Windmill

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Alexis Thomas

A couple of weekends ago on a Sunday afternoon, I decided to drive to the village of Koshi near Larnaca. The area surrounding this village is now the home of a couple of wind farms, making the location ideal for some windmill landscape shots. I rarely go out on my own to shoot pictures, but I must admit I found this experience greatly relaxing as I took the time to drive around and get acquainted with the area looking for the ideal composition.

The result of this short expedition, is the photograph below. For this picture I busted out my circular polarising filter. For anyone unfamiliar with this piece of equipment, this filter enhances the colours of the image, giving a bit more contrast while at the same reducing glare/reflections. It works best when the scene is side-lit such as in this case.

Shot with my tripod mounted Canon 60D and Canon 24-70 F2.8L lens at ISO 100, F11 and 1/100 exposure. Come to think of it, given that I was using a tripod and this was a landscape picture, I could have pushed my aperture down to F16 to increase sharpness. Not sure what happened there!

Strawberry Plunge

Posted on March 2, 2013 by Alexis Thomas

I had this itch over the last 3-4 days to try a new technique. One of my favourite professional photographers, to whom I owe most of my knowledge in photography, is Mark Wallace. In one of his recent Exploring Photography video tutorials, he demonstrated the technique of high-speed photography by using a very simple setup – a tripod-mounted camera and an off-camera flash. So I decided to give it a try and photograph a strawberry plunging in milk.

The technique itself was fairly trivial. Simply set the camera to manual mode with a long exposure (over a second) and a small aperture to get a decent depth of field. Turn all the lights off, trigger the camera, drop the strawberry and just as it hits the surface of the milk, trigger the flash. Needless to say it requires a lot of coordination and patience before you get a decent shot, especially when you are trying to do this all by yourself without someone helping you or any wireless triggers!

Shot with my Canon 60D and Canon 100mm F2.8 macro lens at ISO 100, F16 and a 4 second exposure. Flash was set to manual at 1/16th power.

Long Exposure – Taking the shot

Posted on February 23, 2013 by Alexis Thomas

Continuing from my last post on Long Exposures, here is a picture of my actual set up (taken with my smartphone camera), and the final result. One of the problems with using a 10-stop ND filter is that there will inevitably be a slight distortion in the temperature of the picture. This can be overcome by shooting in RAW and fixing the White Balance during post processing, which is what I did in this case. I also made a slight adjustment in contrast to arrive at this end result.

Set up:

Final shot:

On a side note, the large wave I was talking about, came out 5 secs after I took this picture, so you can see how close I was to disaster!

Shot with a Canon 60D and Canon 24-70 F2.8L lens at ISO 100, F22, 30 sec exposure using an N 3.0 B+W solid filter.

Long Exposure – First attempt

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Alexis Thomas

This past weekend, Daria and I decided to spend the weekend in Pafos. I thought this would be a great opportunity to head to Petra tou Romiou (the famous birthplace of Aphrodite), photograph some rocks and give the “Long Exposure” technique a try. I wasn’t planning on getting any great shots – if anything, this was going to be an educational trial run to figure out how to properly use my 10-stop ND filter.

For anyone not into the photography technical jargon, the purpose of a solid ND filter is to slow down the camera’s shutter speed, allowing the photographer to capture movement. So if your camera’s speed reading is for example 1/100 sec, placing a 10-stop filter on the front of the lens (which looks like a black piece of glass), allows you to slow down your speed by 2^10, giving your therefore a 10 sec exposure for the same aperture.

Below is the result of my first attempt. In this case I managed to get a 40 sec exposure time, which ended up completely blurring the water to the point where it came out looking like mist. I can’t say I am ecstatic with the picture content-wise (afterall this was a technical exercise and less so a creative one), but if anything I have some key takeaways for next time I give this a try:

You must have patience…and a lot of it! Since this particular filter is a solid black piece of glass, the only way to dial in the right camera settings, it to manually focus before putting on the filter, take a reading, do some math to figure out the final shutter speed and then screw on the filter.
You need to have a lot of motion going on to make this worthwhile. Unfortunately the weather was pretty good (yeah photographers are weird this way), so there were no clouds in the sky. Moving clouds and water make great elements to photograph using this technique.
If you have someone with you, make sure they are patient too! Yeap, enough said about Daria! 🙂
Watch out for the waves! That might sound like common sense, but I am almost fell for that one! I placed my tripod really low in a dry area on the pebbles, but at some point a huge wave came out and almost swept my gear. I managed to get my feet completely soaked, but at least the camera and tripod get to see another day.

