I am still busy with processing my negatives from my trip to Iceland in winter 2012. I am done with scanning and I have started the selecting and adjusting process. Since I am not in a hurry, I do find useful to compare the new photographs with those I took during my two previous trips to Iceland in 2009 and 2010. I am quite amazed how much some of those places have changed and also how my personal photographic vision has changed over the years. The first obvious difference in my photography approach, is the total change of my equipment. Unlike the two previous visits, when I was using mostly digital camera (90 % of time), this time I was using almost exclusively Ebony 4x5 large format camera with black and white films and the digital camera was used only in a few situations as a back-up.
Read moreWhere Water Falls From Heaven
It takes 500 kilometers to get from Reykjavik to the Lake Myvatn, which is about 6 hours of non-stop driving. It's actually a very interesting route for the most of time, passing through couple of mountain ridges and valleys with some spectacular views. We had dropped Ota at the airport on Friday morning and decided to drive over to Myvatn for the weekend, sort of fed up with the southern sceneries. The plan came out quite well despite the tight schedule - we aimed to stop at Godafoss for sunset shooting. One more hour of drive to Myvatn. We would definitely used some more time to explore the location but what actually helped was that we have been there before 2 years ago. Unlucky though then, leaving with few documentary shots only. I now happened to have a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do there. And that was to get off the official parking place to the other side of the river. The short walk to the waterfall allowed for a little bit of time to absorb the surroundings while the lighting that was turning to get quite dramatic and beautiful.
Read moreWinter overview and plans for the summer
Despite the fact, that there is still a lot of snow in the Alps, the winter is definitely over, at least for me. However, I have to say that it was one of my best winters in many respects. We did spend quite a lot of family time in the mountains skiing and I also did take some interesting photographs. As I mentioned in one of my previews posts I have spent some time around Lake Geneva and I was very fortunate with the weather conditions, especially in February, when the temperature had dropped significantly below zero Celsius. As usual we also went to Gran Canaria during the winter school break and I have continued to work on my two ongoing projects “Open Space” and “Dreaming Dunes”.
Read more15 Treasures of Slovakia by Lightharmony
It's been more than a year since we finished our project 15 Treasures of Slovakia with the book printed. Six members of the Lightharmony camera club based in Slovakia photographed 15 places to convey beauties of our country to public and customers of a financial institution we have done the work for, in couple of exhibitions. We are now left with less than 10 prints of the book yet for sale. The texts in there are in both, Slovak and English. Interestingly written, by the way. Wikipedia was not used, they rather talk stories that are unique and unknown about the 15 different spots
Read moreLinhof Techno at the Equator
I have been married for 10 years. It was impossible to imagine back then but it actually got to this point much faster and easier than expected. What's even more intriguing is that my own wife has been married for 10 years, too! Happily, I have no doubt. So I thought these were two excellent reasons to leave kids behind and spend few days in Seychelles together. And one thing that I made sure not to leave behind had been my Linhof kit. La Digue, one of many islands belonging to Seychelles, looked like the perfect place for the trip that would combine lots of hideaway resting and a little bit of photography. In this scope and order, dear Mrs Potomova. :-)
Read morePhoto Exhibition
I am very happy to inform you that Marek and I were invited to exhibit our photographs from Iceland during one of the major photo festivals in Geneva region. Confrontations-Gessiennes is taking place in Gex, France from October 5 to October 7, 2012. We will be showing approximately 20 photographs, which we have taken during our last three trips to Iceland in 2009, 2010 and 2012. The name of our exhibition is “Iceland: One Place Two Visions”, which is also our ongoing project, where we are trying to show the same places taken by two individual photographers using different color and black and white media. More details will follow, but in case you will be around you can put this date already to your calendar.
Read moreBack from Iceland
It has been almost two weeks since I come back from trip to Iceland. As Marek showed is one of the previews posts Brief Report from Iceland we had experienced quite a lot of different weather events, such as very strong winds, snow storms, heavy rain and of course clear and cold nights during which we were extremely lucky and had a chance to witness the amazing Northern lights shows. Just before our trip started, the weather forecasts did not give us much hope to see the Northern lights, since very cloudy and stormy weather was expected for almost every day and night. So our expectations were very low.
