As promised yesterday, here’s Jessica. This time in color.

For the next one, I’d really appriciate some advice, in particular, how about this effect:

To me, this one captures the feeling better, but I’m not sure. Any thoughts?

When the cat is away, the mouses¹ are playing.

So, as you may know, thanks to Outlook being my RSS reader, I managed to spot a post from Peter where he’s looking for an assistant. So I decided to give it a shot, after all, I’m very curious as to how people who’ve done it before do it =).

It’s nothing special really, just holding a reflector, but obviously I had my Nikon around my neck as much as I could. And when Peter went out to get something to drink, I “hijacked” his borrowed Canon 1Ds MkII & Jessica and took some shots.

The style of shots is different, I think, than what Peter did.

So I don’t need to ask myself if I should go with BW or color, I’ve chosen to go with both, but in two different posts. So, tomorrow I’ll post the colored ones. Comments are welcomed!

1) Good god man, obviously I mean mice, but for some reason the word just wanted out =), so I wrote it.

As you know, today I was an asistant for Peter Bernik. Since my best friend is waiting in his car (pool time!) this is just a teaser… =)

I’ll post more. I promise.

So, after getting some sleep, going to work, and driving home for 1 hour due to the traffic jams around Ljubljana I finally started writing my “report” from yesterday’s concert. My Delo report is available here. By tomorrow I also hope to give another reference but I’ll see what happenes there.

I went to this concert with very low expectations. I admit, I’m not a fan of Severina. I know her from more than just her “home movie” but I’ve never liked listening to this type of music too much. This was topped with complications with acreditation getting lost in the mail (I recieved an empty envelope!!).

I decided early on that I will try and do as much as possible with my 50 mm f/1.8 lens. And I did. Obviously, I did use my 18-200 for a vfew closeups and a wide shot of the public from the balcony.

Anyway, Severina, along with her guests, performed for alkmost 2 hours and a half, and the show was amazing. Maybe I wasn’t as impressed with music as I was with the performance aspect of the concert. This includes the durations, lighting, coreography, guests, spots in between bunches of songs etc.

As for the pictures… I’m actually quite happy as I mentioned in my previous post. I hope that those of you reading my blog are happy with them as well, and as usual I would appriciate any critique.

What I did notice however, is that I like the portait orientation when shooting solo artists. Do you think this is good or bad?

I’m still excited about the events that took place during the concert (more about this tomorrow). I must admit that the concert surprised me in a positive way as far as perfomance goes but not so positively about organization (we had 30 seconds to take pics of Luka Nižetić and Klapa Nostalgija). But it’s a challange. Anyway, because I really, really, need some sleep right now, here’s a teaser of what I’ll be posting tomorrow.

I’m really satisfied with the pictures I’ve took, and I think it has something to do with me using my 50 mm F/1.8 most of the time… Well, I’ll wait until comments tomorrow and decide if the pictures are really any good. I think the above one is the only one I took with 18-200.

Have fun ;-). 

I guess there’s a lot of “part II” posts on my blog this two weeks =). I hope you don’t mind… it’s just that I’m sick and I have a little more spare time right now. So, as I’ve already promised in my previous post, i’m posting more pictures from Zucchero’s concert in Koper’s Bonifika. Other bloggers who were in Koper and posted their pictures are Miro (Foto Rocker) and Primož.

I am however, having trouble deciding if I should stick with the color picture or go with the BW. Suggestions?

My report for Delo is at their website.

This is a post of some pictures from a long, long time ago — the second week when I got my Nikon D80 and the first day I got my 50 mm F/1.8 :-)

So, as you might recall from my previous post I had some time to kill and Petra and I went to see Jan at his workplace - The Jože Pučnik Airport. Damn, that’s a bad name, I’ll stop it now… we went to Brnik. I wanted to test flash & sunset with fast shutter synchronization. Needless to say, it didn’t work the way I wanted it to, but on the other hand I’m not sure what I wanted :). I thing a reflector screen would be better. More natural light…

The picture to me, looks fake. The lightning on Petra is too perfect, IMHO. Well, will have to try one with a reflector screen. Spanking of which, anyone have any good recommendations for it?

