Category: Photography

Shot with a Canon EOS 50D (w/ 17-55 f2.8 IS USM lens)

• Shot on Aperture priority
• Focal Length: 35mm (35mm equivalent: 56mm)
• Aperture: f2.8
• Exposure: 1/100s (and 1/30s and 1/500s)
• ISO 100

This is a photo of one of my favourite haunts – a small bar in Lija, a village that is adjacent to Balzan (the village I live in). It accommodates around 20 people at its fullest, but it can usually get quite noisy. Since seating is limited, getting there quite early is imperative, and once you’re there you surely don’t want to leave. I go there with my friends, with my wife, with my parents – basically anyone who cares to join me. Drinks are dirt cheap and with every round bought you are served with 4-5 plates of “nibbles”. Usually you get to a stage where you have to stop them from getting you more food.

As if this was not enough, the bar’s owner, Sonny, is not only a great guy, but he is also a brilliant magician. At some point during the night, if you’re lucky, he will start performing tricks for his customers.

Onto the photo. I took this early this morning (at around 6.30 am), which is one of the few times this place is closed. Since the wooden Grasshopper sign is covered by the canvas one there was a major difference in tonality and I therefore had to go for HDR. I bracketed  by two stops each side when taking the shot and fused the images in Photomatix.

(#73 of 366 X 2012 project)

Shot with a Canon EOS 50D (w/ 17-55 f2.8 IS USM lens)

• Shot on Aperture priority
• Focal Length: 55mm (35mm equivalent: 88mm)
• Aperture: f2.8
• Exposure: 1/800s
• ISO 100

Hadn’t been shooting the street for quite some time but this was a shot I could not resist – I was not out to shoot street photography and was carrying my DSLR (I usually prefer to use the G12 for street-photography since it is much smaller).

Even though I’m posting this photo I’m not too sure whether it would have been wiser to focus on the girl’s face instead, but at the time I was scared that if I focused on her I would have lost the drawing since it is light and in pencil. In hindsight it might have been a good idea to shot down the aperture and have both subjects in focus, but that’s life. We only get a moment and can only hope we do the right thing. In spite of its imperfection I still quite like the shot though, don’t ask me why.

(#72 of 366 X 2012 project)

Shot with a Canon EOS 50D (w/ 17-55 f2.8 IS USM lens)

• Shot on Aperture priority
• Focal Length: 55mm (35mm equivalent: 88mm)
• Aperture: f2.8
• Exposure: 1/1250s
• ISO 400

I was walking by a church and spotted these flowers on the steps outside. They seem to be a bouquet that the bride throws behind her after she gets married. Whoever caught them left them lying on the floor, so I wonder what was going on there.

Onto more technical issues, I walked as back as I could, then I got up close and personal with the flowers by zooming in as much as my lens allowed me to, opened the aperture up wide and therefore isolated the flowers. The depth of field is shallow, the field of view is narrow and therefore the scene feels even more lonely. Even though at first glance the picture looks like it has selective colour in a B&W picture, as you can probably notice by the small tufts of grass, I did not play around with the colour of the rest of the photo – the stone was really that grey.

(#71 of 366 X 2012 project)

Shot with a Canon EOS 50D (w/ 17-55mm f2.8 IS lens)

• Shot on Aperture priority
• Focal Length: 35mm (55mm equivalent: 88mm)
• Aperture: f2.8
• Exposure: 1/500s
• ISO 200

One of my most popular photos since I’ve been trying out my 366 project was a shot I took of Greta’s boots. Even though it was liked in general, I received quite a bit of feedback about it and I tried to shoot them many another time since then. I have shots on grass, shots on snow, shots with no background, but still – the ones I like most are always on an asphalt background.

(#68 of 366 X 2012 project)