Read moreNorthern Lights
I'm not a great believer in luck but we've spent some significant amount of time trying to collide with it. Except for exploring various spots and photographing for the most of our days here in Iceland, we have been checking out forecasts (weather and aurora forecasts) and moving around so that we maximized our chances to see northern lights.
Read moreBrief Report From Iceland
We are both on Iceland now where we experience everything and more, but the good light. Sometimes, however, we get to see a northern light. Better said, we've had some northern lights once. In the middle of the island, in Landmannalaugar. Yesterday. Our hopes for the rest of our stay remains high though. These trips are really great for us to get together and spend some time together and over photography. There's hardly any better place to do this than moody and dark Iceland.
Read moreIceland Calling
"The one who has seen the light has seen the true Iceland and will never lose sight of it again." Pall Asgeir Asgeirsson in the foreword to the book of Daniel Bergmann Iceland Landscapes. It was back in 2009 when I first travelled to Iceland, with two particular interests in mind. I looked for much simplified landscape from what I used to know in the Central Europe. And I hoped to photograph when the nordic sun stays shallow below the horizon and the bright nights still provide enough lighting to do so. But I found much more.
Read moreCanon 5D Mark III
This new camera from Canon has been rumored for many moths and finely on Friday, March 2, 2012 Canon launched this new generation of 5D series. I am not technical expert, so I do not want to write a technical review I will leave that for others, but since I own Canon 5D mark II I feel I can write about my own impressions and whether I am going to upgrade or not. So for those who do not want to read the full story, I can say right now that I am not going to upgrade and I will stick to my current camera until it keeps working. I am seriously very happy with it and most of the new features of mark III are not really important for my work. I believe that Canon is right in saying that they listened to the existing 5D mark II users and they tried to satisfy most of their needs. Internet was full of complains about the mark II autofocus and speed with only 3.9 fps. I am not expert on video functionality, but there were also few complains in that area, which Canon tried to solve trough firmware updates.
Read moreFrom Dusk Till Dawn
This is the enriched re-draft of my older text that celebrated the passion for shooting when the sun stays below the horizon. As it largely influenced my approach to photography, I wanted to post it here and now as well. There are many forms of light but generally a “golden hour” is widely considered as the very best time to take photos. No matter how cliche-ish this sounds. Whoever (landscape photographer or not) gets to any attractive place on Earth during the “golden hour”, which is something totally different from a common daylight must always be amazed. You just can’t escape, unless your feelings are as dull as a rock on the bottom of a lake. Lighting conditions that are unusual for our eyes change any subject matter to a previously unrecognized quality. The landscape is gaining some extra hues and the real feel of three-dimensional space thanks to a long trip the sun needs to take through the atmosphere and a low angle it is illuminating the ground.
Read moreThe Essence of Selfoss
In a couple of weeks, we shall again depart north for our annual photography outing (i.e. no business, no family, no problems - just shooting). Though we initially planned Lofoten, for some reasons we ended up going to Iceland once more, this time in winter. So no wonder I go through my older work when planning the trip. I've posted some texts and images already here and some other, too. And a few more here and even Ota created a video. We simply love the place. I have many more photographs to share but one place was really special. Read on. (Summer 2010)... After having spent few miserable rainy days in the fishermens village near Landmannalaugar, we lost patience and decided to cross the island to try our chances in the north. The journey itself turned into much more adventurous event than what we expected, with rough rocky roads, deep and wild river crossings and endless lava fields to go through.
Read moreFrozen Tree
Last week I mentioned my plans to do a first test of my large format camera system in extreme cold weather conditions, which are currently dominating to most parts of Europe. Last Sunday I went to Lake Geneva shore close to small town called Anthy-sur-Leman in France. I got there just before sunrise and thermometer in my car was showing -12 degree Celsius, which would not be that bad, if there was not strong cold wind blowing from North-East. These two factors combined together created real feel temperature well below -20 degree Celsius. As every landscape photographer can tell you it’s not so much fun to be out there if you feel cold, so to protect myself in those conditions I recently purchased special winter jacket from Sirjoseph and I have to say that it did exceed all my expectation. I did not feel the cold at all and I was able to easily wait for my long exposures to finish and in total I spent couple of hours outside without feeling cold.
