Life through a lens

Some days ago, I told you how to obtain a comics-effect on your photographs using a kind of HDR technique. Remind that the most important rule was that to make a copy of the photo and merge to HDR with Photomatix the two pictures.

In this days I improved this technique and the result is this one:

I think that it is very beautiful. The steps that I followed are:

Two days ago I didn't know what to do (well, I had to study, obviously) so I took the train. Direction: Verona. That beautiful city, location of the world-wide famous love story between Romeo and Juliet. Verona is a medieval city, full of towers, old palaces, castles, and monuments. All this is sorrounded by wonderful hills and one of the longest rivers in Italy, the Adige. The weather was good, the sun shined and the sky was totally blue, without any clouds.
I took about 240 shots, but not all are good: some aren't sharp, some overexposed, some underexposed, some pictures are not so well composed and other simply are not interesting. In order to have an improved flexibility in what concern the post-production operations, I shoot always in RAW mode. In this way, I had the possibility to make all the important regulations (like white balancing, sharpness, contrast, saturation and other things) on my computer with its processor that is more powerful and accurate that that of the camera.
The major problem was that of the exposure: whene photographing with the sun behind me, there wasn't any problem. I just overexposed of 1/3 using the evaluative metering mode and the results were pretty good. On the other side, when the sun was in front of me, the photos were all dark. This is fundamentally due to the fact that the metering system of the camera takes the sky as a strong light source so, in order to obtain the correct exposure, it underexpose automatically of one or two stops. But that "correct exposure" is that of the sky! In that way, the subjects are all dark. To solve this problem, one usually overexpose of one or more stops, in order to have the right light balance.
However, in extreme conditions, even this technique doesn't work very well. Here is an example.
In this photo the metering mode was evaluative and the exposure compensation was of +1/3.

1. Enjoy what you are shooting.
2. Pay attention to your thoughts and emotions while you are shooting.
3. Set goals you can achieve.
4. Write tips about photography, beacuse writing is also learning.
5. Never go shooting without a tripod.
6. Watch the place you want to shoot first wirth your heart then with the camera.
7. Perspective is the killer.
8. Keep your camera clean.
9. Find your own style of photography.
10. Try to compose more and to hit the shutter less.
11. Take care of the golden ratio.
12. 10mm rocks!
13. To give a landscape photograph the extra boost, integrate a person.
14. Always shoot in RAW.
15. Discover the things you think are beautiful.
16. The best equipment is that what you have now.
17. You can't take photographs of everything.
18. Pay attention on the different ways that light falls on different parts of your scene.
19. The eye moves to the point of more contrast.
20. Clouds increase the atmosphere of a landscape.
21. Start a photoblog.
22. YOU ARE NOT YOUR CAMERA.
23. Always turn around, sometimes the better image is behind you.
24. It's who's behind the camera, not the camera.
25. Shoot as often as possible.
26. Re-check your ISO settings. It's aweful to detect the wrong settings on your screen.
27. Try to amplify your mental and physical limits. Take some extra shots when you think "it's enough".
28. Pay attention to structures in the sky and wait until they fit into structures in the foreground.
29. Ask yourself: what do you want to express in your images?
30. Photography is never a waste of time.
31. A better camera doesn't guarantee better images.
32. Post processing = optimizing your image to te best result.
33. If you have an idea an immediately you think "no, this is not going to work", do it anyway. When in doubt, always shoot.
34. There will always be people who will not like what you are doing.
35. Henri Cartier-Bresson was right when he said: "YOUR FIRST 10,000 PHOTOGRAPHS ARE YOUR WORST."

I hope that you will find this brief list useful. To learn more, see the original article here.

Finally, today I had some time to dedicate to photography, so I picked up my D-SRL camera and went to Venice. The weather was not of the best, but it was good enough to let me take a lot of photos. Unfortunately I had only 4 hours, so I didn't walk all over the city but only in famous places like Rialto and San Marco. The purpose of this photo-walk was that of improve my composition technique together with obtaining the right exposure in different light conditions. The white clouds didn't help me in this, so I had to compensate the under exoposure of the on-board metering system, over exposing of about one stop. However, sometimes, the over exposure produced washed out highlights. Anyway, here are some of the best results of today. Let us comment the single shots.

These are only four of the many shots I have taken, so stay tuned on my Flickr page for further updates. Note that I've also created two HDR versions of Canal Grande, seen from Rialto. When I finish the producing work, I put them online.

Let me know what do you think about these photos, thank you.