Thom' Luka

02:26 am - Budapest pics

I said I was gonna post some photos from Budapest here. These are a couple of "Previously Not Published" photos, but mostly it's alternate versions and Black & White versions of the ones I posted in luka91. Some of the images just look better, in my view, in B&W, while others I actually thought of as in Black & White already when I took the image, such as images "22", "23" and "26". Others, as the first image here, I thought would work well as Black & White, but when I started playing around with it with "Channel Mixer" in Photoshop, it simply lost all of it's mood, as well as getting sort of murry, so it stayed colour.

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And obviously, you're more than welcomed to comment on the images, as in which one you like etc, or to say.. I love that image.. I want to buy a print :-p

04:19 pm - Various photos

I generally try to gather photos according to some kind of theme, but.. except maybe for two of these, it was tricky to make something out of it, so I just bunch them all together..

Taken at various times the last couple of days, when out walking..

I shot several photos, trying to get the maze of trees and shadows, without getting a completely noisy backdrop as well, which is tricky since it's a small thing in the middle of the city, with streets, houses, a square etc surrounding it... Even if I generally like it, there's so many wishes too. It would have been nicer if the shadows had been darker, but it was tricky to get that without losing all details.. Always the compromises..




This is a, fairly, small statue that stands in the middle of the city, and I've tried getting some images of it every now and then, but never really figured out a good way of shooting it. I'm far from happy with this, but I think I'm on the right track, which of course make me slightly satisfied with it. I both hate and love the background. It's an ugly background, but unless I go out one night and move the statue, I guess I have to live with that (It would have been better, actually, if the statue had been turned another way). The good thing is that the sign, if not entirely visible, says "Handelsbanken" (not gonna translate that.. it's the name of a bank, but Handel means market), and the statue shows a man showing off a horse at some horse market, trying to convince the customer how good the horse is. I guess.. with my next attempt, I'll move slightly to the left (now I was concentrating too much of getting the eye of the seller), and still get only "Handel" of the sign. Maybe with shorter depth of focus as well.




I don't know how many shots I did of this.. Trying to get it "right".. A couple with extremly short depth of focus, some with focus only on the statue with the church a blur in the background, some with the church in focus etc. The main problem was that the statue is in the middle of the trees and completely in the shadow, while the church is entirely in the sunlight, meaning that if I wanted the statue to be ok, the church was widely overexposed, or the other way around. Some Dogde and Burn helped out, trying to get a balance. For sure an image that would've been helped by having my Polarazing filter with me.




Nothing much to say about this. I like the way you have some mistiness in the image. Make it feel cold.




The Baptist Church, which actually is next to that little statue of the Horse seller, and I did went and shot this before I shot the statue. Already when I did take this image, I knew I wanted it in Black & White. I was lacking a longer zoom. Not entirely sure if making it closer had been better, but it would have been nice to have some options.
And.. Geez how hard it is to not feel stupid while photographing. It feels like everybody passing is staring at you, wondering what the heck you're doing etc. And at times I feel like turning to a lot of people explaining what I'm doing, describing exactly what I'm trying to photograph and why etc. What I imagine the photo to look like.. All that.. I so hate being the center of attention!!




Well.. winter.. Almost fairy tale winter, even if it's in the middle of modern houses etc, but I think this comes close to showing the beauty I see in winter. How cozy it looks, when there's a lot of snow embedding everything, shrinking areas etc..
I'm not sure if I actually enhanced this feeling or not.. The image looked more or less as it does now, but I guess I wanted a slightly more.. "fairy tale" sense, so I added some noise to the image, as well as some Diffuse filter on the bright areas, which gives that slightl painted look to it (if you look closely).

11:18 am - Light

I love winter..

The white ground, the dark and various coloured lights..

One thing I've sort of discovered (again), is my love for atmosphere. As some as you know, I'm deeply in love with the paintings of Vermeer van Delft, and among other things I love with his paintings is that he's so great in capturing the very atmosphere.

