Season's greetings

As it says: Merry Christmas and a brilliant 2011 to all of you!

Layered perspectives

Sardinia again, on the way to the hotel from the beach on our second evening there. The sunsets we saw on the island were magnificent, but I'll get to those in a later post. For those of you interested, it's an HDR of five exposures from 1 raw file with a bit of magic sauce afterwards. The iPhone version is here.

Tramonto in Sardegna

And thus, we finally arrive at the pictures of our second week of holiday which we spent in beautiful Sardinia. Seriously, if you ever have the chance go there! It's truly wonderful.
The iPhone version is here.
Dusk is a difficult time to shoot.  New York State colleges have online classes in photography to learn new tricks.

Sun rays over mountains

As I was working on the panorama in the previous post, I noticed that this picture looked quite nice when under exposed by two stops. So this morning I did that edit and this is what came out! I'm very pleased with the outcome.
The iPhone version can be found here.

On the other side

This is the view on the side opposite from the previous picture. It's a panoramia composed of 17 hdr's based on 5 exposures each so basically it took me nearly half the day to get this result. The final tif file ended up at a whopping 1.25 Gb! :-s As with the previous picture I've uploaded a large-ish version to my skydrive for better effect.
Hope you like it, because I am quite happy with the result.

Megapanorama

I took this on the return leg of our road trip. It's a pano of 30 (!) shots. got to say, it took quite some time to stitch these together. The full format result is 27940*4400 pixels and is a tiff file of 395 Mb. I left the one you are looking at when you click it, still quite large (4764*750) so you can appreciate the view better. Sorry if it takes a bit to download but it' 2,5 Mb as well. Enjoy!

Or so I thought... It turns out that Picasa, where the images used on Blogger.com blogs are hosted, re-sizes them somehow and I can't figure out how to have it display in the full size as uploaded. All hints are welcome... :-)

So I finally uploaded it to my skydrive and this should do the trick. Enjoy it in full size! :)

Our room for the night

This was the traditional room we slept in on our trip. Lovely, no? :-)

Roadtripping in Romania

Lovely little country road in Ceahlau.

In a museum on the way to Maramures.

The first wooden church of the trip.

For the iPhone versions; one, two and three.

Wooden churches

The following day we, Iuliana, her parents and I, went on a bit of a two day road trip to Maramures, which is famous for it's wooden churches. This is a three picture vertical panorama as I couldn't get it all in one frame with my 50mm lens. Hope you like it, because there are more to come :-)

Danger!

Normally I don't really do the vignetting thing, but for this one I made an exception as it suited the image quite well in my humble opinion. Ow, and for all my non-Romanian visitors; it says danger of drowning on there.

Keep walking

And here are some more pictures from our walk, or plimbare as they say in Romanian.
I particularly liked the well with the steering wheel for a handle :-).
The iPhone version of the well is here.

Along the way

As we continued our walk, the light started to change. we were heading into the golden hour. With the slight haze there was, this resulted in some very nice pictures, if I say so myself.
The iPhone versions are here and here

Walkies

In the evening, we went for a pre dinner walk to a little monastery up in the mountains to work up some appetite. Four hours later we were back... :-) the iPhone versions are here and here.

Summer

 To me, this one just screams summer. I love the way the colours came out without any editing done to them other then white balancing. In the right you can just see the mountain the village is named after; Ceahlau (1907m).

pano 1

The first pano I took on holiday was also during our fishing trip that morning.

0548h

 Almost sunrise...

0533h

On holiday in Romania once more. This time we first went for a day in the lovely village of Ceahlau. I went fishing with Iuliana's uncle in the nearby lake very (very) early in the morning. Hence the title.I must say, it did hurt a little but it was very much worth getting up for though!
The iPhone version is here.

Porto... more Porto

Yeah, I'm still not quite done :-)

Panoramic Porto

With only a 50mm lens getting the whole bridge on it is not really doable. Solution? Take nine pictures and add some photoshop magic...

here's some more :-)

And here are another couple of pix I finished :-)

yes, again :-)

lemme know what you think! These are the same evening as the lamp post picture.

Quickly before going to work

Just finished another one.
This one was taken on the evening of the Sao Joao celebrations.
Very nice and definitely worth the trip to go and experience it!

Porto, take 2 or was it 3...

Anyway, I've been editing again this weekend :-).
Enjoy!
All of them are in Porto obviously :-)

Porto; first impression :-)

We've been to Porto last week.
This is the first picture I've had the time to edit

Man's best friend

Also from our trip to France.  Pet owners, veterinarians, and students in vet tech schools will especially enjoy this photo. She was walking with her owner down the beach while he was digging holes with some weird looking contraption. I loved the way she just sat down and waited.
iPhone version is here.

Forgotten

Last weekend, I spent about an hour editing pictures to put on here, but due to circumstances I utterly forgot to post them... so there you are...
All three were taken on our trip to the côte d'opale and the iphone versions are: Picture 1, picture 2, and picture 3.

Bully Bokeh

I've been experimenting a bit this morning. On our trip to France I noticed the can of red bull which reminded me of an article I read a while ago about a bokeh filter. One thing led to another, shoe boxes got mutilated and voilà, the result of the first batch of experiments.
Another thing I've tried in this one is adding a signature. Let me know what you think about it :-)
And, the iPhone version is here.

Cape white nose

We've spent a wonderful day at the côte d'opale with a couple of friends yesterday. Going from Cap Gris Nez via the beaches to Cap Blanc Nez. This panorama is a crop of a stitch of 22 pictures. The whole pano in Tif format is a whopping 700 Mb... yes, I was slightly shocked indeed. :-)

Breakfast in Brussels

Yesterday, we went for late breakfast to Pain Quotidien in the Sablon area of brussels.
Lovely lait russe and delightful tiramisu au macarons were the victims of our spree.
I snapped this one while waiting for them to arrive.

And now for a word from our sponsor...

Same terrace... shot "from the hip" so yes, I know the foot of the glass isn't in it but nah I don't care. :-)
Oh, and by the way, I really am open to sponsorship if anybody at Moortgat happens to see this :-)

Spring has most deffintely sprung!

Brilliant weather yesterday so me and the mrs went for a nice walk in the centre. Much enjoyment was had sitting on the terraces (this pic is at "de walvis"), have drinks, eating ice cream, the lot! All in all a very good first day of spring!!

Adventures in DOF

Since I have the nikkor 50mm f/1.4G AF-S, I had to experiment around a bit. This is one of the test shots I did just to get a bit of a feel for the DOF achievable with this brilliant lens. I must say I'm thoroughly impressed. I used to have the 50mm f/1.8 but this one dominates!

And with that he's back in business!!!

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Joost has re-entered the building sporting a brilliantly shiny new D90 and lens.
Once all the little problems with the camera have been worked out I'll be even more happy :-)
But I have been out and about with it and this would be the first of many pictures to be posted here :-) Enjoy!

Old and new

I have posted a picture of this location before as well, but definitely not like this version.
This is a stitch of 25 separate pictures. I'm quite happy about how it turned out!