Photoblog

Last month, we had a great trip to China, so we finally can compare this country with Japan that we visited 2 years ago. The structure of the two trips was quite similar: in Japan we visited Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and had few days in a beautiful natural surrounding, around Fuji mountain. While, in China we covered the famous triangle: Shanghai, Beijing and Xi’an and we spent few days in a really amazing area in Guangxi region. So, how was our travel experiences and how the two trips compare to each other?  And more important, what is our impression about the two countries in the light of those trips: Planning easiness: Both counties are fairly easy to plan. There are lots of information in English about both of them as they are quite popular for travelers. The regular photography websites that we used as source for our location scouting has lots of images from both countries, so we had no issue to have a large amount of locations to visit and photograph in both of the trips....

Inspired by how different images Carmen and I came up with after shooting together at Chureito pagoda in Fujiyoshida, I decided to write this post to show our workflow and how we achieved those results. For my image I chose a horizontal frame (I was wider with my 16-35mm lens) and very close to sunset, when the sun was down behind the hills on the right of mount Fuji. We were not lucky with tremendous amount of colour that evening so the purpose was to accentuate that orange that you can see close to the horizon. I am a big fan of Sleeklens Photoshop actions for landscape and I am using them quite a lot recently in my workflow. So I started with an “BASE expanded Dynamic Range” combined with “ALLINONE Subtle sunset” (both of them turned down to 20 and respectively 25%). The colours where suddenly begin to pop, especially the oranges in the foliage and on the sky). After that I decided I want to correct the perspective a bit (I know, I am quite a mess regarding the orde...

I am writing this post few weeks after coming back from a great trip in Japan. We experienced lots of visually amazing places, especially in Kyoto, a city full of history and spirituality, however it was extremely difficult to achieve the images that we were looking for. Before the trip we did our share of scouting, unfortunately not as extensive as we wanted to; we had a quite clear idea of which should be the sunrise locations and which should be the sunset/blue hour locations. And few mid-day locations too. But things were not actually going as expected. We ended up shooting 3 early mornings, one sunset, one late evening (way after blue hour) and scheduling a day trip to Kobe for shooting its spectacular marina instead of fighting for a spot close to a temple at not so right moment of the day. But which were the reasons for not being able to fulfill our plan? 1. First of all most of the temples close at 16:00 or 16:30. This was 2...

Mount Fuji, affectionately called Fuji-san is a symbol of Japan. It erupted last time in 1707-8 but is considered a still active volcano. It was a common subject in Japanese art, inspired many poets and painters and these days photographers too. It was added to the World Heritage List as a Cultural Site . Actually our trip in Japan was centered around Fuji. The first hotel we book was the one in Kawaguchiko and the rest of hotels and plane tickets just followed up. We arrived in the area after 4 days in Tokyo and it was a well deserved break from the urban rush. We also got a hotel with a room much larger than all the other from the rest of the trip cumulated. And with a beautiful view of Fuji, so we spent the morning in balcony admiring and photographing the mountain. On the practical side, the hotel is called Regina Kawaguchiko. It’s located slightly outside the city but they provide a convenient shuttle service to and from Kawaguchiko station. However...

We started the trip to Japan with a long flight from Copenhagen: 11 hours with Scandinavian Airlines. We were not really in holiday mood due to all the stress with moving in the new apartment and especially the scares caused by Carmen’s strong allergic reactions. But we were rewarded with an amazing Aurora Borealis sight during our flight over Siberia. The scouting process was also rather quick, done in rush, started when we got the ok from the doctor to travel. But we were ready to have fun as much as possible during these two weeks, to enjoy a new culture and to explore exciting places. We arrived on Narita the next morning, quite tired after not being able to sleep in the plane. The immigration and customs check went rather fast, we collected our luggage and we picked up the rental mini wifi modem and sim card. We decided to rent both a sim card and a mini wifi modem, but in the end it turned out that the sim could have been enough to have internet on t...