One of the best reviews I've gotten in LJ is last winter when I posted some other winter images, and I was told that I had been able to catch the "coldness". Making visible how cold it was, etc, and she was true. They actually do feel cold.

I've not thought that much about it, but among my favorite images (I've taken) are the ones that does express some kind of mood/sense/atmosphere. To give an impression of what it's like (being there, that moment when I took the photo). The way it feels. It being a cold day of winter, a bright, relaxed, sunny day or a winter evening not long after the stores has closed, and the last shoppers are heading home.

This photo has to get here too, since it's an image that are sort of bright and have very much to do with light as well.



It's slightly altered, with the addition of a diffuse glow (Photoshop filter)

One thing I've noted recently, is how seldom I crop images I've taken. Of the ones I've posted today, only one is cropped. All others, are as they came out of the camera (except for having altered the "Levels" (Brightness/Contrast essentially) on some of them.

07:29 pm - Snow in the dark

It’s 1 a.m., it’s dark outsid, it’s snowing and a couple degrees below freezing point..

What comes to your mind?

A/ Heck.. it’s 1 a.m., I better get into bed..

B/ You think it would be perfect to lit a couple of candles, snuggle up under a blanket with some hot cocoa

C/ You decide to dress, take camera and tripod and heat out, because that ice on those lamps look kinda interesting

Guess what I did? :-p

I hope you enjoyed seeing the result of my effort..

11:44 am - Goin' nuts

I usually try to photograph things as they are, but thought it would be fun to bring a nice object home and try to take some "glamourous" and stylistic photos of it. The kind of photos you see in advertising or in magazines..

And.. nope.. didn't bother with any advanced set up, and just put it on a surface in the kitchen next to the stove and did it in the light from the kitchen fan, because I didn't feel like setting it up with a proper background, photo-lights and filters for the light etc..

12:41 am - Stones..

Most of you know about my love for stones.. rocks..

It's really hard to explain why, since there's such a lot of things.. A lot of various things sort of multiplying to create a whole, that in it's turn sort of influence the various parts in it's turn..

Mabye the fact that no stone is like another, and that most of them has something insteresting.. Be it the glitter in the sun, the texture, the shape or the various spots forming patterns etc..

It's very easy to get hooked looking at them, because.. even the most ordinary and mundane stone might catch your eye, and when you start looking at it.. you discover something new which leads your eye to look for more etc..

But, it's a real challenge to photograph them because they're three-dimensional and often sort of monotonous, which means it's tricky to bring out the small variations in an image, at times..

Here's some images I took at various places up north, mostly at beaches..

The sense that's the most developed and used with humans are our eyesight, and we trust our vision more than anything else (if we hear something, we do want to look at it to see what it is, since we can't "see" with our ears as some other animals do), and since we mostly spend time with, and socialize, with other humans the most reckognizable pattern/shape is the human face, and, as in the last image, stones lend themself really good to seeing faces.. Not that there are faces, but out of all the various knobs and pits etc, we seek to form some kind of sense of it, and automatically organize what we see into something "familiar", such as faces. Those kind of jump out at us.

With some imagination, I could spot six "faces" (or parts of faces).

09:09 pm - Beaches..

This summer, I've been traveling some, and obviously taken a lot of images..

On a trip north, I ended up visiting a lot of Sea beaches, which is a real great place to take pictures..

Especially "artistic" ones..

As most of you know, I've posted quiet a lot of images from my trips in my ordinary journal, luka91 as well..

06:35 pm - juni, JULI, augusti

lot's more flowers..

Not much to say really.. these are various flowers..

Tried various effects with this flower.. Seeing that it was lit up against the sun, I tried capture it in several ways. In a way that enhanced that effect, and made it look as if it was fitted with a lightbulb inside it, as well as use the effect some, but not in an obvious way.. (and the (bumble?) bee was an added bonus, sort of, since it suddenly was there.. even if I'm not entirely happy with it.. I had hoped to sort of capture it flying, rather than sitting in the flower. As it is now, it's more distracting than anything else...)