My Photography “Bucket List”

Few days back I got another mail from Darren Rowses Digital Photography School containing an interesting article: My Photography “Bucket List”. Well, after reading this article, I started thinking to create my own Photo Bucket List. Many of them are listed in the article as well as in many of the readers responses. Others are already executed and available (Yeah!). Anyhow, here is my list, in random order ;-)

• NYC from upon a skyscraper, showing the yellow cabs in the streets
• Shot of a band on stage colored with some spot lights
  
• A small waterfall with long exposure to get the milky-ish effect
• View of Rio de Janeiro from above with the Christ statue
• Sunlight beams in a forest
• Stonehenge
• A Costa Rican frog, like the Red-eyed tree frog
• White houses with a clear blue sky and sea on Santorini, Greece.
• Nice and delicious food shot
• Moroccan street market with the colored spices
• Bee on flower
• Old Italian villages, which are built on the rocks around the coast
  
• Smoke
• Petra, Jordan
• Falling waterdrop
• Ayers Rock, Australia, here and here and heeeere.
  
• Sydney's Harbour Bridge
• African wildlife: see my Jo'burg images on this blog
• A reshoot of San Francisco's Golden Gate, Death Valley and the Grand Canyon with my DSLR to replace the ones I made 10 years ago my 2mp camera ...
• Glamour shot
• 12 Apostles along the Great Ocean Road in Australia
• Field of lavender in France
  
• etc ...

So, I hope that some of these wished images will become true and will give a satisfying result :-D

That's all folks.

Cool i5 stuff!

Yes, it's there. After a few weeks waiting I could finally go to the shop to pick it up: my brand new imac 27" quad core i5.

Everything is shiny and things are working as expected: fast as lightning with a brilliant 27" LED display (2560x1440). With specs like these, viewing and handling my 10mp images in lightroom is going smoothly :-) I've got Time Machine running for the first time now and all I hear is the noise of my external hard drive; the imac is doing everything quietly...

After a couple of days intense processor and disk use, including the use of the sleep, I haven't encountered any of the on the internet reported issues. Lucky me!

Another exceptional thing is the bluetooth controlled mouse: don't know how they do it, but the more you use it, the more you like it. A 2-button, scroll mouse without buttons and a scroll wheel :-) The bluetooth keyboard seems less appropriate to me when working at a desk (it lacks the numerical part), so I was lucky I ordered a full blown wired one instead.

And now it's playtime again. Ciao!

A late Happy New Year :-)

Hi everyone,
It's been too many weeks since I posted my last message here. So for 2010 I will do my best to be more active on this blog.

First of all I will give some short updates on recent activities:
I have updated the licensing rules of my portfolio. From now onwards, I offer also a set of extended licenses as listed below. For more details, click on the links and Dreamstime's Terms & Conditions will pop up.

• U-EL: Unlimited Seats
• I-EL: Increase Maximum Copies
• W-EL: Web Usage (NEW)
• P-EL: Print-Usage (NEW)
• SR-EL: Sell the Rights (NEW)

Unfortunately Dreamstime has suspended their Canvas and Poster printing activities (Refer to my previous post). Although this was still in Beta phase, apparently it didn't work out all that well. Anyhow, Dreamstime is a microstock agency and as long as it keeps representing us and as long as customers are downloading our images, we all are happy.
I have some other things in mind to put here, but I'll keep those for a next time.




Take care!

Light & shadow

One of my better photographs and at the same time one of my favorites is now available at Dreamstime. This image was taken at the balcony of the hotel when I was in Florence.

For those who would like to have this image (or other images from my portfolio for that matter) printed as poster or on canvas to liven up their walls, just visit this link and select the pink tab "Order print", which you can find next to the image There you can see the different sizes and the prices. One condition though, you have to be registered to have access. So, just click on one of the Dreamstime logos on this blog and then click on the Green "Sign up for Free" button.

Note that the Dreamstime watermark will not be on the final print of course ;-)

Thanks & take care!

Florence

Back from a 3 day city trip to Florence, Italy. Click on the image to enter the Florence gallery.

Calibration

Some time back, I visited (and bookmarked) http://www.marc-en-ciel. A belgian site fully dedicated to calibration: calibration of your screen, printer, color profiles, etc.

The site itself is fairly basic, but all information is nicely organized: going from the standard rules of color managament to a list of color profiles of different online print services. They also offer a calibration service: they create the profile you need to have a clear color management at your home lab. At last there is a collection of manuals and an e-shop where you can find the latests high tech stuff in this area.

