I talked my husband into a detour last week, when we drove between my parents and my grandma place. I remembered the point (close to small village of Jaworznik) with an exquisite view. It was a reasonably good day for stopping there, with not too much humidity and even a lurking sun. Not many days like it around here. And it is not even England! Anyway, I was surprised to see how the spot changed in last few years. It used to be a wild parking next to some church ruin (photos coming sometimes later, as it was occupied by a weeding photo shoot). Now, there is parking, benches, viewing area, all tourist-ready. Interesting.
Back to the subject- we stood there, and after few tries decided to shoot an HDR (sun, lots of contrast, no planning shoot so all the filters were at home, taking the camera was last minute thought). So we set the camera to all manual, f/16 for nice depth of field, and got three horizontal images, 7 different exposures for each.
For HDR merging, I just picked the extreme underexposed, extreme overexposed and the proper middle. They were 3 stops apart to each other. I prepared those HDRs in CS5, making adjustments on the first image, saving them as preset and then just applying to remaining images. I felt so smart…
Until I merged them all into pano, also in CS5. Well?

The right image is clearly different then the rest! I was trying to fix it in Lightroom using the grad filter, without much success. I was considering merging to panorama first, before working the HDR, but realized quickly enough that it wouldn’t solve my problem at all. Clearly, same settings applied to images differently related to the early afternoon sun was not an option. Especially, when this sun is lighting your scene on the side. So I reprocessed all three HDRs, using saved preset just as starting point to achive more consisntency between them before merging.
And just for fun, if you are scanning the details in the view, try finding the hidden garbage. To my surprise, I found it only while post-processing already ready panorama! Write in the comment, where and what it is.

This old wall, or entrance, is a part of the same palace I showed on Monday. After finishing off photographing the whole ruin, I went off to focus on details, on windows framing the tress growing from the inside of the palace and tress coming through doors.

Another month is coming to an end, so it is the time again to look back at my stock business. It was a very successful month for me, maybe not in the scale and earnings, but certainly in the progress I made. I am selling very systematically on Shutterstock. Since they finally accepted me in middle April, I sold already 12 images. Not much, but I am still to get a sale on iStock or Bigstock. Also, I started submitting to Fotolia just in May, and I have already two sales scored.
As I mentioned before, you got to love Suhtterstock subscription program. But I really have very ambiguous feelings about them. First, I read yesterday here some critical view on the vicious cycle you can get yourself into. And it kind of makes sense. With all the troubles I had with “getting in” and being able to submit beyond trial batch, I expected them to have the hardest criteria out of all stock agencies I submit to. These are iStock, Bigstockphoto, Shutterstock and recently, Fotolia. But it happened to me today for the second time that Shutterstock accepted the whole submitted batch, and I generally get more images in there then for example in iStock. I also used to have far more images being accepted in Bigstockphoto, but recently, they seem to be the pickiest.
A grand summary- I have 66 files with Fotolia, 60 files with Shutterstock , 55 in Bigstockphoto and 29 in iStock, mostly because they are two batches behind.
That’s another thing- the review time. iStock is by far the worst, I am getting feedback in a week, sharp. I submit Friday evening, I will start getting decisions next Friday evening. Fotolia is not a master speed either. But Bigstockphoto and Shutterstock update my portfolio with new images after barely 2 days. Or less. I just got decisions from Shutterstock in images submitted yesterday in the morning.
Being on forced vacation, I am getting ready a batch of 10-15 imags a week. Good, but I thought I might do more. It is not that I am not picking up the camera, but I spend a lot of time photographing flowers for example. I don’t have spots to photograph flowers around my home, and here they are just everywhere. And I don’t submit those to stock at all.

My dog, Viking, just like my cat, Ace, although both are different nationality, if you can say it about a pet, have one thing in common. They just hate me trying to catch a picture of them. I was very lucky to catch Viking sitting calm, on the uniform background of the wall of the house, and was able to take several nice portrait photos of him. I thought that making it black and white will put the accent on the dog, as he fur is yellowish, and the wall was really bright orange.

Another simple mini-studio food shot. Again, after finishing serious work for the stock submission, I went to play with Lensbaby. Indeed, setting camera with Lensbaby on the tripod helps to get sharp image, and let’s me pay attention only on focusing (with camera in hand, I change my distance form the subject). I also used the tip I picked up recently (and cannot localize the link right now) to check if what I want is indeed as sharp as I hope by magnifying the image at the back of the camera to extremes. It worked quite well.

My father-in-low brought home yesterday a large package of fresh strawberries. Hmmm, what a smell. He washed them on the colander and left to drain. It just looked ready for photographing. I have a small studio set-up – a piece of white paper on the cabinet next to the window- ready for just such occasion. When I was done with standard, sharp all-in-focus shot, I took some with my Lensbaby for fun and for blog.

After a couple of years shooting almost exclusively in Aperture Priority mode, I moved to Manual. And believe me- I had a real reason. I am using 99% of the time my Nikkor 18-200 mm lens, and recently I discovered, that regardless the metering mode, it is overexposing pictures. It is driving me mad. Although my husband argues with me, that the pictures both look good on the screen and their histogram looks right, they are too bright to me. And it is not happening with my Nikkor fisheye, so looks it is just this lens. Instead of Googling what the problem is (I constantly forget to do that) I switched to Manual and learn new skills. It is like driving a stick shift car, which I am also figuring out after spending last 10 years with automatic . If you know the rules, signs and all that stuff, it adds only one additional element. Not easy, but not horribly complicated either. Both with car and with camera, I have moments I forget to check, though .
Anyway, I was photographing my mom’s rock garden this weekend, and here is one of my favorite images. It is a little Lensbaby soft, but I still love the leaves/petals pattern and matching colors.

I took this image of the 17th century palace ruin yesterday in small town of Wlodowice in South-Central Poland. The composite image (15 photos went into making) was 43 inches wide and 28 inches tall. Quite a size for my small MacBook. It made the file almost impossible to refine in LR2! I cut it down a bit. But you can still see a lot of detail in the photo when you scroll around it.

I was astonished when I saw it for the first time several weeks ago, when we arrived to Poland. In my husband’s region, there are fields and fields of canola. And right about now, they are all blooming. So between green wheat, you can see those large, bright yellow areas. Quite picturesque.

I was listening to this interview by Matt Brandon (@digitaltrekker) with Trey Ratcliff today and after leaving a comment on his blog I decided that I will write a post about it here as well. Towards the end of the interview Trey is explaining his reasons for posting images on-line under Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA, one of them meaning no commercial uses. And the question was asked – what if an non-profit organization asks to use images. And Trey explained, that they would have to pay. Those organization would not only use those images to bring in revenue, but they also have budget to cover costs of running business, such as employees are being paid their salary, thus it is only logical that they pay to use images. And this are in fact great arguments, and I totally agree with them. But.
Just take a look at this blog post to see how important it is for NGOs to have in hands good quality images, which they may not necessarily be able to afford. I wonder then, if those organizations, for what their mission is, shouldn’t be treated differently from other commercial entities. If the images for them could/should be treated as charity donations or received at a discount price because of limited budget and importance of what they do.