Siguenza, Spain. Extreme wide angle view at night of the Santa Maria Cathedral

Wide angles makes things look different, there's no doubt about it and most of all there's no much you can do to avoid it. When shooting architecture, monuments, historical building, being from a lower position the walls will converge, the base will look way bigger and the precise plans of a master builder go to hell. So what ca we do, drop the wide angles at home and shoot only with a 50mm or a tilt&shift lens? No way.
make the flaw bigger, exaggerate the bug and create some super dramatic shots.

For this image I put the camera n the tripod and almost had to sit on the sidewalk to compose through the viewfinder. The 10-20 was with its nose up and everything seem to tumble on top of the viewer. I edited it in Lightorrm and converted in duotone because the full color image was kind of weird, I mean there was a strange mix of colors

The work in progress

Sometimes, when I shoot I'm not sure of what I want to achieve, but when I see the image in Lightroom I start thinking about it and the ideas start flowing to my mind while I play with the software. Thus, there are other situations when by the moment I glue my eye to the visor that I know what I want to say, what the image means to me or what I can do with it during the editing process. 

This image, when it happened, it was quite clear, even though I understand it can give room to many different interpretations. The simple and plain idea was: a lonely man walking away from the camera in a sad and moody autumn’s afternoon. If you give it a deeper look, you will notice that at the end of the walk is not exactly clear what he will find. The trees are quite thick and apparently there’s no sign of another track going anywhere else. Is he about to get lost in the park or swallowed by the dark trees? This uncertainty probably adds a bit more of pathos to the frame, but the main thing, if we don’t want to get too far and clever in the interpretation is that is sad and moody. 

This is the key scheme of the shot but to achieve that I had to work on the best composition, even before the man arrived. I had the camera on the tripod because I was working on a slow shutter speed (1/4 sec) and had to wait until the man was a tad farther from me, right in the place where I wanted him to be. At home, later, I had to convert the shot to black and white, quite gloomy and blue, while it was originally a decent afternoon with the sun setting nicely.

Not every time I have the chance to think so much about a photo and to be able to explain it decently, as I hope I did here. Usually is my gut that keeps me pushing the shutter button, and the brain start working later, especially when I’m on the “reporter” mood. Every once in a while I will post some “image with a thought” and comment it for those willing to read about it.

Three from Rome

I have been few days in Italy visiting the family and enjoying my vacations; needless to say I had an amazing time. Few days in Rome and few others in Tuscany allowed me to grab quite a few Gigabytes of images with my D90.  For these two weeks I borrowed a Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 that I have used a lot. Is not a lens designed for an APS sensor but I must say that was tough for me to unscrew it from the camera. What a superb piece of engineering! What a sharpness! It has been an unfortunate move to carry it with me, now I brutally raised my quality demand, and in addiction to that I also put my eye on the 70-200 f2.8VR to replace the already sold 18-200VR.  I’m longing for a fast bankruptcy because they would both work well with a FX body…..

Anyway, back to Rome for the moment. I took my wife for some brief sightseeing visits and collected most of the shots during a late afternoon one that eventually stretched into the night. Being together with someone who wants to see things and walk around at a different pace than yours is not the best option to do the things properly but she’s patient and I had my share of time. As a matter of fact I also carried my tripod, which is not known for being a tool that fastens things up.

The Gianicolo is one of those spots you must visit. Is one of the roman hills and the view you get from there is quite staggering. Rome spreads in front of your eyes like a renaissance painting, the old mixes with the new and the churches’ domes scratch the polluted sky. The sky was dark but the sun was finding its way through the clouds giving me the chance to grab at least a dramatic light. For this image I did a bit of work in Lightroom, transforming it in a duotone and pumping up the contrast. For the original shot I used a ND Grad filter but I enhanced a bit more the sky with an additional grad filter in post.

Then it got dark and it was that magical hour when the tungsten lit buildings create that amazing contrast against the dark blue sky. I love this time of the day, even an average image collects few extra points, and most of them are quite elegant to say at least. Doesn’­­t last for too long though, so you have to work pretty fast to seize the moment. In this case I had a problem with quite a bulky and dark object in the foreground, name it statue: Marco Aurelio’s. I took a first shot, and it was quite poor. With a 30 seconds exposure I had the sky well exposed as well as part of the building, but the statue was pitch dark and the lights burned out. So I took a different approach; slowed the exposure to 20 seconds and pulled the SB800 out of the waist jacket. I don’t know how many times I have used the speedlight so far to dramatically change the result of an image, being this animated or not, this for sure has been one of those. With the camera on the tripod, during the whole length of the exposure I painted the statue with the flash and pulled out most of the details not long before hidden in dark shadows.

