Good day everybody! It has been a while since my last post. I had some pretty cardinal changes in my personal life, and was so caught up that couldn’t free my mind to write anything. But I continued to take photos and have some new stuff to share.

In addition to the changes, during this time me and Ira also went on an 8 day trip mainly to Switzerland but with short, 2 day stop in Prague. Actually one out of these two days we weren’t in Prague but in a small village named Černošice. It is located about 20 minutes by train from Prague, and it is so beautiful!

Černošice lies on the Berounka river, so we stepped off the train and went to the river right away. There is a nice walking trail along the river, and in the photos below you can see some of the views that we saw while walking there.

I saw these naked trees on the shore and their beautiful reflections in the water. I wanted to photograph them but thought that only the trees with their reflections were not enough to make interesting photograph, so I was looking for an additional element for my photograph. These red tulips were it.

Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

The photograph above was not enough for me and I was looking for additional ways to photograph these trees and their reflections and as a result I got the photo below. The additional element was the tree branch from the left. As you can assume I have much more photos of these trees in my collection, but I chose these two to show here because I think they are most successful composition-wise.

Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

While walking, I saw this horse’s hoof fungus. Well, it is not an unusual sight, at least not in Europe, but I just got this idea to photograph it, but as always I looked for somewhat different way of doing it. I decided to use a wide angle lens to emphasize its form and at the same time to hint about where it grows.

Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

When I took the photo below I was almost certain that it won’t be something I’d share. The sun was harsh creating a very high contrast between the sky and the earth, but the clouds looked so interesting that I couldn’t resist giving it a try. And I am glad I did! I like this photo because it is pretty simple, but at the same time it conveys movement and a feel of space.
Actually this photo didn’t look exactly like this when I opened it in Lightroom. The lower half of it was almost completely dark. But here comes the magic of shooting raw – using the “fill light” slider I was able to recover many details. In general, I use the “fill light” adjustment slider when I am forced to shoot in harsh afternoon light, and there are some strong shadows. The fill light adjustment helps make these shadows much less disturbing.

Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

Next photo is pretty ordinary, I mean there are many photos like it out there, but I still liked it for being so bright, happy, and colorful, and couldn’t resist sharing it.

Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

I am not presenting here photos I made in Prague, since not long ago I had a more substantial trip to Prague and already posted photos from it. You can find my articles about Prague here and here.

After short stop in Prague we continued to our main destination – Switzerland. I always wanted to see whether this country is as beautiful as photographs show. Believe me – it is!

Our first destination was small town named Grindelwald. It is located in a very beautiful and mountainous area, which was exactly what we wanted. We camped in Grindelwald and went for a long hikes up the mountains from there. Since late April is still pretty cold, there weren’t much tourists (the ski season was over, and the summer hiking season didn’t begin yet), and we mostly hiked alone.

In the photographs below I will show some of the stunning views we saw on our hikes.

Photographs by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

I was looking for interesting shapes, patterns and angles to create interesting photographs, that would stand out. Whether I succeeded or not is for you to decide.

On one of our hikes we went so high up the mountains that we reached areas where snow didn’t melt yet and the wooden houses, which are restaurants and resorts in the summer, were completely covered with snow! There is one catch in photographing snow under bright sunlight (just in case that you are not familiar with it) – because the snow is so white it reflects the light very good, and the light meter in the camera perceives the scene to be very bright thus underexposing the photograph. So you have to set your exposure compensation to about +1 stop. It is not an exact science so just try and see for yourself.

Photographs by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

After two days in Grindelwald area we went to another area near town named Hintergoldingen, also with mountains but they were lower so there was almost no snow there. The next photo is from that area. The wast green fields are breathtaking! At the end of this article I will put some more photos from here.

Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

And finally on our last day, on the way to the Zurich airport, we stopped in Rapperswill – a small town located near Zurich lake. This tree caught my attention as light was hitting its leaves making them shine beautifully.

Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

I also tried to capture the slow pace of this place, where locals and tourists relax and don’t hurry anywhere.

Photographs by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

Photographs by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

We had a great time on our trip and I hope I succeeded in showing it in my photographs. I bought a backpack for my photographic equipment especially for this trip, it was a “CompuRover” from Lowepro. I was very satisfied with it and I am planning to write a detailed review on it in the near future, so stay tuned if you are interested!

This is it for now, and until next time take care!

Greg.