Needless to say I will give this technique another go. Anyone know where I can find a pier or a lighthouse here in Cyprus?

Taken with my tripod mounted Canon 60D and Canon F2.8L lens at ISO 100, F22, 40 sec exposure (with B+W ND 3.0 solid filter).

Studio Photography

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Alexis Thomas

Finally got a chance during my photography class last Wednesday to give Studio Photography a try. It was my first go at using external light sources, rather than simply shooting with a standard flash gun. I must say that the technique itself is fairly straight forward, especially if you have a light meter handy. You simply position your lights, tether your camera to the light kit, take a reading on the meter and then just dial in the settings.

The truly difficult part however, is managing the model herself. I definitely see the value of communicating constantly with your subject, asking her to move around and try new poses that would really make her shots come out flattering. I managed to take roughly around 300 shots or so over the course of 2 hours, and happily ended up with about 10 or so that look fairly decent, one which is shown below.

Taken with my Canon 60D and Canon 24-70mm F2.8L lens, at ISO 100, F9.0 and 1/125 shutter speed. This shot was taken with a single softbox to the right of the model.

Monkey Business

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Alexis Thomas

On my way back from Myanmar in December, myself and a few colleagues of mine decided to take a private tour in Bangkok, to visit the Bridge on the River Kwai. Despite the 3 hour drive to the outskirts of Bangkok, the scenery was great and well worth the trouble. For me however, the real reason for wanting to visit this place was to finally see in real life the actual bridge from one of the movies I used to love as a child – “The Bridge on the River Kwai”. Can’t tell you how many times as kids my brother and I used to whistle that tune pretending to be marching as the soldiers did in the movie.

As nice as the tour was however, the real highlight of my day was what I got to experience on our way back to Bangkok. As we were driving through the valley, we witnessed an entire herd of over 50 monkeys crossing the road. We immediately asked our driver to pull over, quickly got out of the car with our cameras, and followed them to a nearby resting area where conveniently 2 locals had set shop selling bananas! As my colleagues were busy feeding them with one banana after another, I was even busier taking one shot after another. I managed to snap a bunch of decent pics, but my favourite was this one below of the mother carrying around her baby.

Shot with my Canon 60D and Sigma 3.5-6.3 18-200mm OS lens at ISO 400, F5.6, 1/800 sec.

Lake Boat

Posted on January 3, 2013 by Alexis Thomas

Over the Christmas holidays, Daria and I flew to Thessaloniki (Salonika) in Greece to spend a few days with my cousins. The plan was to stay in the city for a couple of days to do some late Christmas shopping and then head to Florina (a town on the northern most part of Greece bordering FYROM) for the rest of the week. We would then use Florina as our base to explore the surrounding area.

I have to admit that this part of Greece is truly spectacular. I can honestly say that the scenery of western Macedonia has nothing to envy from the Swiss Alps. Snow-peaked mountains, forests and lakes as far as your eyes can reach. The picture below was taken at Vegoritida lake which we visited while taking the scenic route from Thessaloniki to Florina.

Taken with my tripod mounted Canon 60D and Canon 24-70 F2.8L lens at ISO 100, F8.0 at 1/320 and bracketed at -2/0/+2.

New Year’s Resolutions

Posted on January 1, 2013 by Alexis Thomas

Happy New Year to everyone and I wish happiness and health to you and your loved ones!

Can’t say I am a big fan of New Year Resolutions, but in the spirit of the season I would like to set some goals for myself (photography-wise) for this new year. Since the whole point of why I created this blog is to keep myself dedicated in a hobby I really care about and enjoy, it only seems fitting to set some goals that will help me achieve just that. So here is a fairly short (and hopefully achievable) list for 2013:

