Apart from photographing nature and landscapes, I really enjoy photographing architectural details like doors. Doors are literally everywhere and not only are doors often full of great details and textures; they also have a lot of symbolism associated with them. An open door can symbolize opportunity, walking through a door can symbolize change, and closed door can symbolize mystery.
Here are a few photographs of doors that I’ve made this year.
I will be selling my landscape prints at the Home Business Fair at the Deerfoot Inn and Casino this Sunday, June 13th. The fair runs from 10am – 4pm and will feature over 35 different vendors. If you are in the Calgary area, I urge you to come on by. It would be great to see/meet you!
Elbow River
Kananaskis Country, Alberta, Canada
This photo was made the same morning as the photo in Behind the Photograph #1. After shooting the waterfall, I continued looking for other compositions and found this several meters upstream. By this time, some nice colour in the sky was starting to develop so I looked for a foreground, which I could pair with it.
I felt that these rocks made a good foreground because they were interesting and because they form a triangle that leads the viewer’s eye in to the scene. I also liked the great colours in the water in the middle ground.
I once again used my 24mm TS-E lens (my favorite landscape lens) on my Canon 5Dmk2 and I tilted the lens for maximum depth of field. I also used a polarizer, to help eliminate the reflections of the water and a 2 stop ND grad filter to get a properly exposed sky. The final exposure was 3.2 seconds at f/8.
At home on the computer, I tweaked the contrast, slightly boosted the saturation. Then I used the tonal contrast filter from Nik’s Color Efex Pro, to help bring out the nice textures in the foreground rocks. Finally, I resized, sharpened, and saved the image for the web.
Here is a quick snap shot taken with my Canon G11 of my camera setup on location.
I went for a walk this past Sunday to Fish Creek Provincial Park here in Calgary. We are very fortunate to have a park such as Fish Creek right in the city. It is one of the largest urban parks in North America, and stretches 19 km from east to west. The park has many kilometers of trails and a quite a lot of wildlife.
Sometimes, when I feel the need to be in nature, and I don’t want to drive far or I don’t have very much time, it’s the place I like to go.
Here are some of my shots from my walk. I really had a good time; the bright, lime, greens of spring were everywhere.
To see the rest of the images, please have a look at my Facebook page.
Athabasca River
Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada
This photograph was made at sunrise in early August 2009 in Jasper National Park. I arrived at this location the evening before and before it got too dark, I scouted this location and decided on what I wanted to shoot the next morning. I thought that a composition that was just off to the left of this scene.
When I got there in the morning, I realized that my idea was not going to work, because the light was not as I envisioned it. The light I wanted was not downstream but rather across the river. I knew I had to change my strategy and I immediately started looking for a new composition. That’s when I noticed my girlfriend a little ways upstream shooting near these rocks. I walked over and I immediately knew that this was exactly what I was looking. I liked the great colours in the sky, the nice ripples in the water in the mid-ground and the rocks in the foreground really helped anchor the scene.
I mounted my 24mm TS-E lens on to my Canon 5Dmark2 and using the tilt feature, I adjusted the focus until everything from the foreground rocks to the background trees was tack sharp. I used a 2 stop graduated ND filter to hold back the exposure on the sky and I used a 4 stop solid ND filter to get a longer shutter speed. I wanted a long shutter speed to get a nice motion blur on water. The 4 stop ND filter along with my f/16 aperture gave me an exposure of 16 seconds. My tripod was set low to the surface of the water to make the rocks more prominent in the frame.
Post processing on this image was fairly straightforward. I simply boosted the contrast a little bit and slightly lighted the dark trees. After that, I just resized, sharpened, and saved the image for the web.
Here is a photograph of me, shot by my girlfriend Katerina Berkova, shooting that morning in the Athabasca River. As you can see, in order to get this shot, I had to be ankle deep in an ice-cold glacial river for about 30 minutes. After the photo session, I crawled back in to my sleeping bag and it took almost 2 hours for my feet to warm up again.
Sensor dust circled in red.
If you shoot a DSLR, it’s only a matter of time until you get some dust on your camera’s sensor. There are numerous ways to clean your DSLR sensor; I’ve tried several methods, and the one I like this best, is the Pentax Sensor Cleaner that was recommended to me by the good people at The Camera Store.
The Pentax Sensor Cleaner is basically a plastic stick or wand with a piece of sticky rubber at one end and it comes with a little booklet of sticky sheets that are used to clean the Sensor Cleaner itself. The kit will last you for dozens of sensor cleanings and is relatively inexpensive.
Pentax Sensor Cleaner
Another great tool that I find indispensable for sensor cleaning, is the Sensor Loupe from VisibleDust.
Sensor Loupe and the Pentax Sensor Cleaner
The procedure:
Set the Sensor Cleaner aside carefully making sure that the rubber end doesn’t touch anything.
7. Repeat this process until all of the dust is gone. It usually takes me anywhere from 2 -4 tries to get the sensor completely clean, and a total of maybe 5 minutes max.
That’s all there is to it. This method works extremely well on loose, dry dust. If you have baked on dust or oil/grease on the sensor, this method will probably not work. If that’s that case, I recommend a wet cleaning method such as Sensor Swabs and Eclipse2 solution, but for 99% of my sensor cleaning needs the method outlined above works like a dream.