Anyway, these pictures were taken in the near by corn field :), I just wanted a series titled “Na koruzi s Petro” :).

I’m really bothered by the overlay on the first image over Petra’s mouth. Will have to do better next time I gather.

Comments welcomed!

Yesterday was a busy day for me. It started with going to the Cosmopolitan’s Run in high heels. As far as the event goes it was interesting, but Adriamedia could have done better! In particular, the run itself should have been the tip of the iceberg, not the first thing at exactly 11 o’clock. Then there was lightning… They tried to have a photographic competition, but at that time, towards the sun it was hillarious =). And the asfalt didn’t help with reflections. Anyway, my gallery is here. Then there were the Quads. In front of the runners were two quad bikes… great for the video but very bad for the rest of us.

The winner was Cita Cvirn. Although she wore high heels only for the second time in her life (”Allegedly, allegedly”), she took the rest of the runners by storm with a time of about 18 seconds. But, she’s a professional mountain runner and she ran must of the track on her toes. The video is here.

Remember, my gallery is here.

After the run came the highlight of the day. Alenka from Adriamedia suggested we go for coffee. Obviously neither Jan, Petra nor I argued with her =). So we joined Had, Davorin, Tamala, Gregor…

Alongside our drinks & lots of water for the Em3r10 team, we had a discussion about what we expect next year:

• Men’s health should organize a men’s run in high heels — see who has the balls
• Playboy should organize a topless run [can also be in high heels, but not a requirement]  

Also present at the run (that I know of right now) were Nergač, MatejMM, Irena and Marta… [If I forgot anyone, let me know, please!]

I did it. I have version 0.1 of my watermarking tool which I have named Polaris. When I feel it’s ready for more people to test it, I’ll put it up on my blog in case anyone will want to download it and give me feedback.

After having tryed a solution MarkMyImage from CodeProject, and finding it visibily (at least to me) reduces the quality of my images, I felt there was a problem with the way the code handled applying the watermarking. I thought I could do better, and since there were a couple of other things that bothered me (or that I’d like to have) I decided to do it. What I’m starting with is:

• Loadable Watermarking profiles with watermark drag&drop placement
• Automatic invert of watermark image if image is too bright or too dark to allow it to be visible
• Asynchronous processing (non-blocking UI)

However, the first issue I’ve encountered is that as much as I hoped it was the way the code handled the watermarking in MarkMyImage, it was actually .NET to blame. It appears that the call to Image’s Save() method assumes a higher compression that expected. In particular, I believe it chooses 75% quality preservation. After doing some research and reading up on articles, I found this one.

The solution is to include the ImageCodecInfo object and EncoderParameters where the quality setting is set to 100. The code to do it is simple:

ImageCodecInfo myImageCodecInfo;
System.Drawing.Imaging.Encoder myEncoder;
EncoderParameter myEncoderParameter;
EncoderParameters myEncoderParameters;

myImageCodecInfo = GetEncoderInfo(”image/jpeg”);

// Create an Encoder object based on the GUID

// for the Quality parameter category.
myEncoder = System.Drawing.Imaging.Encoder.Quality;
myEncoderParameters = new EncoderParameters(1);

 // Save the bitmap as a JPEG file with quality level 100.
 myEncoderParameter = new EncoderParameter(myEncoder, 100L);
myEncoderParameters.Param[0] = myEncoderParameter;
 //save new image to file system.

After this, all I had to do was call Save(path, myImageCodecInfo, myEncoderParameters);.

After I generated the images, I did a comparison of the original, Polaris image and the previous solution. This is the result:

I may be a bit to precise on this quality thing, but I saw the difference. And it bothered me. Can you see it? Now, the quality diference is minute (there will always be a difference due to the very nature of JPG).

Anyway, now I’ll post some pictures =). Just as soon as I finish getting the solo guitar right from Jefferson’s Starship - Nothing’s gonna stop us now.

We can build this thing together. Stand in stone forever. Cause nothing’s gonna stop us now!