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In addition to my passion for photography I also like to climb. Climb as in rock climbing. Up until now I didn’t mix these two things, and when I went out climbing I didn’t take my DSLR with me, because I was afraid that it would “get hurt”, and I also wanted to concentrate on climbing. Actually I was climbing long before I got into photography, so at first there was no issue here. But since I started photographing it always bugged me that I don’t have my camera with me.

Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

Recently it started bugging me so much that I couldn’t resist it anymore, and took my camera and three lenses with me when we went to climb. I decided first to climb a few routes, and then to take photos of my friends climbing. It worked out just great.

In my photos, I wanted to achieve several goals:

1. To show the surroundings in which we climbed.

Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

2. To show the climber and the belayer in such a way that viewer would understand what is going on, and also to make the height of the climb “visible”, so the viewer would feel that the climber is high above the ground.

Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

3. To show the dynamics of climber when he climbs the route.

Photographs by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

4. To create rather artistic than documentary photos.

Photographs by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

You can judge for yourself to what extent I succeeded in achieving these goals.

One very important thing that I couldn’t control was the harsh sunlight, which made the contrast between the shadows and highlights very strong. When I go to photograph alone, I can time my visit to early morning or late afternoon, but in this case there were factors beyond my control. Partial solution to the harsh sunlight was shooting in RAW, and then in post processing playing with the “fill light” and “contrast” sliders to make the deep shadows brighter.

Any comments, suggestions, or opinions are always welcome.

Till the next time, take care!

Greg.

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In every photographer’s evolution process comes a time when he tries to photograph smoke. As a result you can see many photos of smoke on the internet. Now my time has come!

As always I wanted to do something different with smoke, so that my photos will differ from most of what can be seen online. Common practice with photographing smoke is to photograph it with plain white flash and then add color to it in photoshop. But I decided to do it a little bit different – I used flashes with colored gels on them, so I received the colored smoke “in-camera”. That was not enough for me and I tried to use two flashes with different color gels pointing at different parts of smoke, and here you can see what came out of it:

Photo by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

The red flash had a gobo so that the light wouldn’t spill on the top blue part, and it was also stronger than blue flash so it would overpower the blue light spilling from above. Of course I didn’t get the result that you see in the photo above right away. It took me couple dozens of shots to achieve it.

My next move was the following one – I thought that most of the beautiful smoke I saw online wasn’t “attached” to anything, so I tried to add a “source” to the smoke as you can see in the photo below.

Photo by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

In this photo I faced a technical issue – the flash power that I needed to properly light the smoke was too much for the “smoker” and resulted in overexposed lower part of the photo. I solved this issue by using again two flashes. The flash that was lighting the smoke was placed behind and to the right of the “smoker” and set to “high” power. Then I used a second flash to light the smoker, and placed it in front of the smoker and a little bit to the left. This flash was set to a much lower power and was directed in such a way that the light from it wouldn’t spill on the background (because I wanted a black background).

Here is another attempt of adding a source to the smoke.

Photo by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

For this shot I also used two flashes – one with dark-green and another with red gel on it. The red flash was placed from the left and pointed high up to light the upper part of the smoke, while the green flash was placed to the right of the composition and pointed to the lower part. In this photo I had a glossy background and you can see the greenish reflection of the flash in it. I tried to shoot this scene also with matte background but I liked this version more because it adds nice color touch to the overall dark image.

Continuing my experiments I placed two smoke sources and tried to blow on the smoke to create different shapes while I am taking shots of it. I got many interesting photos this way, and this is the one photo I chose to present here:

Photo by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

Strangely it reminds me of two opposite sex persons having a conversation. In this shot and two of the following shots I used two flashes with blue and red gels on them, placed from the sides of the frame pointed up at the smoke and away from the background.

This is pretty important – if you want your background to remain dark, you have to point your flashes towards the camera and away from the background. When I say “towards the camera” it doesn’t mean that flashes have to point straight into the lens, they just need to be pointed in the direction of the camera and, again, away from the background. This way, since the light travels in straight lines it won’t hit the background (unless it reflects off something, so make sure it doesn’t) leaving it black.

During the time that I was experimenting with smoke I was constantly thinking what more can I do to make my photos stand out. And one day, at work, my friend brought this childish toy to make soap bubbles. We had so much fun playing with it and remembering the days that we were kids… and then it hit me – I can combine smoke with bubbles to create beautiful images. At this point I started to visualize what can be done with smoke and bubbles, and the idea that I liked the most was to create image of a soap bubble resting on top of smoke pillar.

