25 - Animals

I focused on animals the previous weekend while we visited our relatives who have a little farm. What better opportunity would I find? I'm sharing two similar pictures because I can't decide between them. They are very similar, on both there are sheep backs. While the woolly backs on the first photo create interesting, almost abstract pattern, the black head on the second picture makes good accent in otherwise light background. You choose... ;o)

24 - Architecture

I took a camera to work with me because I had to go downtown to the bank, and I hoped there could be a chance to take some pictures of architecture. However it was already dark when I got out from the bank and I had to refocus from the bigger views to the detail, where there was enough light. I was lucky. The first picture is a fragment of the beautiful functionalistic front face of the Czech National Bank that was designed and built in 1930's by one of the best Prague architect Frantisek Roith.


The second photo shows the windows of the Municipal House, built in one of the best examples of Art Nouveau style in Prague (my favorite period in architecture). There is a wonderful café behind the windows. If you sit there, you suddenly feel like you moved back hundred years...

23 - Photo of Choice

I got inspired by number of sunsets posted recently on other's blogs. Here is one I made on Sunday while we were with the kids outdoors on a short walk.

22 - New

It was really gray and miserable weather today, the forecast is not better, so I decided not to delay my plan to use the construction site as a symbol of the new theme. The spot is in front of our office so I was able to take picture little from above the ground. No single shot was really interesting, so I eventually made a row and composed them into one panorama of the construction.

21 - White on white

I wish I knew the name of this flower. Or plant. Or bush. Whatever. I saw it yesterday leaning against a white wall at our neighbor's while we were on a visit there. So I excused myself, rushed for the camera and took a couple of shots. By the way, wouldn't it also qualify for fair L-composition? ;o))

20 - Eyes

Our cats have definitely the most eye catching eyes in our house. And above all, they don't mind posing!

19 - Self Portrait

I was skimming through past photographies and I saw the girls as they waved the lit sparklers. So I found some, took out the tripod and start playing. The hardest was to make the camera focus right because I had nobody else on whom I could fix it. Eventually one of the shots came out quite sharp...

18 - Light

I had the Light theme in my head when I was roaming through the old town of Prague. And I picked the two photos of the gas lamps shining on and in the corners of narrow alleys.

17 - Movement

Movement. Blurry cars, blurry legs, grass in the wind... traditional means how to express movement. Dustyn made a step further when he place camera in the moving car. And why not to move the camera itself? Our kids got a "surgeon's kit" from my sister-in-law who works in a hospital. And they immediately wanted to lay me on the table and take out my organs. The rear flash synchronization enables to move the camera around the subject and the final flash freezes it. This is the first kind of movement that I captured.


The second is from the vault. It shows another kind of motion - move of the zoom lens. It is from one of our trips made in June last year and I like the dazzling freshness of the colors.


The third and the last way I moved camera was to rotate it and hope that the subject in the axis of lens remains more or less sharp. This exercise has the least predictable outcome (at least in my hands). I'm showing two photos. The first I made earlier and I like it because the ducks look really funny. I recall I published this picture on some photo forum and then struggled a lot to convince others that it was not a Photoshop filter. I did not succeed.... So I asked myself if I can repeat it. I chose the flower of daffodil on our table. It swallowed some 20 frames before one of them was reasonably focused (I wasted more than thirty on the ducks). But I did it! No filters needed.

16 - Reflection

I managed to take the first picture of the reflection in Hamburg where I was on a business trip last week. I walked along one of its canals on the way to the office and there was a multistorey parking lot on the opposite bank and it casted nice reflection on the surface of the water. I made it little more contrast and turned upside down to get the final photo.


And yesterday I was jogging in the evening and noticed the old mill that reflects nicely in the pond. The reality was better than the final result I was able to get with the camera. Anyway, I'm sharing...

15 - Landscape

I was with my girls on a short trip to another geocache last week. Not far from our village, some 10 miles, the landscape starts to wave, it gets more hilly. The late afternoon and low sun lit beautifully the church in the village while the horizons of the hills remained blueish dark.

