In decided to do it in a simple manner.

• I wanted a simple, dark design, emphasising photographs.
• I wanted Flickr to be the source of my photos, so I don’t need to reupload them.
• More precisely, I want to be able to make a post right from flickr photo page.
• I decided on using an online blogging platform to avoid the hassle of management and software updates.

In the end, I decided to use Blogger, as it allows me to create my own template and can comply with the above needs.

The result of a couple of hours work:
Proudly presenting Dušan Smolnikar: Photo Journal.

In the last 2 months, I’ve visited Scotland, Amsterdam and Crete. Hooray for being a student! ;) I’ve also entered my last year of faculty, as a so called “absolvent”. Basically, that means no more lectures or practical work, just a year to write my diploma. Hooray!

I will upload photos from Scotland in the next few weeks. I don’t want to make them public just yet.

Meanwhile, here’s a set from yesterday’s trip. We’ve been to the coast. But not just any coast. We’ve visited the Sečovlje salina – a place where salt is being produced, making our food taste a wee bit better. Salina has been transformed into a nature park, allowing visitors to walk around and enjoy the surroundings.

The place is just astonishing

As always, I wasn’t quite happy just doing landscape photography, so I experimented with the flash …

… and also, some fashion-like photography

View the full set, or better yet, the slideshow.
Sadly, it seems as yesterday was the last day of summer around here. But on a brighter note, autumn was always very photogenic. Expect some colours soon.

I bought myself a Lumiquest FXtra, for some color. And as with everything new, testing it was inevitable.

A great thing about gels and photography in general is, you don’t need to make it look real. You don’t always need to make things look real (and light look white).

I’m living with a fluorescent light bulb above my head. It’s stated as being “neutral white”, but my camera doesn’t know that.

I equipped my flash with a CTO gel. CTO means orange, about the same color as a standard light bulb. So I convinced my camera this CTO was white — I shot a gray pillow and set custom white balance to that gray. In contrast, the white fluorescent turned blue all of a sudden. Which was exactly what I wanted.

Click, in my face.

Ema is a fashion designer. Soon to be a graduated fashion designer.
She had some clothes to show, which meant taking some photos.

So we improvised a little studio. We used a white wall as a backdrop, plus some white shelves to make the floor white as well. Sunlight was coming through the window, but was not quite as bright as we had wanted. Therefore we had to use an extra light — A Canon 430 EX flash. We bounced it off a white towel, which was taped on a closet, as per usual.

These took some Photoshopping. As we were shooting quite late in the afternoon, sunlight was turning a bit orange and did not quite match the color of the flash. So I decided to put the photos in black&white and mask out the skin colors, which was a bit time consuming, but worked out quite well. I also had to stretch the floor, as our shelves were not big enough. Erasing electric plugs from the walls was the easy part.

See the full set at Flickr

Besides that, I’ve been teaching Sabina a little bit of photography. Shooting people, especially. Which means I have to model a lot lately. But I like it. Look.

I quickly got bored of the little creatures. So, as I do, I started taking photos of Darko taking photos. Taking photos of Darko taking photos of me. Meanwhile, he was taking photos of me, doing this. See recursion.

We got bored of that as well, and started shooting some portraits. But Darko, being his technical self, soon decided that sun light was too direct, as one side of the face was always in the shade. Luckily, he had a handy reflector in his back pocket.

As the name implies, this little toy reflects the light. Which means it bounces the sun back into areas it wouldn’t otherwise reach. Ergo - no harsh shadows anymore. And just because we can, we brought out an extra Flash as well, to look even more professional.

So there we are, 4 of us, fighting for one goal - to take a photo. A girl modelling, Darko holding and turning the reflector, suggesting on the set up and giving instructions, another girl holding the flash, and me, pressing the little button on the camera, moving everybody so I could see the mountains. After a few clicks, this was the result:

I’m happy.

In the attic - a set on Flickr

A guy on Flickr was asking, why self portraits? Well it’s easy. The model is always available, plus he/she doesn’t get annoyed by you taking so many photos. So, why not?

Video of the day: Aerosmith - Toys in the Attic

While looking so orange, I just had to take a few photos. My set up was simple. A sheet with a nice texture, me, camera, diffused flash and sun light trough the window.

read it here:
Slo-Tech | Barvno upravljanje na spletu

For those of you less fluent in the language, here’s a list of sources (in English) I’ve referenced to prepare this.

1. Is the Web Safe Palette really dead?. Gillespie, J. 2001.
2. Frequently Asked Questions. VisiBone. 2008.
3. How a 16 color palette is represented in different pixel formats. A Witness to YAHWEH. 2002.
4. HTML Colors. W3Schools. Referenced Dec 27th 2008.
5. So Many Colors. Holley, B. 2008.
6. sRGB. Wikipedia. 2008.
7. A Standard Default Color Space for the Internet - sRGB. Stokes M., Anderson M., Chandrasekar S., Motta R. 1996.
8. Graphics Interchange Format. Wikipedia. 2008.
9. JPEG. Wikipedia. 2008.
10. The Sad Story of PNG Gamma “Correction”. Sivonen, H. 2008.
11. Browser Gamma-Correction Test Page. Roelofs, G. 2005.
12. Get better color online through Flash Player 10. Nack, J. 2008.

A few days ago I had an idea of creating an interesting bokeh effect by using aluminium foil. It bounces off light doesn’t it? And if you wrinkle it, the reflections should be quite random. So, by taking it out of focus, it should produce some interesting results, no?

I started thinking. First of all, I need something to shoot. The foil itself would be a bit boring. And after searching my room, I found out I have a model car, just right for the job.
So, I have the subject. The background would be a wrinkled piece of aluminium foil. But the silver foil is quite dull and I needed some colour. Pros use gels to tint their light. I don’t have any gels, but I found a red plastic bag lying around. It should do. In theory, putting it over my flash should tint the light red, light would then bounce off the foil, thus making the foil look red also.
But I didn’t want the car to be red. So I would have to shoot the car with a different light. As I have only one flash, I had to wait for the night to fall, which would allow me to turn off the lights, use a long exposure and fire the same flash twice. Or three times. Maybe even more.

And so I waited …

As the night fell, I gathered some “toys”. I stole some aluminium foil from the kitchen and a dust removal product from the bathroom. To clean the car, obviously. But as I’m not an experienced cleaner, I didn’t do a very good job. Go figure. Good thing we have Photoshop.

I set everything up. Put a camera on a tripod, car on a box covered with aluminium foil and taped some more aluminium foil on the wall. For the background. I did some test shots to set up a nice composition and then some more (a lot more) to set up the lighting. I ended up having 3 lights - my flash, an iPod and an lcd screen. Flash as main light, shot a couple of times from different positions and iPod and the lcd for some fill light. And I could set the power of each of them separately to balance the light.

In the end, I came up with this:

It’s not perfect, but all in all, I quite like it. It’s “different”.

You can read my final lighting set up on the flickr page.