This was not an easy task to do, as I didn’t have anyone to help me shoot this. So here is what I did: I placed my camera on a tripod, and pointed it exactly at the area where I intended to “place” a bubble on top of the smoke pillar. I focused the lens on the plane of the smoke and changed to manual focus. Then I connected a remote shutter release cable so that I could stand away from the camera. Then I just made a soap bubble and tried to place it where I wanted, shooting in continuous mode during this whole process. Then bubble would pop, and after checking the LCD and seeing that I didn’t get any satisfactory results I would repeat the process.

Eventually, after way too many failures here is what I’ve got:

Photo by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

This is pretty much what I had in mind. But in the process I also got the following image, and I like it much more than the image above. It looks like a planet in deep space…

Photo by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

One more tip if you decide to try this yourself – bubbles reflect everything, and I mean EVERYTHING around them. So after seeing myself being reflected in the bubbles, I had to wear black sweater and a black hat to eliminate my reflection as much as possible. I also turned off any additional lights in the room.

In the next, and last photo I tried a little different approach – I used only one flash but I shot it through umbrella in order to make my light source bigger. In the result below you can see that umbrella can be recognized in the reflection, but I still like this photo. I call it “Aliens!”

Photo by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

I hope that you learned something new from my experience with smoke and bubbles and it inspired you to try this yourself.

Comments, suggestions and critiques are welcome as always, and if you have any questions, technical or other, you can leave a comment or drop me an email to greg at photopathway dot com

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I think that one of the most important aspects of photography is about joy of creation, expressing yourself and enjoying every minute of it. I always try to be creative, and though I don’t always get the desired results from my experiments I just continue trying. For me there is no other way. I try to put my heart and soul into my work mixed with feeling and emotions.

Today I’d like to share with you one of my attempts at creativity. It was a nice autumn weekend in Israel when me and Ira went to the Upper Galilee region to do a walking track near the Sea of Galilee. On our way back we stopped to visit the Greek Church of the 12 Apostles. This church always attracted me when I was driving by with its’ red roofs but I never had the chance to actually get inside.

This time we had about an hour, so we decided to finally give this church a closer look. I was so tired from our trip that I left my Canon DSLR in the car. I just didn’t have any mental mood for photography. But the closer we got to the church the stronger grew my desire to photograph it. Eventually I decided to photograph it with my iPhone.

This Greek church is very beautiful and is also located in a beautiful place. When we returned to our car I was surprised to find out that I took about fifty photographs of the church and its surroundings from variety of different sides and angles.

Another important aspect of photography (again, in my opinion) is to know how to choose your best photos, and to be brave enough to delete most of the rest. Otherwise you’ll end up with tons of photographs, which are very similar to each other (a tiny difference in a crop here, and in viewing angle there).

Thus on our way back (Ira drove the car) I went over all the photos of the Greek church that I took and deleted about 90% leaving only the ones I though were most successful. After that I started thinking – what would be the best way to present these photos in a way that would show the Greek Church of the 12 Apostles in all its beauty and also reveal some of the architectural details.

Eventually I decided to create a photo-collage of all the best photos. During the following months I was busy with other projects (including trip to Prague) and only recently got the time to put the idea of a photo-collage to test. It took me quite some time to do that as I had to change sizes, crops and other things in order to create what I had in mind.

Here is the collage of the Greek Church of the 12 Apostles. Remember that all the photos here were taken with my iPhone, and don’t judge the quality too harsh

And as always feel free to leave comments!

Cheers,

Greg.

Greek Church of the 12 Apostles. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

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At first this thought might sound crazy to you as it sure sounded to me, but then I thought that I could at least try to do that. Since my iPhone is always with me and my camera isn’t (due to circumstances beyond my control of course! ) it had already been more than a few occasions on which I really wanted to make a panoramic image but couldn’t.

So I decided to see if there are any apps for iPhone that can help me create panoramas. During my research I found several applications that  were created for this purpose. But after trying to use them I found out that most applications don’t do a good enough job – either the whole process was too time-consuming and difficult or the result wasn’t satisfying. And then I found application named AutoStich.

First of all I want to say that I am not affiliated with makers of this application in anyway, and I don’t receive any benefits if you decide to buy this application after reading this article. I am writing this only because I loved this app and want more people to enjoy it.

AutoStich really did the job so well that I was truly amazed at the results! And the process is also very simple. All you need to do is to take photos for panorama with your usual iPhone camera application. Just make sure that each photo overlaps with the next one at about 30 percent. Then you open the AutoStich application, simply choose the photos that you want to create panorama from, and let the application to do all the work.