14 - Vehicles

I have a weakness for trains, I don't know why, but they seem to have some charm in them. So I did not want to "waste" pictures on cars and instead waited six days before I had time to go to the nearest railway with the camera in hand today. Long lenses helped to squeeze the vagons together, one is the passenger train City Elefant that I often use to commute to work, the other is cargo train where the containers make interesting patchy snake. Third is little post-processed, but I think that now it even better stresses the forlornness of the desolated carriage at the end of blind rail...

13 - Monochromatic

I was nursing this theme in my head for some time already and I made the photos in last two weeks on this purpose. This first one has almost all colors hidden under the layer of hoar-frost. It looks that the radars serve as a good source of subjects for the pictures. In the second photograph there is everything hued in to the same color by the gas lamp in the old town of Prague (they indeed replaced the electrical lights with the original gas lamps some two years ago to evoke the atmosphere of old lighting in the last centuries).

12 - Design Through Cropping: Manmade

We ran into old abandoned amphitheatre on the way to our cache today. It was used before more than twenty years ago for the last time and it has been breaking apart since then. What a shame. Anyway, the steep rows of stone slabs provide interesting patterns, though to some extent already touched by nature, I hope you will forgive this flaw...

The second picture goes more into manmade, technical field, though the reflections of tree branches are clearly visible. Isn't there perhaps a message that the nature is ubiquitous?

12 - Design Through Cropping: Nature

This design through cropping gave me hard time, despite the posted pictures from all others. I think that it does require some thinking and looking around to find something that could be used. I noticed the deep frosts made (I guess) ten inches thick ice in the barrel that we have outside. And interesting textures. The original picture is little boring, just grey. I pushed and pulled a couple of triggers in RAW editor to make the result a bit more appealing.

11 - Photo of Choice

I decided to publish one of the pictures I took today and one older photo. As I said earlier, we met a beautiful old avenue bordered by rows of lindens (basswood). 450mm focus drew them close in nice way and also the small chapel at the end of the road.
The second is one week old and it was taken in Ondrejov, on the hill with the observatory that I mentioned in B&W post. I post-processed it a little to stress the dramatic sky.

10 - Children

How I was looking forward to this topic! I love children and also the challenge to picture them in a natural way. These are not perfect examples of spontaneous behavior frozen in time. I used long lens and hoped that I could be less intruding than if I was in the midst of them. We were on a little trip today to a cache in the village (we are fans of geocaching) and the photos were taken during the walk. On the first picture the older are consulting our trace with the GPS navigator. The second was made on a lovely narrow avenue between a remote chapel and the village.

07 - Aging / Old

There is a perfect example of aging, old, even neglected building in the village next to ours, it is actually a small chateau, but in very poor state. It is however still dark when I either go to work or return home, so I'll have to keep it in mind for another theme or for the next round.
I looked for other examples today. And there were plenty: breaking lamp post not giving light anymore, rusted parts of some old agricultural machine, or the abandoned wooden wheel leaning against not younger stone wall...

06 - From Another's Perspective

I felt that the weekend could be quite fruitful and it indeed was. I was able to close the gaps regarding older topics and also covered several newer themes.
The one From another's perspective made me to think about it a lot. At the end I postponed it until we visited my sister-in-law and her newborn. They have a little farm and I focused on sheep. We brought in the new pack of straw and the sheep started to feed on it hungrily. I began to play one of them, crouched closer to the ground with the camera glued to my eye. I made a couple of pictures until the only ram José suddenly got idea that I'm perfect target, rammed me forcefully to the thigh and I had to back out from the battlefield...

09 Black & White

I was with my kids in nearby village Ondrejov, where there is our biggest astronomical observatory on the hill. Unusual shapes of radars and cupolas offer interesting possibilities. The red filter turned the sky to dark grey, so it looks little wild...

08 - Modern

As I said, I'm always thinking of a couple of topics ahead. And so it happened that I took pictures falling to the future topics, whereas I'm stil pondering about those that are due. That's why I decided to make a little swap, to go out with Modern and B&W pictures and let's see if coming weekend brings some results regarding Aging/Old and Children.

