"It must be great to travel so much!", is what people sometimes say to me. To counter the idea that travel for work is as nice as traveling for pleasure, I once started to make a series of depressing photos from my hotel windows in famous cities--often the only thing I'd see, apart from conference rooms, airports, and the (traffic-laden) road in between. That series started in the days of analogous photography (but was not kept well-organised), and sometimes I still add to it. Prague is a great city to add to that series of sadness: although much has been restored since I first saw the city, just after the Fall of the Wall, there still are views of "maintenance wanted" situations and one of those was right opposite my hotel room, across a narrow street in the Old Town.
This time, the trip had its nice, touristy moments: we had some time to enjoy the panoramas of the city. Can you spot the post-processing, apart from the obvious cropping? I guess you can: in both cases I made the sky more 'dramatic' by reducing the exposure locally by about one stop. Of course I tried to make the effect as much as possible look as if I had used a graded neutral density filter.
By the way, these pictures were taken with a normal compact camera (it is not worthwhile carrying the DSLR for those few photo occasions). I am quite satisfied with the results of the Lumix TZ-5: good colour rendition, good resolution. Too bad it's all in Jpeg, though.
"It must be great to travel so much!", is what people sometimes say to me. To counter the idea that travel for work is as nice as traveling for pleasure, I once started to make a series of depressing photos from my hotel windows in famous cities--often the only thing I'd see, apart from conference rooms, airports, and the (traffic-laden) road in between. That series started in the days of analogous photography (but was not kept well-organised), and sometimes I still add to it. Prague is a great city to add to that series of sadness: although much has been restored since I first saw the city, just after the Fall of the Wall, there still are views of "maintenance wanted" situations and one of those was right opposite my hotel room, across a narrow street in the Old Town.
This time, the trip had its nice, touristy moments: we had some time to enjoy the panoramas of the city. Can you spot the post-processing, apart from the obvious cropping? I guess you can: in both cases I made the sky more 'dramatic' by reducing the exposure locally by about one stop. Of course I tried to make the effect as much as possible look as if I had used a graded neutral density filter.
By the way, these pictures were taken with a normal compact camera (it is not worthwhile carrying the DSLR for those few photo occasions). I am quite satisfied with the results of the Lumix TZ-5: good colour rendition, good resolution. Too bad it's all in Jpeg, though.
1 comment:
The Hotel view picture will be featured on: http://pragueee.blogspot.com/. Recommended viewing!
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