When the sky turned black I was still around Piazza Venezia trying to figure out how to make a decent image with so many people around, work in progress, cars and bad lights. Finally I decided to go for the Chiesa del Santissimo Nome di Maria, in front of the Foro Traiano including the famed Colonna Traiana. There’s nothing really special in this image, but I had a ball working on the HSL in Lightroom retouching saturation, luminance and hue in most of the colors.

Obviously there’s much more photos in the laptop’s hard disk but either I had not much time to edit them, or they were not worth it. Soon more stuff about Rome though, maybe some museum….

Orbisflash for macro work

I’m slowly getting familiar with the Orbisflash and this time I gave it a try with a macro subject. Working with the 60mm Micro Nikkor stuck at a mere 10cm from the lure, I did some fun testing

For works of this kind there is no other option but to place the camera on a tripod. Otherwise we would have the Orbis on the left hand and the camera in the other with both hands shaking and major focusing problems. Still, a sharp focus with a macro lens so close to the subject is extremely complicated. If you pay attention, even at f16 the depth of field is so limited that the metallic paint is not as focused as the eye, and I think the difference in depth between the two certainly cannot be spotted without a magnifying glass.

The Orbisflash, as many ring flash used in fashion photography, it gets reflected in a very unique way in the subject’s pupil. It is true that in the human eye is quite pleasing, very cool I’d say, I wanted to see if it would work as well on a plastic one, and to be very honest I believe it does. From the first to the second picture you can see we have slightly moved the Orbisflash from the lens axis to an off-camera position, and the reflection moved as well.

The light that provides such peculiar flash will sure have critics and devotee; I personally find it very cool. It wraps the subject in a very uniform shadowless way, yet not flat or dull, and delivers enough contrast to the image.

When I received it from the shop I thought it was a darn bulky monster, but now, after very little use I handle it with the same ease I handle my SB800 alone, and I am finding many and different applications for it.

"The Bridge" session.

Yesterday evening I went scouting for a place where to relax a bit and take some photos. As usual I was looking for some running water hence I opened the map and headed north, towards the Sierra of Madrid. Without knowing it I arrived to a place that I have already visited with my wife and daughter and recognized a road to the Jarama river, in an area not infested with bulls and hardwired fences.

The familiar noise of the running water raised my spirits. I put my high boots, grabbed the camera and tripod and took my way down to the valley, where the Jarama River was running. The photo session was OK but nothing spectacular, many different shots in places that somehow called my attention, but I was enjoying it. Every time I go out to take a picture I try to take it as a learning experience, not thinking about coming out with a winning image. Hence, whatever it comes, if is an improvement over previous tries is a goal achieved.

Towards the end of the day I discovered this sort of a "Bridge". Maybe is just a decorative log, even though I doubt that the elves of the woods spend their time re-decorating it just to make it look nicer. Anyway, I placed the tripod and started playing with exposure, white balance and obviously the flash.

The first shot I'm showing here is very orthodox. Cloudy white balance and nothing else. I like it but is probably average, it doesn't have any special "edge".

This is a B&W conversion of the same shot, maybe is a little bit more appealing because of that Black & White feeling yet is not a gigantic improvement. For a novel photographer like me is a nice image but I understand that it cannot compete on the major league

Here below is where I started playing with the camera configuration and my always available portable speed light, in this case a Nikon SB600

Here things started to get a tad odd. I changed to WB to tungsten and played with the SB600 speed light with two full CTO gels on it. The result is a tad exaggerated, the "Bridge" is cooked, way too hot. There's a lot of flash light spills on the ground as well.

Second attempt. Mellowing down on the gels and the amount of flash bursts. Changed the white balance in RAW to something closer to Fluorescent rather than Tungsten. The result has improved a bit but at least to me it still looks a bit too hot.

Third attempt. Maybe I'm wrong but I think this is the right way. There's no signs of the flash bursts on the ground and the color given to the "bridge" is more natural, yet still creates a contrast with the background. Unfortunately I couldn't paint with the flash further that half the log. For my next attempt I will try with a torch.

Funny enough I don't seem to be able to do landscapes kind of stuff without playing around with a strobe. Maybe one day I will grow up :-)