Czech-in Time

I have been living in the Czech Republic for the past three years. I was also here between 2003 and 2006, which makes the total period spent in Prague 6 long years. All this time mostly working and enjoying free time with my kids and wife. When I recently browsed through my archive, I realized that I had very few images of Czech landscapes that I am happy with. It's perhaps because I actually did expose just a few rolls of Velvia in here. The very most of my photography happens on the trips out of the country, be it photo expeditions to the north of Europe that I started to travel to couple of years back, or journeys home to Slovakia where I do not need to work and can leave my family behind with their family and go shooting. :-) But that's not the end of the shame, I have to admit that I have not tried to photograph anywhere else than in the Bohemian Switzerland, which I urge myself to change no later than within the next 2-3 months when testing my new Linhof Techno kit. The learning curve seems to be steep enough to look for any opportunity to get out of home not just wait for the next trip.

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Going Larger

"The best camera is the one that you have with you." Don't know who said it but I like it a lot. Hence I always carry my best camera. So I did this past weekend when I went to Geneva to see Ota and his lovely family. The side purpose was to test my new Linhof Techno kit that I put together after struggling two months. Yes, even in today's internet times (or perhaps because of them) I had troubles to learn what bits and pieces of equipment I need to make the Techno work. And I'm yet to be delivered with cables to connect it to my Phase One. For some time already, I wished to go larger (6x9 or better 6x8) to open up fresh horizons by using the potential of controlling the perspective via moving standards. I take this as an entry ticket to a completely different world. A world that is bigger, slower and more intimate and detailed than everything I tried so far. From what I was doing with my camera for the past few years, I found out that I liked the process somewhat more than a result. I had a feeling I could not do anything else than move to this format to significantly increase the joy from a process.

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Photo of the Week - May 29, 2011

This is one of the few photographs I took on Iceland, during my second trip in summer 2010, where luck played bigger role than precise preparation. There is very special thing about long exposures, you never know what the result will look like until you really see the final photograph. In this case the exposure time was 140 seconds and the ice formation was facing the incoming tide very bravely without being moved too much, so even on the big print both pieces of ice are still reasonably sharp.

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Lee Big Stopper

In this post I would like to share my personal experience with Lee Big Stopper ND filter, rather that provide full technical review, which you might be used to from other websites. I have been experimenting with Long Exposure techniques for couple of years.   I started with just three EV stop full ND filter, which allowed me to get exposures in range from 1 to 30 seconds during the day. Latter on I become quite curios what the photographs can look like with longer exposures and I purchased ten stop round ND filter with the tread to attach to my lenses.

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...Let It Snow (Continued).

I took this image on our first trip to Lofoten in January. It was well after sunset and some 100+ kilometers ahead of us to Svolaer. We were returning from the place called Å, the tiny village situated endmost in the Lofoten islands. We scouted for locations to return to on our next trip as we had already decided to stay in Reine next time. I admit I have not paid too much attention to where we were when shooting this photograph because we were late and in a hurry. Moreover, Ota left me with my two and a half minutes exposure all alone. Despite the dull sky, I tried it at least for seeing how this rather unorthodox compositions would look like. Did not have too many other options as there was an ugly little quay on the left from houses.

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Unspoiled Nature of Poloniny

The photograph for this week was created about a year ago when we were shooting our book 15 Treasures of Slovakia (you can browse through it online here: http://www.lightharmony.com/treasures). Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians were added on the UNESCO World Natural Heritages list on long ago, in 2007. You can find them in the very eastern part of Slovakia, on the border with Ukraine and Poland. Some of them are part of the youngest and least known national park called Poloniny. The forests are absolutely unique for being preserved in their original conditions and untouched for several thousand years. Not too many people know that they contain the world's tallest beech trees.

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Joe Cornish - A Photographer at Work

I'm sure I'm not going to surprise many of you nor I'm going to be very original when I say that Joe Cornish is one of the few photographers that I have been looking at in search for inspiration for the past few years. I've been a happy owner of couple of Joe's books with The First Light sitting in my bookshelf on a special place. It was the very first book where I could find exactly what I was then looking for - stunning images in combination with educational stories. Even now, it's never boring to browse through it and enjoy photographs full of colors and empathy for various subjects, just to use some of superlatives one can say when looking at Joe's work.

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Iceland - Video

In this presentation you can see selection of my photographs I have taken on Iceland during two visits in this spectacular place. The first visit took place in summer 2009 and I had not particularly strong idea where to go and how to photograph Icelandic landscape. However, after the first arctic summer night I was sure that this place can give me a lot of opportunities to use my camera:)

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Let It Snow...