*Note: Please be sure to read and understand the instruction booklet that comes with the Pentax Cleaner and never rub the wand on your sensor side to side. This can cause a huge mess (streaks on the sensor) that will take a lot of time and effort to clean.
When I was first getting started in photography, roughly 10 years ago, one of biggest inspirations was a photographer named Bryan F. Peterson and especially his book “Learning to See Creatively”. It is a great book and I would recommend it to everyone starting out in photography.
I remember one specific example in the book to this day. It was a series of 4 photographs of a bunch of orange poppies by the road side. The first photo was a snapshot of the overall scene and the other three were “creative” photos shot with a wide angle, normal, and telephoto lens respectively. I remember I was moved by this example because until this point, all of my photos looked like his example snapshot and now I saw all of the creative potential that any scene has if one just takes the time to look.
It is because of this inspiration that I have today decided to begin my “Behind the Photograph” series on my blog. Every two weeks or so, I will post a finished photograph along with a story of how it came to be. I will talk about the location, the composition I chose and why. I will also talk about the exposure and any special filters I used to create the look and feel in the final photograph. And lastly, I will address my post processing and any other relevant details and information. So with that said, let’s get started…
Elbow Falls
Kananaskis Country, Alberta, Canada
Elbow Falls, 20km west of the hamlet of Bragg Creek, Alberta, is a small set of waterfalls on the Elbow River. The great thing for me is that this location is only a 40minute drive from my home in Calgary!
This photograph was shot just this past Sunday at 6:13am. Sunrise, is my favorite time of day for photography so anytime I plan out going out shooting, the first thing I look at is the time of the sunrise. This past Sunday, the sunrise was at 6:15am and because I like to be on location at least 30 minutes before, that meant I had to leave home at 5am.
When I arrived at the waterfalls I grabbed my camera gear and started looking for a pleasing composition. In the end, I settled on this spot on the rocks right above the waterfall. I chose this spot because I liked how the falls filled the foreground of the image and how the river goes deep right in to the scene. I also liked the partial reflections of the trees in the water.
I set my camera on a tripod and mounted my 24mm lens. I adjusted the framing and using live view on my Canon 5Dmark2, I manually focused on the waterfalls about a third of the way in from the bottom. I set my aperture to f/8 because that is the sharpest aperture on this lens and because I knew, that at this aperture, everything from 4 feet to infinity would be in focus.
To keep the sky from being too bright, I used a 2 stop Singh-Ray hard edge neutral density filter and to get the gold colour in the reflections on the rocks and the water I used a Cokin Blue & Yellow Polarizer. To learn more about the Blue & Yellow polarizer, I highly recommend reading Darwin Wiggett’s article entitled “Fields of Gold (or was that blue?)”. The polarizer was helpful because not only did it make the reflections a nice golden colour, but it also allowed me to shoot with a 3.2 second shutter speed, and that allowed me to get a nice motion blur in the water.
When I got home, I imported the photo in to Adobe Lightroom, and adjusted the white balance, contrast, and clarity. Then I brought the photo in to Photoshop CS4, and slightly lightened the trees on the right and the hill on the left. Finally I resize, sharpened and saved the image for the web.
Here is a quick snap shot taken with my Canon G11 of my camera setup on location.
Chinook
© Tomas Nevesely
This shot of the chinook arch was taken with my Canon G11 on a walk in SW Calgary.
Kananaskis
© Tomas Nevesely
Shot with my Canon G11 on a hike in Kananaskis, Alberta
Ten years really isn’t that long. I remember the whole Y2K thing like it was yesterday. In fact, I was on the Y2K preparedness team at my day job. My task was to test every single PC with a piece of software (in DOS) to make sure it would continue to function when the date changed from 1999 to 2000.
Recently, while browsing the web, I came across some humorous “news” from a decade ago.
The first one that I found amusing is this one from December 20, 1999:
Epson Stylus Photo 870 – 10 year prints
Excerpt: “Just got a message from my good friend Tham Kok Leong over at Digital Darkroom, it’s not often that we mention printers on this site but being the proud owner of an Epson Stylus Photo 750 I feel that I should mention Epson’s latest printer the 870 with the promise of longer lasting prints (claimed 10 years), edge-to-edge printing and “photo rolls” the ability to produce 35mm-like prints at home with a good quality digital camera and printer is already here.”
It’s funny now, but 10 years ago, ink jet prints lasting 10 years was a big deal! Of course today, we can expect our ink jet prints to last a lifetime and in some cases much longer.
And this one, from October 3, 2000 almost had me laughing out loud:
Excerpt: “Sounds too good to be true, but Kingston Technology (one of our sponsors) have a special $25 mail-in rebate on their 64MB CompactFlash cards, buy from one of their participating “e-tailers” (Buy.com, Egghead.com and 4sure.com) from now until December 31st 2000 and you’ll get a $25 rebate off the price of a 64MB Kingston CF card!”
Yup, that definitely sounds too good to be true! 
Especially since today, you can get a 8GB compact flash card for under $80.
These are just a couple of examples of the unbelievable change in the photographic industry in just the past 10 years. I wonder how things will change in another 10 years.