D - 248 - Window geometry

D 230 - Just the sky

Golden hour can even save an otherwise poor photo.

D 205 - Farewell to the Day

I never learned what caused this magnificent sunset. Low clouds which let the sun out just before it reached the horizon must have been a factor.

Equipment

E-510 with Helios 44-4

What I learned

Sunset/dawn silhouette photos have quite an "African" feel to them. I never thought that they can be so powerful with only some red sky and majority of the negative space within the frame.

D 180 - Night Stripes

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Equipment

E-510 with ZD1442.
RAW edited in Lightroom.

D 168 - Swingallows

And sometimes a night can look like a day.

Equipment

E-510 with ZD1442.
RAW edited in Lightroom.

D 166 - Night of the Lush Green

A scene that attracted attention on a dark, cloudy night.

Equipment

E-510 with ZD1442.
RAW edited in Lightroom.

D 150 - The Worst

A T-shirt.

Equipment

E-510 with ZD1442.
RAW edited in Lightroom: crop, levels, sharpness and yellow filter.

What I learned

I felt really good about my photography yesterday. I had to choose some good family photos which I made since December. It was hard for me and my girlfriend to cut down below 120, because each photo left at this point was too good to reject.

I thought that my cheap Chinese tripod was a junk already, but it came out that after fixing all the loose screws and lubricating joints it is works smooth and stable.

D 144 - The Entrance

Entrance to a staircase of my building just pass the sunset.

Equipment

E510 with Pentacon 30mm.
RAW file edited in Lightroom.

What I learned

I've hit the invisible wall again. I can't think of any good photo and I can't see interesting frames around me. Frankly those are some photos from last week, because I didn't make anything I'd like to see on this blog for two days.

D 132 - By the fire

First campfire of this season.

Equipment

E-510 with ZD1442.
RAW file edited in Lightroom: levels, split toning, crop from 4:3 to 3:2 format, noise and sharpness adjustments.

What I learned

I played around with different automatic presets and programs in my camera. This time I wanted to check out the 'By the Candles' scene mode. It used smaller ISO and aperture than I would. It surprised me with using simply 'Daylight' white balance but it gave a nice result.

D 111 - Warm light

A lamp lit in the night.

Equipment
E-510 with ZD1442.

D 110 - Half-lit grapes

Night shooting of grapes on a dish.

Equipment

E-510 with ZD1442.

What I learned

I tried some back lighting with a flashlight from underneath but the results weren't better than this photo.

D 97 - Nightime sneaking

The moon was close to full, the sky was almost to clear. The night was bright and inviting without being overwhelming.

Equipment

E-510 with Pentacon 30. Mounted on gorilla-pod.

What I learned

I was using a manual lens at night with very little ability to precisely focus the lens and with a need to have large depth of field. I ended up with exposures from 30 to 60 seconds and ISO boosted up to 200-400.

I'd decided to start shooting SooC (Straight out of Camera). So no editing here, although I had to fight myself not to correct the exposure with Lightroom sliders. I broke at noise removal and did some.

D 77 - NKVD on Victory Square

A dubious result of carrying a camera with me at all times. This particular times were completely inebriated and late for the last bus home.

This place is really called Victory Square in Polish but the fur hat isn't Russian.

Equipment

Samsung S630 on high ISO (thus the noise) and long exposure (thus the blur). But the lamp light was too good to waste by turning the flash on. Or so I thought at that time. Well, maybe "thought" wasn't the word to use in my condition.

What I learned

It is hard to make long exposure photos. It is very hard to make them while being totally smashed. Each time I looked at the LCD to frame, my labyrinth went a bit crazy, my upper body went backwards and I had to try to compensate it with my hands to keep the camera steady. I wish I could see myself doing that. Must have been quite a disturbing sight.

The city is amazingly quiet on Sunday midnight. Even more so, when two major local football teams (soccer for some) play an evening match.