The more I thought about Modern topic the broader possibilities I saw. Eventually I focused on modern art and one of my favourite sculptures in Prague is "Idiom" from Slovak artist Matej Kren. It is placed in the hall of the main municipal library of Prague and basically it is a column of books about 5 meters high and 2 in diameter. Inside there are mirros at the top and the bottom and so when you look in, it looks like endless well of books. Perhaps endless well of wisdom? .
For illustration I'm adding the photo of the whole Idiom from outside. .

05 - Love

I did not know what exactly should I try to visualize on a photo with Love thema. Today we have packed all Christmas decoration and after that the kids started to watch the TV. And then I saw it. I love them, they love each other, they also love nuzzling with their pets and, eventually, they love watching their favourite cartoons. I took the camera and started shooting. Unfortunately the pictures with both girls together did not come out best, at least one of them was always moving and blurry, so I picked this one with Alice and her tomcat Mourek.

04 - Complete Stranger

What the hell means Complete Stranger? I asked myself when I saw the list of topics the first time and started to think of complicated answers. Perhaps it means something or someone who does not belong to the surroundings, somebody who does not fit, like African among Eskimos? I thought hard and I made up the first picture. It was before I saw other's photos on the blogs. Then I understood...I took the camera and the tripod with me today. The first place where I took out the stuff was the railway station nearby our village, right in the morning while we waited for the train. I got some strange looks but otherwise the people were still little sleepy, I think. The morning mist, frontlight from the station lamps made turned the bodies into ghostly silhouettes, perfect strangers...
My efforts culminated after work when I set up camera on the railway station in central Prague. As I'm chicken shit I put on long lenses and did many shots on distance. The lighting in the hall was however very poor and so almost all photos were fuzzy, even if I used high ISO.
Then I switched back to normal lens, went to the middle of the hall and started to play with white balance. Suddenly the small stinky homeless man came to me and showed interest in what I'm doing. After a while he asked if I have some change. "Let's make a deal. I will give you twice more than usual change and you'll sit for me", I said. "Yes Sir, of course Sir, wherever you want me! Sir!!" My train was leaving in five minutes, so I did not have much time. I sat him on the bench, made a couple of shots and that how the last Complete Stranger was born...

03 - Pyramid Composition

I know I'm ahead of schedule. The thema of "pyramids" has not let me sleep well. We were at parent's during the weekend and my father brought down from the attic a suitcase full of train models and rails that we used to play with when were were kids. They are not small models but rather bigger ones, I don't know the type. The steam locomotive is beautiful, I love them in real life too and it's shame there are only so few of them visible on occasions. I looked at the model and thought - why not to give it a try? The background was rather ugly, I replaced it by the sky, now I'm not sure if it was a good move but I leave it as it is.


On Sunday our girls had the final ski races in their ski school. It was funny how every single kid tried to stand up on the top of the winner's steps before the ceremony started. Don't they form a decent pyramid? There was not much time to think of composition or the angle, soon the cluster broke.

We are just about to tidy away the Christmas decoration. It suddenly stroke me how the Christmas candelabra makes perfect pyramid. I could not have resisted and so the third photo on this topic was born.

02 - Rule of thirds

It is really funny how this challenge changes the way how I look at the world around me. One of the first questions these days are "How to make a good picture of it?" "What's the topic?" "What's the thema for tomorrow? For day after tomorrow?" I even started to carry my SLR in the backpack because what if there is something worth snapping?
This photo perhaps represents rule of thirds ad absurdum, vertically, horizontally, like a grid. It is actually part of the plaster lighthouse decoration that we brought from Hamburg and it has stroke me how regular thirds it shows.


In the second picture I'm coming back to the picturesque way how the frost painted the trees and grass behind our house. Only later did I learn from Dustyn that the composition can also be done differently, like two thirds of the main topic and one third of the rest. Maybe I'll try something. Now I have head full of "pyramids"...