Daniel Korzeniewski Photography » Outdoor

Trip to Europe | Day 3 | Brno

korzeniewskidaniel — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 07:01:56 +0000

Here are some other pictures I’ve taken in Brno yesterday, it was a short day photographically speaking, as I just stayed there a couple of hours and then it was time to move to the next point.

So, I just walked around a little bit during the morning, and then returned to the hotel to pack and go. After lunch we drove to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, and for what I saw this city is much bigger than Brno, but I’ll start start walking around today.

I guess I made a bad hotel selection, so besides being and old Russian, I assume, never maintained….. since well… a long time… there is no internet, luckily I had only one night and I am planning to move today, to another one. So the situation with the internet seems to be worst every day, we’ll see what happens once I get to Budapest… and Ohhh, and piece of advice… don’t totally trust those prior visitors reviews, trust more in your guts…

Anyways, I keep posting low res images, there are not that many today as these are from the morning in Brno. All of them are quick edits, some already processed in HDR, but without my usual post HDR processing. There is no time for fancy editing here, I’d rather be out there shooting and take care of that once in get home, plus the screen in the laptop is really inconvenient.

Hope you like them, and thanks for the comments I’m getting, please don’t be shy and keep writing I really love them, critics are also welcome.

Well that’s all for now, more to come soon, in the meantime, get out there and shoot something…..

Trip to Europe | Day 1

korzeniewskidaniel — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 09:53:27 +0000

Just arrived to Brno, in the Czech Republic, after more than 16 hours of flight and a 2 hour drive, from Prague. But it tell you more about this city in the next post.

In the meantime, here is a little map of the trip I am intending to make in the next 10 days, basically, drive from Prague to Budapest, stopping in Brno, Bratislava, and Vienna, the plan its sort of ambitious, but we’ll see how it goes.

I’ll start exploring Brno today, but from what I saw yesterday this is a wonderful city, full of wonderful people and historic locations.

Yesterday, in the way here I tried to take some back roads instead of use the Highway all the time, I ended up passing by little towns that seems to be like lost in time, pretty amazing. I stopped in one of them, and made some pictures, this one is called Divisov. I’d love to put some more but the internet connection is not easy to get and really sloooow… We’ll see if I can find a place for connection tomorrow.

Well that’s now for now, more to come tomorrow, in the meantime get out there and shoot something…

The Building at the Side | HDR Photo

korzeniewskidaniel — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 12:45:15 +0000

I’ve found this building at the side of the old church I photographed last week in Nassau, I fact it’s in the same property but not attached to the church, this church is the oldest one in Nassau, but you can see more information and pictures about it in my prior post or clicking here.

I liked the old and rusted walls and patio so I stopped by and took some photos, and this remind me how often in the rush to go to the next place we, as photographers, forget to document the not so obvious, the details or side places that usually can end up being very rewarding.

Like the HDR photos in my prior post, this one was done using the Nikon D300 and the lens of choice is again the Sigma 10-20 mm. This image is done with 9 bracketed exposures, and I post processed the final photo using the new HDR Efex Pro from Nik Software and fine tuned in Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop CS5.

Stay tuned, more photos to come soon…

HDR Photos in Historic Nassau Church

korzeniewskidaniel — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 12:45:27 +0000

So, I went to Nassau in The Bahamas once again, this time for business, I believe this is the 4th time this year and I set to go back at least twice more before the end of 2010.

The good thing of traveling several times to the same place is that once you photographed all the iconic locations a couple of times you start to try to go off to places that are not usually seen or discovered by the occasional tourist.

I’ve discovered this location passing by in a taxi, I saw the old walls from the street and I asked where I was and they told me “ohhh this is St. Mary the Virgin Anglican Church, I think it is the oldest church in Nassau…” dam.. The place is walking distance from downtown, so I arranged to go back the following day in the afternoon.

I found out that this church was built by the Spanish in the 1600′s, I got there around 6 PM, and nobody was around, only a couple of friendly locals doing the yard, so I started to shoot the exterior without any problems, soon the Pastor came in and opened the church, they were having lectures that night, so I asked if I could photograph the interior and he immediately accepted.

I’ve taken all the photos here with the Nikon D300 and the Sigma 10-20 mm, a lens that I love for this type of shoots and that has proven to give me amazing wide angle pictures every time I’ve used it. Most brackets here are 9 exposures, and I post processed the photos using the new HDR Efex Pro from Nik Software and fine tuned in Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop CS5.

I hope you like the photos, let me know… if you can. In the meantime, I have yet to see what other historic landmark I’ll photograph when I get back to Nassau in just 2 weeks.

The Rusty Garage

korzeniewskidaniel — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 13:36:14 +0000

HDR photography, like it or not? I love it. Of course, like many others I don’t like it overdone, and I know sometimes its difficult to know where and when you are crossing the line, so my take is that if I think I went too far, then I probably did. So I always go for the realistic look, and try to find and use the best and new tools or acquire knowledge to accomplish that.

And talking of new tools, this week NIK Software released the NIK HDR EFEX PRO plug in, and at first I didn’t even wanted to try it, because I am really used to my Photomatix Pro workflow and pretty much mastered the way I process the images there and I still playing around with the new 4.0 release. But after seeing some comments and being a fan of other NIK plug ins I decided to give it a try and I installed it yesterday, I don’t pretend by any means to make a revision because there are plenty of those already out there, but in a short paragraph here is how it worked for me.