All restless souls of that night had been pacified in clashes with the police. And then it was quiet. Shhh... shhh... It was so still and so peaceful until I felt like singing on the bus. :D

D 71 - Ouf of the corridor

Scarce light and high contrast.

Equipment

E-510 with ZD1442 on a tripod.

What I learned

Some tripods are better and some cost a fiver. Mine is the top of the line Chinese crap but it doesn't fall over or collapse under the weight of a DSLR. So it is useful. I wish it had a ball-head for easier framing and an option for mounting the head on the under side of the shaft for frog perspective shots.

D 69 - Lightpainting

Light painting was another technique that I don't really care for much. Some works with it are stunningly beautiful but they need a level of planning and directing on the set which is just as intimidating.

Equipment

E-510 with ZD1442 on a tripod.

What I learned

I hoped to achieve a 3D effect with a short focal length. But it either needs wider lens than 28mm or some additional treatment of the light source to make itself more 3D.

D 56 - And when you see a tunnel, don't follow the light.

A passage out of Jurassic/Fairy Tale theme park. Yes, that means dinosaurs and Cinderella standing shoulder to shoulder.

Equipment

E-510 with ZD1442.

What I learned

The aperture...
I left it at 1/3.5.
And it shows.

I usually worship the rule of thirds. The only repetitive exception I notice in my work are photographs of alleys and portals of various kinds, when I see the central composition to be the only fitting.
I should try this conviction one day and put such object in a golden mean composition for example.

D 53 - Charming the Spring

Another photo that sort of came out in green-yellow hue. Looks like someone here is looking forward to the snow melting away.

Equipment

E-510 with Helios lens. Longer exposure in place of flash.

What I learned

In body stabilization of Olympus as compared to better high ISO performance of Nikons and Canons is a double-edged thing. It's a pain in the back when you want to catch your kid running around or other scenes with people in motion, because it allows you to shoot at longer exposures but it doesn't compensate in any way for the motion within the frame.

However in such cases as my today's photograph it is great to have an old manual lens stabilized and shoot just slightly softened picture at 1/6 second shot from hand.

D 51 - Cheesy moon with strings attached

Today I was trying to catch a triangular composition.
But I failed. It was quite ironic that I suddenly saw interesting compositions in all but triangle shapes.

I can't complain, I got at least two nice photos from the other shapes that exposed themselves to me so aggressively.

Equipment

E-510 with Pentacon 30mm.

What I learned

I'm not sure why couldn't I get the tonal range in the background, which I saw on the camera's LCD, from the RAW file in Lightroom. It came out almost uniformly black.

Vintage lenses with their lomo effects should not be shunned but embraced and explored. And getting special effects from your lens isn't the same as editing the photo in Photoshop, really.

My Pentacon does pretty poorly against the light when counting objectively. But with the photos I'm making it doesn't bother me a single bit.

D 46 - Bad news

No staged shots on this day again.
So this is true story: bad news on the phone.

Equipment

E-510 with Pentacon 30m, flash with softbox.

What I learned

There is a fine line between catching real emotions and being a voyeur with a camera. This is particularly sensitive issue when you are shooting your own family. What can you show and what you mustn't?

The problem isn't that simple because people photographed would feel offended not by the way they look in the picture but by how they felt at that moment. And that isn't always easy to judge for the person behind the camera.

This is just a thought. Actually this news, reception of which I photographed, was bad but not like a surprising tragedy.

D 43 - Oh, it's snowing! again...

Oh boy!
I learned today that not only you can go outside, you can also go somewhere by a car. Even to another town (or in my case - village). You may not have time to shoot anything when you are there but a snapshot or two, while in traffic can be fun.

Equipment
E-510 with ZD1442, handheld from a car which was almost stopped.

What I learned

Always have the camera on you and always look out for opportunities. In this case at first I thought that the photo would be horrible if shot through a snow-stained window in a moving car without any way to stabilize the camera body. But I gave it a try and proved myself wrong.
Maybe not entirely, because two out of three shots were blurred. But it was worth it for the sake of that remaining photo.