Explore Cyprus! I’ve been fortunate this past year to have the opportunity to travel a fair bit and in the process I’ve managed to take some decent photos. Even though I feel that it’s easier to find great photo opportunities when you are travelling abroad (compared to the familiar surroundings of Cyprus), this certainly is to a great extent psychological. Cyprus has some great scenery and all it takes is the will to go out and explore. So no more excuses here…the goal is to visit some new places and take at least 3 new pictures depicting life in Cyprus (either portraits of people or scenery).
Long Exposures: Last summer on my trip to New York, I forked out a fair bit of money in purchasing a 10-stop solid ND filter. The whole point of such filter is to reduce the amount of light coming through the lens (by 10 times in this case), so I can slow down my shutter speed and capture movement in a single frame. The results can be truly astonishing (see examples), and over the last couple of years this technique has become very popular among both professional and amateur photographers. So my goal here is to finally take that filter out of its box and experiment by shooting some landscapes (minimum of 2 pictures posted on this blog), particularly in Black & White.
New types of Photography: I am more or less happy with the variety of pictures I’ve managed to take over the past few years. There are dozens of other photography types however that I haven’t yet experimented with e.g. aerial, street, stock etc., and feel that I should so as to stretch my skills and improve. This year’s resolution therefore is to post 3 entries with photographs from types of photography that I have yet to experiment with.
Frame a Picture: For all those of you who’ve been to my apartment, you can attest to the fact that I only have one single picture (though fairly large) hanging in my entire apartment. This is a B&W version of the Havana Car picture I posted on my blog this past August. I made the conscious choice that I would hang more, so long as these pictures were my own and they had to fit-in with the rest of the decor. Suffice to say that I failed miserably so far, and the empty IKEA frame hanging in my bedroom is a testament to this failure. The goal therefore for this year is to take one picture that fits the above-mentioned criteria and is worthy for me to enlarge and hang anywhere in my apartment.

I will post updates of my progress against these goals during the year. Have a great year everyone!

The ancient city of Bagan

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Alexis Thomas

A few months ago, if someone had asked me where Myanmar was, admittedly I would have struggled to pin-point it on the map. Upon visiting this country, I witnessed a place undiscovered to many tourists, traveled to by only few and somewhat daring individuals. At it’s heart, in the Mandalay region and roughly a one and a half hour flight from the old capital of Yangon, lies the ancient city of Bagan, one of the richest archaeological sites in Asia. The city is famous in the region for its sheer number of temples and pagodas – roughly around 2200 which have survived today out of the 13000 that were originally built in the 11th to 13th centuries.

After my first trip to Myanmar back in early September, a number of locals advised me to find the time to visit this ancient city, promising a lifetime experience and a sight like nothing I had ever witnessed. At first I was apprehensive, but a couple of colleagues convinced me to go and thankfully I did. It was a truly unique experience and I sincerely hope I get the chance to visit again.

These temples and pagodas are considered holy and as such you can only walk inside and around them completely barefoot, which made the task of taking this picture only that much challenging! After watching the sunset on a private boat cruise, we decided to head back to the hotel for some rest. As we were driving back, I started itching for an after-sunset picture of the skyline. We asked our guide to pull over at the nearest temple, and with flashlights on hand, we started to climb the top of the temple barefoot – a somewhat scary ordeal given that we had to walk on the steep rooftop of the temple on a 15 cm wide ledge, carrying a flashlight, tripod and camera. Thankfully we managed through, and I was happy to shoot the following picture during the twilight hour.

Taken with my Canon 60D and Sigma 18-200 F3.5-6.3 OS lens at ISO 100, F5.6 and bracketed at -2/0/+2.

PS: I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and all the best for the New Year! See you all in 2013!

Bagan Road Workers

Posted on December 16, 2012 by Alexis Thomas

Just got back from a week-long trip to Myanmar and Thailand…and what a week it has been! In this short amount of time, I managed to squeeze in 2 days in the ancient city of Bagan, 4 working days in Yangon, and a 24 hour layover in Bangkok on my way back to Cyprus. As I am writing this blog post, I feel like I haven’t slept since I left Cyprus; it was rough, but admittedly I had an awesome time!

What I am even more excited about, is that I’ve managed to get some decent pictures out of this trip, which I am hoping to post on my blog over the next few weeks. This first one is one of my favorites from my first day in Bagan. As we were getting the tour around the ancient temples, we noticed a bunch of people doing some road work. On closer inspection, we realised that all of them were women dressed up in their traditional Burmese lungi and wearing identical hats. They were covered by a cloud of dust from sweeping the road, and with the sun rays piercing through the dense tree canopy above them, it created an almost dreamy effect. Suffice to say that I quickly pulled out the camera from my bag and started running towards them. I took a few shots, but this one came out best. From the look on her face, one can say that she was really baffled by my presence!

Taken with my Canon 60D and my Sigma 18-200 F3.5-6.3 OS Lens at 200mm, ISO 250 at F7.1.

Light Paintings

My journey into photography

Author Archives: Alexis Thomas