After AutoStich finished, you will see the final image and also will be able to crop it as you wish. Then you can save it to your photos. There are several great things about AutoStich that I liked very much:

1. The panorama creation process is pretty fast and simple.

2. The result is very impressive – photos are stitched perfectly together, and if you made each shot correctly, the final result is just great!

3. The final panorama can be saved at the maximal resolution of the iPhone, what I mean is take for example 5 photos with your iPhone, stitch them together in AutoStich, and the final resolution that you’ll get will be 5 times bigger than single photo resolution.

4.You don’t have to use tripod or to be extreeemely careful! Just try to maintain the initial angle of shooting, and make sure that your photos overlap with each other. AutoStitch will do the rest.

I’d like to show you two of the panoramas that I created using AutoStitch. Please note that I reduced the resolution of these images in order to fit them here.

High Tech District in Tel Aviv. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

Alonei Itzhak Nature Reserve. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

And now here is what welcome screen of AutoStich looks like, when you open the app in the iPhone:

In conclusion – AutoStitch is a great application for creating panoramas in your iPhone. It is cheap, simple to use, and delivers great results.

If this article was helpful to you, or you have additional thoughts on creating panoramic photos in iPhone, you are welcome to leave comments to this article or drop me an email to greg at photopathway dot com.

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My personal study of light continues and this is the third post, which I am writing after another several hours of playing with light. My first post on this is “Patterns and Light Study” and second is “Light Study (I) Working with flashes”.

This time I was inspired by some abstract photographs I saw on the net, and wanted to try and do something abstract (or almost abstract ) myself. For this shoot I used Canon 100mm F2.8 Macro lens, and two flashes with gels on them. The colors that you see on the final photographs were not edited in photoshop. I achieved them only by lighting, and of course this Canon macro lens is great!

As I said I wanted to achieve abstract photographs with certain aesthetic value main goal being my personal study of light techniques. First of all I needed a texture, so I walked around my apartment and searched for something suitable. Eventually I found a big blue plate with interesting ornament. Then I filled it with water (since the plate wasn’t deep, I had to be careful not to spill). Finally I had to decide on lighting. Because the plate was blue, I decided to choose a matching blue gel on my main flash to the right of the stage. I also wanted to have more than one color in the frame so I added another flash with pink-red gel to the left and a little behind the stage. I set the second flash to lower power than my main flash. Both flashes were with gobos (if you don’t know what gobo is, read my previous post).

The first photograph (from the left) is simple this plate with water (which is not seen). You can see that the strong foreground blue color slightly changes to purple towards the back due to the second flash coloring. And also because I was using a macro lens from close distance, the depth of focus is pretty low.

Then I thought of making some splashes in the plate and see what happens. Everybody saw at least some photos with water drops and ripples, so I thought that I can also try some of that, and my second photo shows one of the many interesting pictures I got.

When I had enough of playing with splashes, I added a sunflower petal to the picture and dropped a small water drop on it. Now I had to change my secondary lighting because the petal was yellow, and red light didn’t do it any justice. After experimenting I finally decided to put very light green gel on my secondary flash, and it resulted in emphasizing the yellow color of the petal with light and gentle shades of green. Third and fourth photos were taken with this setup (left flash on low power with light-green gel and right flash with blue gel).

And finally the fifth photo was taken using only the left flash with light-green gel on it. I worked on this photograph for quite some time to achieve the deep interesting shadows.

As always any comments and your own experiences are welcome!

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Finally two additional flash units that I ordered on e-bay arrived and I could experiment with more than a single light source. Now I have one Canon flash (430 EX, bought second hand) and two Yongnuo flashes. Yongnuo (full name is Shenzhen Yong Nuo) is a Chinese company, which makes photographic equipment. They sell many products, which can be cheap replacements for the branded expensive Canon or Nikon stuff. For example these two new Yongnuo flash units cost me less than one Canon 430EX second hand! Anyway I’ll talk about the equipment in another post.

Basically what I was doing in this photo-session is placing light sources differently, shooting the picture, and looking at the result. My aim was to be able to predict how the image would look like so in the future I will be able to first visualize in my mind certain composition and then consciously achieve it using my light sources.

At first I couldn’t get any result that would satisfy me, my light was too scattered around and uncontrollable. Then I understood that I need more directional light, so I created gobos. This is something I learned from Strobist. You know that website right? If you don’t and interested in light, you definitely should visit it.

