Apparently, I should be going through my archive more often than I do. I am finding all those nice images by accident. Like this time. I was looking for some interesting black and white photo to post over at Epic Edits blog, when I found this shot from New York trip more then a year ago. I was walking around Met, upstairs, looking at the entrance hall when I spotted this vase. The post-processing here was not aimed at selective color, I just was desperate to have the column white, which I am sure they were.

I am falling in love with my 30 mm 1.4 lens again. I had rough time with it last year, not being able to shoot as wide open as I wanted. I couldn’t handle proper focusing and achieve shallow depth of field. I guess I learned some during that time, as I picked it up again last week, and seem to be doing just fine.
Just look at the wall behind this Mexican statuette, how soft it looks. And all the detail on the statuette itself. I also love the colors of Mexican artifacts, they are so vivid.
This guy comes with a story, too. He sits in Hacienda Las Glorias restaurant. He survived the fire, and he survived the flood. Two catastrophes later, he is still there, untouched, not caring that everything around him changed. He is still the same.

It is more than two weeks now, and I still did not put out on the blog any of the images from the assignment I gave myself during our last vacation. I had a recent issue of Outdoors Photographer, and I was browsing the pages filled with those great images of large and prominent foreground followed by beautiful background, which was supposedly the main subject in the scene. As much I am fed up with huge rocks on low view of waterfall or river, I rather enjoy seeing trees in front of amazing landscape. Maybe I have not seen that many millions of that type yet. Yeah, I know, this is classic, but it just makes everybody’s images out there looking the same. Maybe except of so called “happy snappers”. Back to the subject at hand. I gave myself a task, to photograph the landscapes on this trip with some vegetation in front of it. Several interesting images resulted from it, and this is my very favorite.

This image was taken here.

The hour and a half pleasant hike in Calf Creek area takes you to beautiful Lower Calf Creek falls. You can admire rocky landscape, ruins of ancient granaries, some pictographs, and fish in the crystal clear creek. When you approach, you start hearing thunder of running water, when it drops 126 foot, and feel the cool breeze from the waterfall. In typical Utah weather, there is not a cloud in the sky. On a day like it, HDR comes in handy.

This image was taken here.

I think I already mentioned it on the blog. Although I cannot find it. Some time ago, I gave myself a task- leave at least one comment a week on somebody’s blog. It was hard at first. I was basically forcing myself to at least leave a short note like “good job” or something, just to keep up with the challenge. Since then, it grew in the habit. Reading of others blog gave me vocabulary to talk about photography, and my confidence grew. I estimate right now I am leaving up to 5 comments a week on different blogs I follow, and they are all of substance. Yeah, I know, I have a blog myself, and even a short “hi, I read your blog” is an event making my evening, but I believe more in interaction, so giving a feedback or input just makes more sense to me.
Hmm, using this post as intro, how about another poll. If you never leave comments on blog, feel free to tell why .

Simple Grayscale conversion to black and white is not doing it to me anymore. Not since I discovered Channel mixer (or Grayscale mixer in Lightroom). It helps to add contrast between tones in B&W image. Just make red a bit darker. Or lighter. And green. And blue. Have you ever thought how tomatoes look in B&W? Me neither. But here they are.

I had exactly one evening to catch some photographs on my last stay in Salt Lake City a couple of weeks ago. The weather was not exactly perfect (it was so cold and windy!), but at least was not soaking rain like an evening before that. We were even able to catch some sunset on top of LDS Conference Center.

The last winter images, hopefully. The snow is gone, but we still have the bird feeder out and full. We bought this winter different type of seeds than usual, and it brought different, more sophisticated bird species to it, but they also were less hungry or there was less of them. We put it out, needed to refill it two months later, and more then half of it is still there. For taking.

Last weekend, first day of spring, we went hiking on our neighborhood lake, looking for colors. We were rather optimistic, the snow just melted few days ago, and a bit came the same weekend as well. All I could get in brown-grey environment were the old, orange leaves, remains of last fall.

Largely underestimated National Forests offer beautiful views as much as National Parks do. It was on our way along scenic route 12 in Southern Utah. Dixie National Forest was not a great place to hike two weeks ago, with basically only this observation point accessible due to high snow. But take a close look at the amazing view, in all the detail the camera could capture.