Drinking And Driving

The balloon attached to the big box was was beeing slaped over and over by the wind on the balcony. I came closer curious to see what's in the box and why it's on the balcony. My birthday was a recent history but I was perfectly happy to accept more gifts.

Alright, now that I told you what my friends brought for me and themselves for breakfast... let me tell you about what we did today. We drove to Sonoma and drank. And for the very first time, I did not drive. :)

There were lots of things to photograph -- like this nice underwear label. :)

Coming back is always an ordeal, with the heavy traffic between Napa to Vallejo. But once you get halfway through the Bay Bridge and see the San Francisco part of the bridge, it becomes all worth it.

How To Save a Bad Photo (Without Photoshop)

I dare to say it. Most of the bad photos can be made into good ones. It takes a little creativity, some free tools, and time.

In this episode of "How To Save a Bad Photo" I'll try to illustrate how to save a dark photo with distracting colorful elements... a picture that sucked so bad I almost deleted it. But I'm glad I did not. 

How

Start with the original photo. The photo is way too dark, you can barely see the people in it, and the colorful banners are distracting.

Convert a photo to black/white. It still looks dark, but you solved the problem with the distracting banners.

Now lighten up the photo a lot. Do not worry about the background beeing too light. Focus only on the skin of the subjects. I used the "fill light" feature in Picasa (download for free here). Picasa is very easy to use and has just the right amount of features to do simple photo editing.

Now fix the problem with the superlight background by adding shadows. Make sure the subjects won't get too dark.

Once the darks look good, add a little bit of punch to the photo by adding highlights. Do not go overboard with the highlights, or else you'll loose the detail in the lightest parts of the photo, but sometimes it's worth adding a little bit more if it helps to make the faces more contrasting.

 Age the photo by adding a little bit of warmth (use "color temperature" slider in Picasa).

 Add a little wignetting to direct the eyes to the middle of the photo.

In the next episodes of "How To Save a Bad Photo", I'll talk about how to save camera phone photos, badly composed photos, bright photos, and other products of photographer's misfortune. If you want me to write an episode about a specific bad photo you have in mind, send me the photo and I will do my best.

Photography Terminology For Dummies

If you are a pro or a are pretty good at photography as a hobby, you can stop reading now. This stuff would just annoy they hell out of you if you continue to read. Really... go ahead and close the browser window.

.... waiting ....

.... waiting ....

Alright. If you are reading this far, you are either a photography newbie, a dummy, or one of those pros who did not listen to me in the first paragraph! Welcome newebie or a dummy! 

Although I wrote a similar post a while back, learning by watching never gets old. This is my attempt to not only list the basic photography terminology, but to also show you what these things look like.

You will notice that this list explains the items in a "for dummies" style. When I started learning about shooting, I had to google for the expressions mentioned by other photographers... and list like this would have helped me a lot.

• hot shoe -- the thingie on top of your camera, where you would slide the flash. It has metal parts that touch another metal parts at the bottom of the flash which will allow your camera to close an electrical circuit that triggers the flash
• exposure -- amount of light that hits the camera sensor while the shutter is opened
• shutter -- a thingie that is in front of the image sensor that opens and closes, allowing the light from the lens to hit the camera image sensor
• shutter speed -- how long is the shutter opened (should be long enough to have correct exposure -- enough light should get in to paint a nice picture onto the image sensor)
• aperture -- how wide your shutter opens when it opens, determines how wide is the beam of light coming from lens to the camera sensor
• F-number -- a measure of how wide is your aperture, a measure of a "lens speed" (smaller F-number means that the shutter is more opened and more light comes in)
• aperture priority -- a setting on a camera that allows you to specify a fixed aperture (and let the camera adjust all other variables to make a correct exposure)
• ISO -- a measure of sensitivity of light (use higher ISO number in darker room, low ISO outside in the daylight)

• strobe -- flash, speedlight, a thing that emits light
• light stand -- see the below photo
• umbrella adapter -- click on the below photo and see the notes (picture is worth a thousand words)
• focal length -- a measure of how strongly the optical system focuses or defocuses light; the distance in air from the lens or mirror's principal plane to the focus
• focus -- a point of convergence of light
• auto-focus -- a feature of an optical system that allows you to obtain a correct focus on a subject

• wireless flash triggers -- a.k.a. "pocket wizards", these are devices that tell your strobes to fire when the shutter is pressed on the camera. You mount one trigger on the hot shoe of your camera and another below your flash (flash mounts on a hot shoe of the second trigger). See photo below.
• wireless flash receivers -- these devices listen to the signal from the flash triggers and send an electric impulse into the attached flash which triggers the flash.

• bokeh -- blurry, fuzzy background, see examples
• composition -- an arrangement of elements that you are taking a picture of
• lens -- a photographic objective -- a device that contains optical lens (or lenses) and other mechanics allowing to focus, to zoom, all while projecting the not-distorted image at the image senso

If you think of a term I missed, please add a comment. I will be happy to add it to the list. Hope this helped all you newbies and dummies out there and you now feel more confident in your photographic abilities!

My Shiny Old Flexaret

To my dissapointment, my dad gave most of his old cameras to a camera collector friend. Luckily, he could not find all of them.

When I started focusing on photography, he still had couple of them left in his "pile". He just had to find them. When birthday approached and he could not procrastinate any longer. Voila, Petka got a shiny old Flexaret!

It's been a while since I used a non-digital camera and I must admit, I am quite intimidated by this metal brick. But it looks fabulous and has so much history -- it was my dad's first camera. Can't wait to see what comes out of it! And if nothing else, it will look great in my living room. :)

Bringing it back to the US was interesting. The German security employees at the Frankfurt Airport looked at it and wondered who made it. I said it was German. They said it was not. We looked at the labels and found out that this wonder is coming from Czechoslovakia. I did not tell them I come from there as well. :)

Lucky Me

I left my best friend and a lover and traveled to Slovakia on business. The trip overlapped with my birthday and with the world ice hockey championships. Right there in Bratislava. 

The city was spot clean which made sense given the huge event it was hosting. Groups of foreign fans painted in their national colors were crawling the streets and taking over the pubs. When we walked by them, we made sure to yell the name of their country and smile from ear to ear. They echoed it right back at us. It always works. :)

I was loved and bublibished by my old and new friends and also by complete strangers. I even received an improvised birthday song from a real ladies man -- a singer Peter Adamov:

 

Matko, Petko, Iris, Dagmarka, Matko, and Nadja -- thank you so much for being there and making this life worth living.