The site is in Dutch, so mainly focussing on the belgian and holland market, but I guess that the tutorials are self-explanory enough for non-dutch speaking visitors as well because of all the screenshots.


© Peter Guess Dreamstime.com

Dali, Gaudi & anchovy

Hola!
We're back (again); this time from a trip to Spain. We went the North-East of Catalonia: l'Escala & surroundings and Barcelona.

Too bad that the wind was having a couple of off-days: so no windsurfing for me at the Club Mistral station at the Bay of Roses. We decided to take it easy & relax and drive around a bit instead to visit some surrounding places: Girona, Llafranc, Cap de Creus, Empuries, Figueres etc. Dali was omnipresent ;-)

After 10 relaxing days, we entered Barcelona by car, which is always a big adventure for non-Barcelonians. But we managed it without a scratch! Here is a short list of things to see and do in Barcelona: Gaudi, Montjuic, Gaudi, tapas, Gaudi and once more tapas. And of course many other things :-) Barcelona was super!

After 4 days in what I call the tapas-town of the world we headed for the Codorniu winery for a guided tour and Cava taste session. Unfortunately we still had to drive 1300km that day, so the bubbles had to be limited :-(


To enter the images library, just click on one of these photos. To see some people-saying-cheese pictures, just let me know and I'll send you an authenticated url.

Adios!

Ps. I updated my Lighthouse portfolio once more...

Lighthouse update

I just came back from a trip to the north-east of Catalonia. This trip resulted of course in some new images for my lighthouse directory :-) Just click here, or follow the link that is located at the right-hand side of this blog.

The rest of the Catalonia trip pictures will follow soon. Keep tuned ...

100

My 100th image is online :-)

Here are some stats...
and

Jungfrau, cycling and cheese fondue

Here they are: some impressions of our last trip to Switzerland. We're lucky that we have cool friends living there, so we got quite some nice tips of places to visit. Click on the images to go to the album. For more holiday pics, just contact me to get the holiday-url.

What did we do:

• From Grindelwald (1034m) going up with the longest gondelbahn of Europe to Manlichen at 2225m from where we could see the Eiger, Monich and Jungfrau summits. Then following the Romantic route downwards to the mountain restaurant at Alpiglen for a Rosti with Bratwurst. Via Brandegg we continued the downhill track back to Grindelwald.
• The hotel offered us some great BMC MTBs to use; so we planned a trip to the lake at Biel via on and off road tracks.
• A visit to Aareschlucht where we could walk along the paths in the narrow gorge. For the ones who are interested: click here for some extra Wikipedia info :-)
  
• A quick drivethrough Lauterbrunnen and the valley of the 72 waterfalls.
• Relaxing at the lake of Biel.
• After having a stop in Interlaken, a nice small town with lots of shops (especially Victorinox), places to have a drink, etc. (quite touristic though), we went to Etang de la Gruere. A calm lake in the Jura, with a nice and quite easy walking path. The setting reminded me of the movie Lake Placid :-D I was waiting for the croc to show up...

What we did not do and is on the list for a next visit:

• lunch at resto Piz Gloria at Shilthorn, where scenes from James Bond were taken for On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
• hiking trip to Eigenergletscher
• Zurich
• ...

Cool Swiss food stuff that we experienced: rosti with bratwurst, cheese fondue, open air portable bbq with sausages on a large wooden skewer, apfelschorle, meringue (didn't know it had Swiss roots: click here) and of course toblerone.

www.emuse-zine.com

© Photographer: Pradi | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Every microstock contributor will confirm: finding one of your images being published on the internet or in a magazine is good news! Well, today I traced back one of my mine that was sold recently.

I found a tip about the way to try to find back your downloaded images; a Google search gave no results, but the recently launched Bing engine from Microsoft made my day :-) Here is the place to be:http://www.emuse-zine.com/Jun2009/page28a.html Just scroll down a bit...

Next to mine, www.emuse-zone.com publishes much more images from Dreamstime going from the photos used for their banners till the images used for guiding the poetry. The site mainly covers selected poetry, reviews of fiction and art, etc.

New collections

Everything still goes well on Dreamstime. After one month of not uploading images at DT, June was a good month for photography: the weather was good, a lot of activities were going on and will be keeping to go on during the summer. My next goal is to reach a portfolio of 100 online images by the end of the month.

Next to my 2 public collections that I've created earlier ( African wildlife and Australia) I created 2 private collections:

• Food and beverages
• Public events

Both still need to grow, but at least it's a gathering place for some subjects.