I just tried with a couple of images, and I really like it, the integration with Lightroom is great and at first looks slower to process than Photomatix, but I believe the overall process goes faster, you have multiple options and pre-sets, and you can go crazy with them, I tried some of them and played a little bit, but at the end I went with the standard more subtle version, just like I do in Photomatix, to finish the process in Lightroom and Photoshop as I always do, and one of the things that I noticed is that there is less noise in the image, and I love that. Like I said I got the photograph out of the plug in almost flat and I finished processing it in Lightroom and Photoshop. I am planning to keep trying out NIK HDR EFEX PRO, and I’ll probably decide to keep it.

The picture was taken in Arizona over Route 66 and it is a 5 bracket exposure, I used the Nikon D700 with the 14-24 wide angle lens.

Desert View Watchtower | Grand Canyon South Rim

korzeniewskidaniel — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 12:45:47 +0000

The Grand Canyon in Arizona offer great opportunities for travel and landscape photographers, but if you do a little of research most of the pictures are done outdoors, however there is also plenty of opportunities inside the historic buildings within the park, in this case inside the Desert View Watchtower located in the South Rim.

The Desert View Watchtower is a 70-foot -high stone building, this four-story structure, completed in 1932, was designed by American architect Mary Colter as a replica of a prehistoric Indian tower and it’s the highest point in the South Rim. The interior contains murals by Hopi artist Fred Kabotie, and this is what really got my attention, I spent well over an hour taking photographs of those amazing textured walls and murals.

Travel photography is great and fun, we just need to remember not to shoot only the obvious but also look around, up and down, to discover different points of view and angles.

For these images I used the Nikon D700 and the lenses are the 14-24 mm 2.8 and the 24-70 mm 2.8, Because I was shooting inside my ISO was set to 800 and I post processed this photos with Lightroom and Photoshop.

The color and texture of the walls and murals are unique and different, but I’d love to get your comments and feelings as well, so let me know what do you think….

To see a larger version of the images, just click on them…

Downtown Miami at Night Photo

korzeniewskidaniel — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 13:15:27 +0000

Here is a photo of downtown Miami at Night, I like this image because the point of view is different, I took this photograph from the 5th floor of a parking lot near Biscayne Ave looking South, there are some skyscrapers in the area but not as many as looking north, and I like the view because is clean and you can see also the streets, the Miami Metro Mover station, and of course, some trail lights. Night photography is one of my favorite subjects, specially urban shots, and you can see why here.

I used the Nikon D300 with the 24-70 2.8 lens, the exposure time is about 25 seconds, and I patiently waited until I had the Metro pulling into the station, as I wanted to have the trails of lights coming into the station.

Old Wagons HDR Photo

korzeniewskidaniel — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 13:30:55 +0000

Hey folks, here is another HDR photo taken at the Golden Coast Railroad Museum, here in Miami.

This is an awesome place to practice HDR photography, in fact I have a prior post with a gallery of images that I made in this location, and you can see it here. They don’t have any problems with tripods, so this is a “photographer friendly” location. If you’re shooting commercial or with models they have a fee, but they don’t charge other than the entrance fee to amateurs or personal photography.

Going back to picture, this one was done using a wide angle lens, and I placed the camera almost in the floor to get some drama from a low point of view and take advantage of the perspective and curves in the railway. The image is a 5 bracket exposure and it was tone mapped using Photomatix Pro and finished in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.

Well, that’s all for today, enjoy and let me know what you think…

The Magnificent Hoover Dam

korzeniewskidaniel — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 12:35:13 +0000

In a recent trip I had the opportunity to visit Hoover Dam, and I was really impressed by such engineering marvel, specially when you think it was constructed between 1931 and 1936, and also because of the massive effort to build this massive concrete structure and the difficulties the project presented. Nevertheless the six companies involved in the construction turned over the Dam the the government more than 2 years early than the expected, something that this days…. is almost impossible to see.

Well, the Dam is on the border between Arizona and Nevada and the generators are currently providing power for Nevada, Arizona and California.

For these images I’ve used different techniques, including panoramas of several shots and HDR.

Panoramic view of Hoover Dam and baypass bridge. This is a 20 Megapixel Pano composed of 12 vertical images.

View of Hoover Dam from US 93. This image is an HDR composed of 5 bracketed images.

View inside of the historic Hoover Dam plant. This picture is a Pano composed of 4 horizontal images.

Rural Mailboxes

korzeniewskidaniel — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 12:30:35 +0000

Driving to Grand Canyon somewhere close to Williams in Arizona, I started to see unpaved dirt roads entrances from the route, at first I didn’t put a lot of attention, but then I noticed mailboxes cramped along wood structures on the side of the roads in every entrance.

I’m not sure why, maybe just because I am not see this nearby home, but I decided to jump on the next one and photograph them, it was something different and typical of this rural area.

So here you go, another HDR, it was taken with the Nikon D700 and a wide angle lens, composed of 5 bracketed exposures, tone mapped in Photomatix and post done in Lightroom and Photoshop.