This image was taken at the same time as panorama shot featured here on blog on June 14. You can see the same piece on the left far side of the panorama.
I noticed the pattern formed by the canola fields, some long rectangular shape, and some like a triangle? and in between them the green fields of wheat maybe. I zoomed in on it and composed the close-up, but left the view on the mountains to keep the feeling of the whole place and its location.

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Lat weekend, we went to a reconstruction of battle for the fort at Srebrna Gora. It was featuring a Napoleon war episode in the war, and turned out to be a really international event. The soldiers, dressed in the appropriate to the era attire were not only Polish enthusiasts of the “living history”, but there were units from Germany and Czech Republic as well. It was great fun, and we certainly know for next time where to position ourselves for the best pictures of the battle itself (we were in less then optimal location this time). But luckily, we came early that day, and saw and photographed a lot of preparations for the battle, and took a look at the military camp where everybody resided.

This image was taken previous weekend, on the same day I took the sunset photo. For the abstract image of water at sunset, I composed so there is nothing but water in the frame. And I started to play with white balance. That day, I was for the first time shooting without Auto White Balance setting on the camera, I picked the Sunny setting (I am shooting RAW, so whatever I chose, I can change, but at least I have some consistency among pictures). But I thought, let’s see how it would look like at different white balance settings. In fact, I liked the bluish setting the most. I still decided to add to the atmosphere of the image by introducing split toning. I added a bit of yellow to highlights, and just a little of blue to shadows.

I guess I promised to post this panorama last Monday, and the life got in the way of this plan. Well, the panorama of really cool, long, red-roof Lower Silesia town is coming today. It is far longer then it is wide (more then four times), so close-up viewing is the only way to observe the individual buildings and parts of town. Look for an artificial lake and few churches and textile factories.

My parents place is located in a very interesting part of Poland. Called Jura, the region features limestone rocks. Out of those rocks, and using them for support, the medieval king of Poland build a trail of defense castles called Eagle Nests. They are located in the hilly region, and build so you can see one from the other, to ease the communication. Today, all but one are in different stages of ruin. The castle on today’s blog image is in a small village of Mirow. I took the image as HDR to accent all the details of the rocky construction. Just for fun, I used the CS5 HDR recipe shown on last weeks Terry White blog post. Used as a starting point, it seems to be perfect preset for a detail rich image like this.

Last week, for the first time, I had real, uninterrupted time to photograph around my parents backyard. I set up the tripod, put the camera on it, and infrared filter (Cokin P007) on my D300 to see, if i can finally master the infrared images. I composed and set the focus before placing the filter in holder. With aperture f/8 I did several trials to nail the right exposure, elongating time up to 20 seconds, until I was happy with it. I was quite surprised, as it was rather bright day. When I looked at the image on the LCD and then on the computer, I was not so sure it will work out. But some extensive web browsing gave me the red and blue channel swapping tip in Channel Mixer in Photoshop, and … the result I wanted revealed itself! I just added a bit of blue cast, because the B&W version looked, well, grey, and the worm cast just didn’t do it for me.

I took a short, unannounced break from blogging last week. I spend the extended weekend with my family, enjoying finally summer weather. Luckily, there was many photographic opportunities along the way, so there is stuff to pick up for blog today. One evening, my husband and I went to photograph sunset on the lake. There probably would be nothing unusual about it, except it was the first time there was actually sun, no clouds or rain, a real possibility of capturing something interesting. We went about an hour before actual sunset, which gave plenty of time to explore the surroundings of Poraj lake. It was a Friday evening, in a middle of long, 4 day weekend, so there was a lot of people picnicking, walking, fishing. I think this image shows well the atmosphere on the lake this evening, the symbiosis of nature and human, the gulls and fisherman. And the calmness of the moment.
For this shoot, I also took another step into going full manual, and set White Balance from Auto to Daylight, and achieved those beautiful warm colors, rich red sunset feeling.

Disclaimer for locals- yes, I removed the power line. It was double and single line, right in the middle of the sky. I was struggling if I should do it or not, and decided to brush it out. It was distracting.

Found it in “old” files, from several weekends ago, when we were spending time in the beautiful lake region in North-Western Poland. Somehow I ignored that image then, now it drew my attention because the green color of the boat is just perfectly matching the green feel of the whole scene.

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.

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.