Here is some teaser from the food and beverages collection.

© Photographer: Pradi | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Lighthouses

My Lighthouses portfolio is growing. I recently updated this collection with a few extra pictures of lighthouses that I visited at Fuerteventura (Canary Islands).

Just click here, or follow the link that is located at the right-hand side of this blog.

Action on Dreamstime

This month has been a good one for my microstock business. Everything is relative of course, so with "good one", I mean compared with previous months :-) The number of downloads is increasing, so that's the important thing. Needless to say that in this stage I've been also frequently confronted with a rejection. A bit frustrating, when the picture which I thought would be definitely accepted, turned out the have some flaws. But I see it as a learning process.

I also noted that some of my uploads have been put in collections, which is a good thing as this leads to a bigger viewer audience, and to an increasing potential download market as well :-)

Here are 3 examples of the pictures that were recently downloaded:

© Photographer: Pradi | Agency: Dreamstime.com


© Photographer: Pradi | Agency: Dreamstime.com


© Photographer: Pradi | Agency: Dreamstime.com

The last photo already upgraded to a higher level. Yeah!

Windsurf @ Fuerteventura

Aloha! We just came back from a one week island discovery and windsurf trip at Fuerteventura. Here's a quick summary of the experience. As it was end of March, beginning of April, the weather was OK: few clouds, blue sky, sun and wind. As the pictures show: Fuerte is quite rough and you cannot find much green out there, besides the few palm trees in the small villages and at the hotels. If you love rocks, dust, sand and windmills Fuerte's the place to be :-)
For the windsurf geeks amongst you readers, I can recommend the Rene Egli Pro Center in Sotavento as a very good windsurf rental station. I have already some experience with similar surf trips and the friendliness and relaxed atmosphere is definitely a plus here.
Cya

Johannesburg, South-Africa

Something I had to complete was the photo gallery of the last trip I made. The trip went to Johannesburg, South-Africa in between Christmas and New Year last year. This gallery is just a quick selection of the bigger set of pictures I took to give an impression of the shacks of Soweto, what a game drive has to offer and how a smile of an Ostrich looks like :-)

RAW and EV setting

Underexposure or overexposure?
It all depends the purpose of the pictures. If you just want to have some photos from your holiday or from a party with some friends, one tends to shoot in JPEG i.s.o. RAW. In many cases you would select a (semi-)auto setting. And typically you want to give it +1/2EV or so for snowy conditions and -1/2EV or so for taking a picture of your black cat in a dark brown sofa. Just for the reason not to end up with a grey cat in a grey sofa as the camera tends to level everything back to grey :-)

But what with pictures that you want to sell or print in large formats? Well, in most case you will shoot them in RAW to allow some good post processing. Do you still need to follow the standard rules from above? Nope. You can forget about your grey cat in a grey sofa :-) Another way of working applies here. But before going into that, first some technical stuff to explain the background.

First keep in mind that a camera works in a linear way in contrary to humans. An histogram of an 8 bit picture has typically 256 values, with 255 being white an 0 being black. Say that you need a certain light condition to get to 255. What happens when you decrease the amount of light with 50%? You can chop the x-axis of the histogram also in 2 (value 128). If you again reduces the amount of light with 50% the left hand side of the x-axis is divided again in 2. If you continue like this, you get closer and closer to the black point (value 0) on the histogram and this means in terms of images and image quality that at the lightest conditions, more detail is available in the picture than at the darker areas. Following diagram supports what I explained here.

How to show this in practice?

Let's take an underexposed RAW image and post process this to an acceptable format. Do the same with an overexposed RAW image and make sure that there is no clipping. After post processing the 2 images, zoom in on one of the dark areas to 100% or 200%. You will definitely see more noise in the image that was initially underexposed.

The next images show what above test is all about. The image at the left was taken with -2EV, while the image at the right side was taken at an +2Ev. The images are then leveled back so that their histograms are similar and they are a crop of a 100% view, which allows you to easily see how much noise is generated by post processing the underexposed images up to an acceptable level. So even Raw is not sacred here. Click on the image for a larger view.

Release of pradi.net

Welcome all to this new blog!

As said already at the introduction of this site: photography, microstock, travel will be the main topics of this one. My microstock business started by reading an article by Perrush on BelgiumDigital's forum.

To give you already a sample of my popular images on Dreamstime, have a look at the following image:

© Photographer: Pradi | Agency: Dreamstime.com

And one of my personal favorites:

© Photographer: Pradi | Agency: Dreamstime.com