoon resulted in some spectacular colours (as you probably know blue and orange are so called complementary colours and they look great in one picture). I used a bit longer exposures here ranging from 5 seconds to almost 30 to give the water smooth look as described in this tutorial. All this resulted in a calm and colourful image that I hope conveys how beautiful this place really is.

The best thing is that it required very little post-processing. I just combined the exposures to HDR in Photomatix Pro and then applied some contrast adjustments in Photoshop. And that's all.

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Crazy Mayan Dance

Daily photo - Crazy Mayan Dance 

I just got back from 2 weeks vacation in Mexico. I took a lot of photos there, mainly landscape ones (the sunsets were really gorgeous! and each of them was different). However, not only. As I made a visit to Xcaret park, which is famous for many interesting activities and shows performed by local actors and dancers, I also had a chance to capture photos of traditional Mayan dances (yes, the same Mayas who predicted the end of the world... in fact they didn't but it's another story which I hope to share in following days).

Below you will find just one of many photos captured by me during shows performed in Xcaret. Some of them were really crazy and I was wondering if they had been really performing or whether they reached some trance status of mind. To show they craziness I decided not to freeze motion. Instead I used slow shutter speed of 1/8 of a second. This way dancers are blurry showing how dynamic their movements were.

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250k views on 500px

250k views on 500px

In the last few days I reached another milestone on one of my accounts - I finally reached 250.000 views on 500px portal! It took me much longer than I initially expected but it's good to see it happening finally. I hope that reaching another milestone, i.e. 500.000 views, will take a little less time :)

250k views might seem like a relatively small number but still quite a few people recognize me and my photographs now (they mention they saw it on 500px), what's really great!

I'm also close to a few other milestones (concerning different accounts and blog) and I hope to share the news soon :)

If you want to view my photos on 500px you can do it here.

Daily photo - Winter in Dolina Kościeliska

Below High Dynamic Range image was taken last winter in Dolina Kościeliska (Koscieliska Valley) in Polish Tatra mountains. I captured 5 photos at 1 EV spacing to cover full dynamic range of this scene.

BTW If you want to learn how to capture such photos, make sure to read my free HDR tutorial, which will guide you through whole process of creating high dynamic range images - from taking them, to post-processing.

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Ruins in Rome (painterly)

New Light Box

I made a small change to my blog today. Once you click on an image to view it in larger size, you will now see a different Light Box than just a few days ago (more cool I would say). The change might seem unimportant but I needed to make it as previous Light Box wasn't very reliable and some of the images didn't open in it (instead they opened in new page). Also it was very difficult to customize - you couldn't show title below images for instance.

While at it, please note that you can use ARROW KEYS on your keyboard to scroll between the images while in Light Box view.

Daily photo - Ruins in Rome (painterly)

Sometimes, I cannot understand why some of my photos get much more popular than others. Especially if I no longer like them. Take this one for instance. It's my very old and a little grungy HDR image taken in Rome. Something that I don't do anymore (at least I try not to ;) ).

However, as so many of you viewed it I decided to revisit this high dynamic range photo and see if I can make it at least a little better (let's say I decided to take a challenge). Unfortunately I don't have source files anymore (in the past I deleted them once I tone-mapped an image! a very bad idea... I know :( ) so what I decided to do was to give it a painterly look (using this technique).

Although giving it painterly look didn't solve all the issues with this image - like haloing - I think it quite suits it. Another advantage is that this painterly processing has tendency to make the images cleaner by removing some of distracting details (and there were a lot of them in the original image there). This way, to some extent of course, I can control what in the photo will attract viewer's attention.

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