Anyway gobo is a simple cardboard rectangle box that you can do yourself. You then place it on your flash so it directs the light from it in one direction. And this helped a lot in achieving more predictable and neat results.

In addition I used colored gels on my flashes. Gels are transparent colored plastic stripes that you put on the flash to make its color different from daylight. By the way, there is one trick I learned myself in the process: if you use these gels, and work with auto white balance, your camera may try to adjust its white balance incorrectly since there is too much colored light in the scene. My solution was to put the white balance to “daylight” and that solved it.

And now to the results I received, and what I did to receive them:

In the first photo (from the left) I used two flashes. Both flashes were with gobos. The flash on the right side was without gel, and I pointed it more to the “base” of the light bulb. The flash on the left side was equipped with red gel and gobo, and was pointed a little above the lamp. This way I got less specular highlights on the light bulb. Both flashes were on manual control and placed approximately at the same distance from the subject, but the power of the left flash was weaker. This way I tried to achieve the feeling that the light bulb is glowing with red light.

In the second photo the setup was essentially identical to the previous one. I just added blue gel to the right flash. While this added interesting color to the photo I tend to like the first photo better because in my opinion it better achieves my goal – getting the light bulb to glow with red color.

Next two photos are of a champagne glass lighted with the same two flashes (still having gobos on them) left flash with red gel and right flash with blue gel. The difference now is that I put the left flash on minimum power so there would be much more blue and only a touch of red. Of course I achieved the result you see in the photos by trial and error.

One more thing to notice is that the background is almost completely black. This is not because I had a black backdrop. Actually my background was plain white wall, but all my light was directional (thanks to gobos) and none of it got spilled on the background. And since I worked with exposure settings that were too “low” for the ambient light in the room, as a result the background was heavily underexposed. If I wanted to have a background, I could use my third flash to light it.

That’s it for today’s photo-session. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave comments here or drop me an email and I will be happy to get back to you. And, of course, your own experiences will be highly appreciated!
Just one more thing – don’t forget to visit the Strobist web site – I learned a lot there and sure that you would too!

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Good day everybody!

I hope this day was as good for you as it was good for me. My photo was printed in National Geographic magazine, Israeli August issue! I wanted to share my joy, and I’d also like to explain how I did it. I imagine that this is a dream for many photographers.

As you know (or might guess) there is a National Geographic web site – www.nationalgeographic.com. At their web site they also have a section named “Your Shot”. In this section people from all over the world submit their photos. Each day twelve photos are picked to be displayed on the site that same day – they call it “The Daily Dozen”. But in addition photos that editors like the most are picked and printed in the printed version of National Geographic magazine.

Since many countries translate National Geographic magazine to their language, they also add to each issue some articles regarding the local country. In that section they sometimes also print photos from local photographers with a few lines about the photographer and the photograph.

I created an account at National Geographic Your Shot section and uploaded my photo there. It turned out that they liked it in NG headquarters in Washington and also in Israel, contacted me and asked for a little info about me and the photograph. Then after a month or two – voila! my photo was printed, and I also received a free issue of that month.

Now I will show my photo (show off!!!) and describe how I shot it. First of all here is the photo:

I took this photograph about 40 minutes after the sunset, and in addition I was using polarizer to reduce the light even more. Actually polarizer created an additional effect – it made colors more saturated by eliminating the reflections (or anything that was left of them after the sunset). Of course I was using a tripod and a remote shutter cord to eliminate camera shake. The exposure time was 25 seconds and the aperture was f7.1. I used wide angle lens (Canon 10-22mm) at its almost widest angle (12mm).

The interesting thing about this photograph was that during the 25 seconds of exposure many people went by, but they are not seen in the photo! It was because people were too dark and stayed too short time inside the frame to get “noticed” by the camera. The only person that is visible is the one that was sitting during all that time on the bench.

I shot several photos at that location slightly changing the composition. I had a shot without the rail in front. That shot was “divided” in two sections – the sea, and the boardwalk. I felt that it was out of balance, and searched for something to balance the photo. The rail across the bottom of the photograph provided this balance creating the final shot I was satisfied with.

You can see more photographs from that day on my web site where I display my work: IsraNature in the album named “Sea World”. Well what the heck – click here to go directly to that album. I recommend watching all the photos on full screen (there is a button at lower right corner).

And last but not least here is the link to the National Geographic “Your Shot” section: Your Shot

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