Read moreCopyright Infringement in Landscape Photography?
Last week, the interesting ruling of a court in the UK came to my attention. Actually, it caused quite a lot of buzz within landscape photographers community in social as well as serious media. In a nutshell, and very simply put, the judge looked at the two images linked here and decided that the second photograph was a copy of the first one. Looking at it from the landscape photography perspective and with no further details (as many people shared the news this way), it's scary. Bloody scary (do I really need to know each and every photo made from a specific location to be on a safe side??). Here, even the compositions significantly differ (not to mention the ugly effect of partial desaturation that however, as I learnt later, might have had some 'artistic' intention to support sales of souvenirs but this is a different story). I got genuinely interested hence I read the copy of judge's justification.
Read moreTime
It has been more than four years since I moved to Geneva. I still remember my excitement from the fact that I had not been so closed to the mountains before and I was so convinced that I would spent all my free time hiking and photographing in the mountains. So that was the plan, however the reality was quite different. There was always something that stopped me from going up there or I was just so lazy and tired from my daily job that I was finding excuses why I should stay home. At the end I have not taken as many photographs in the mountains as I wished four years ago, but I still have a lot of great “mental” photographs in my mind, which I will have a chance to take next year or year after that or...
Read moreLong Story Short
Yet another tree from our always-differently-amazing Horehronie (the region in mid Slovakia for those who might not know) garden. I am actually incredibly grateful to couple of friends from lightharmony who have been showing me around for years now and my fascination of the place is endless ever since I first time took my way through marvelous little hills high above villages. However, I can't say that I always connect to the subject I would wish to photograph for some reason, and this specific tree was not particularly chatty when it came to the communication between the two of us in the past. You sure know the feeling when you see something beautiful to shoot but somehow do not feel any way is the right way to do it.
Read moreFour Most Beautiful Places I Photographed And One, Well, Not So Beautiful.
I took a long break from everything for the last 3-4 weeks hence the return to all the ordinary lives has been quite uneasy. I am now slowly getting back to all stuff I left behind in 2011. Before I happen to take any image this year, I thought it could be refreshing to look back and browse through my images for a while to see - what exactly? Don't know, really. Not that I expected to find anything mind-blowing. I actually awaited nothing. And, for a wonder, I found nothing. But going through my archive I realized I had seen so many beautiful places on Earth (in Europe, more precisely, but Earth surely sounds more fatal) that I struggled to say, which of them was the best looking. My database is organized by places and I got stuck switching from one folder to another to identify my Place (Miss) World (okay, Europe). I finally sorted them down but apparently not by the final result in the form of a photograph, but by the appeal a place has been having on me. And while PJ Harvey is trying to Let England Shake with her gorgeous voice, I list 5 of them for you below:
Read moreBlack and white workflow – Part 2
Few months back I wrote first part of this black and white workflow tutorial and I really did not expect that it would take me so long to come up with part two. So here it is:) As I said last time I prefer to have just simple grey files as a starting point. It helps me to select only the strong photographs, which I really want to present. I can imagine that everybody has their own system how to mark and rate photographs so just only briefly about my way. All photographs, which I convert to black and white get red label (number 6 in Lightroom) and during the selection process I do rate individual pictures with stars and one star means that this picture is ready for further adjustments.
Read moreTree Brothers
It's no surprise that the autumn is my favorite season to photograph Slovakia. I'm definitely not going to be the only one. Rich color palettes, foggy moods and (relatively) stable weather make chances of creating an interesting image higher. Every year I try my best to set apart couple of weekends for shooting in my home land and it was no different this autumn. I have been there two-three times and it's over now, processed films are scanned and I enjoy going through them before choosing which may be worth to finalize. Comparing results over last few years, I have to say that the past years' fall colors were much chunkier and richer probably for an extremely dry weather this year.
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