As I'm slowly processing my shots from Norway, some look really odd and different from what I usually appreciate because of lighting conditions. I simply was not too lucky this time. But having been there with no other agenda, after a little while I got excited about thinking of how to deal and experiment with what the nature offered. It was often snowing so I had to put my equipment into a harsh weather testing quite regularly when trying to shoot something. And I must confess it failed every now and then. Apparently, Hasselblad does not seem to have designed its H1 for rough outdoor conditions. Especially metering system in the viewfinder suffered badly from the wet and cold. I had to restart the system couple of times, or even remove the viewfinder and clap it back on. To my surprise, P30 back passed with no fault whatsoever.

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Shooting Northern Lights

Some of you might have seen this picture already on lightharmony or facebook but I can find no better to kick off the Photo of the Week category than this one. It's the result of the most exciting photographic adventures I have gone through this year and perhaps ever. I've been dreaming to witness the Northern Lights for the last few years but only this March all elements came in alignment and I got lucky. Originally, I just wished to watch and photograph it. Then, let it happily rest in my archive and pursue other little projects. But the magic of aurora can't be described with words and I only know now that the night I saw it was just the beginning of our long-term dating.

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Michael Kenna - Photo Exhibitions

I would call myself a lucky man, since I have had a chance to visit two of Michael Kenna’s exhibitions during the last six months. The first exhibition took place in Amsterdam in November 2010 and my wife had actually organized the whole trip for me (including personal meeting with Michael) as an early X-Mas present:) I was very excited when I arrived to Amsterdam and a few hours latter I was heading to the gallery for the opening ceremony. To my big surprise the exhibition did not take place in a big fancy gallery as one would have expected, but in the very small one, the smallest I have ever seen:) In this case it was prime example when the saying “size does not matter” was proven more than true. The gallery had an amazing atmosphere and the photographs were absolutely awesome. I spent quite a some time observing all the pictures and at the end I got enough courage to go and meet face to face the photographer. I did say to him something like “ehm, my wife sent me over here” and it was like saying a special secret code. He was fully aware of the whole deal and we started to talk and talk about photography, personal life and much more. One hour later I felt I should let other people to have a chance to talk to him, so I asked him to sign some of his older books I have in my collection and I left with my mind in the sky.

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Notes from Iceland I.

If you’re flying to Iceland one day, it’s likely you’ll take Icelandair because there’s not too many services that connect Reykjavik with the continental Europe. In such case, don’t miss your chances to browse though the on-board entertainment options and listen to the Icelandic music (not talking about folk, which I avoided by miles). Apart from the usual suspects as Sigur Ros and Bjork (remember Sugarcubes? :-)), you can get to hear less known bands and musicians that are often nothing short of pure reflections of a meditative remoteness of the island. There’s no better preparation for ambient mood of the place than giving ear to Ampop or Blindfold in your headphones and watching icy toppings of volcanos, wrinkled faces of glaciers, black sand beaches framed by white lines of crashing waves or countless veins of rivers deltas as the plane have reached Iceland. And yes, if tired by the melancholy, play Emiliana Torrini.

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Welcome to Land & Colors

I have met Marek many years ago thanks to one of few (those days) servers related to photography and we become very good friends over time. Together we started project called LIGHTHARMONY more than five years ago and now we are trying to move further with Land and Colors project, which should give us more active interaction with outside world and allow us to present not only our photographs, but also our thoughts and experiences relating to photography and traveling more frequently. Land and Colors project is also here to provide a unique opportunity to all of you to buy our limited additions of fine art prints (see more here). These fine art prints will be printed digitally with the highest standards regarding permanency and color accuracy and we will also do our best to offer you the highest standards in terms of aesthetics and artistic feel.

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Launching Land & Colors

It's been 5 years since I started to use the internet to communicate my photography. At that time, it all was much less interactive than today and the static web gallery could usually be at the top of any ambitions. Fair enough, we have been successfully running our lightharmony.com site, which still attracts lots of attention. No wonder as you can find there the selection of best work of some excellent emerging landscape photographers from Czech and Slovak geographical space. The website is simple and the communication goes one way - we present the images and if we're lucky, some people will stumble upon them, browse through them and share them. Do not get me wrong - I love what we are doing there and will continue to do but I have a feeling I need to move closer to establishing my own identity. This is why Land & Colors was designed by Ota and me.

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