SmugMug review

Normally I don't review social networks and websites but SmugMug is a bit different. It's a website hosting photographers' portfolios (BTW you can see mine here) not the one where you share your images to gain 'likes' or comments.

Pricing and Features

There are 4 plans, which varying in features, that you can choose from. You will find them listed below with their pricing and core features. Please note that there are probably 10x more features for each of the plans - I just picked the ones I consider the most important (eg. I skipped images enhancement):

• Basic ($5/month or $40/year)
• portfolio website (with customization),
• unlimited traffic,
• ability to upload both images and videos,
• detailed stats,
• technical support
• Power ($8/month or $60/year) - same as Basic and additionally:
• ability to disable right-click images download,
• premade themes for your page
• Portfolio ($20/month or $150/year) - same as Power and additionally:
• ability to add custom watermarks to your images,
• a lot of settings to set up prints selling,
• ability to sell digital downloads
• Business ($35/month or $300/year) - same as Portfolio and additionally:
• ability to create custom coupons for promotions,
• a lot of branding settings.

I decided to go with Portfolio plan as it offers virtually everything I need (probably even more). However, if you're not much into selling your photos and you don't need custom watermark you can definitely go with Power program (which is more than 2x cheaper) as it's also feature-packed.

I recommend it over Basic plan because of the ability to protect your images on right-click... i.e. it won't be possible to download your images after right-clicking them. In fact I'm rather surprised and somehow disappointed that this feature isn't part of Basic plan as from my point of view it's crucial for almost any photographer. Another nice feature of Power plan are premade themes that are great starting point to customize your portfolio.

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Getting older... My blog turns 3!

3 years of blogging!

Exactly 3 years ago, on 24th March 2011, I wrote my very first post here on this blog. It started quite funny for me because before that I had 3D graphics programming blog where I shared various game-related graphics techniques (and some very complex algorithms... I'm software engineer after all). On that blog I occasionally shared my photos too. But as I took more and more of them I decided to create blog dedicated to photography.

First post (which I would prefer to forget actually) here was just a simple "Hello world" kind of post where I introduced myself to my readers, that is to you. Initially I didn't have much to share and for this reason in the first year of blogging I wrote only about 20 posts in total. Not much... Also at the beginning I intended to share only images, without much text nor technical info... I thought as my blog as a backup for Flickr at that time... but all this was about to change pretty soon...

I was taking more and more photos and my skills as photographer were greatly improving (I think I made biggest progress in 2012) and so did my photos. As quite a few people seemed to like my style and asked me various questions about my processing, gear and alike I realized that I have some things to share with others and so I decided to share free photography resources. Why free? Because this way I can reach broader audience than with paid ones and besides I believe in the idea of sharing free resources. If I learnt something from someone who shared this for free, I shouldn't keep my knowledge as secret.

During these 3 years, I wrote and recorded about 60 free tutorials ranging from HDR to infrared photography to creating tiny planets effect, shared numerous tips, workflows and a few hundred of free Photomatix Pro and Lightroom presets. I also wrote a few reviews of photography software and equipment... And what's really important for me, some of this content seem to be quite popular - my HDR tutorial was viewed almost 50k times, my free Photomatix presets were viewed 35k times and my star photography tutorial was displayed almost 20k times! These are truly impressive achievements and I now may say I somehow affected photography :) and probably inspired a few people to try something different, something new :) I hope to continue to do this in the next years! With your help of course, because without you this blog wouldn't exist!

My plans for the next year of blogging? I have a few big tutorials planned and a few smaller ones too. I also intend to record more video tutorials. I have some other cool ideas too but it's to early to make promises on them.

Finally do you have any suggestions on what to add in the next months? Maybe there is some text you would like to read or feature you would like to see on this blog? Maybe there is something you don't like on this blog and would like me to change it? I'm really looking forward to your suggestions.

Daily photo - Rocks at sunset

Time for a daily photo - rocks at sunset. A truly golden hour with a bit of the blue in the sea. Hope you like it :)

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Tutorial: Tack sharp photos in 10 easy steps

Razor sharp, tack sharp, ultra sharp or simply sharp. Whatever you call them - sharp photos are great and attractive to your viewers (and a proof of your technical expertise!). As a few people asked me for this, in this tutorial I will give you some general tips on getting sharp results. Please note that applying a single tip from below list won't change your photos from a little soft ones to tack sharp ones. If you want to take razor sharp photos you need to follow all of them (or at least majority).

If you want to learn more about sharpening you can read my sharpening tutorial: part 1, part 2 and part 3.

So here are the tips:

1. Use a steady tripod
   It should be self explanatory - tripod greatly reduces camera shake. When you're shooting hand-holding your camera there is always some movement even if you have steady hands. Tripod lets you eliminate this movement completely. What you have to remember is to use a really sturdy tripod. Some I used in the past were shaking so they were a little useless.
   What's more when you're using tripod you don't need to use faster aperture nor increase the ISO to get steady photos.
2. Use manual focusing
   Although Auto-Focus is great most of the time it often doesn't work that good in dim light (or no light situations) and these are the ones landscape photographers have to deal most often (sunrise/sunset, blue hour, evening).
   And even if it works, it might produce images that are slightly out-of-focus (due to slight back- or front- focusing).
   If you still prefer to use Auto-Focus make sure to use central point single focus. It's the most accurate one in most cameras.
3. Use your lens sharpest apertures
   This may surprise you but not all apertures are equally sharp. For most lenses, fastest and slowest apertures are usually the least sharp ones, with apertures between f/4 to f/11 usually being the sharpest. And the difference between sharpest and least sharp aperture can sometimes be really huge. To learn how to find sharpest aperture for your lens, read my tutorial about it.
4. Disable Image Stabilization
   When using a tripod disable image stabilization system if your lens or camera has one. The way image stabilization works is by trying to find and reduce vibrations. If it doesn't find any, it can introduce a little shake on it's own - not much but it can still cause your photos to look a little softer than they could.
   Please note that it's not true for all image stabilization systems. Some (especially newer systems) don't introduce movement when mounted on tripod. To check if it's the case for you, refer to manual of your camera or lens.

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Just before storm

Daily photo - Just before storm

Today photo is one of my favorite ones taken recently because the light is pretty surreal and dramatic in it. It might even look artificial at first glance... but it's not. I took this image during sunset just before storm and heavy rain. Apart from a bit of warm light in the top corner of this image the scene was very dramatic, frightening with heavy dark clouds all around. Actually I had to evacuate soon after taking this photo in order to protect my gear.

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Do I go in the right direction?

Do I go in the right direction?

Do I go in the right direction? It's the question I recently often ask myself about my own photography. I make changes to my workflow all the time (introducing new tools and techniques), I try various techniques I learn and also try to experiment with my own ideas. The problem is that it's difficult to tell whether these changes are for good or bad. I simply don't know :) Sometimes I wonder whether my older photos weren't better, maybe not technically because they contained some issues like noise or colour fringing, but in terms of colours and detail. Do you have similar doubts? How do you deal with them?

Daily photo - Jetty at Sunset

Today photo is High Dynamic Range image taken at sunset in Mexico. I took 5 exposures at 1 EV spacing, merged to HDR and tone-mapped in Photomatix Pro 5 using Contrast Optimizer tool and then finished the image using luminosity masking technique in Photoshop. This is the case where I'm definitely happy with the colours ;)

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Thoughts: When HDR is not necessary

Thoughts: When HDR is not necessary or HDR-addiction

When you start taking HDR photos, you can quickly become obsessed with it (HDR photography is really addictive, isn't it?). Every time you take a photo - you bracket. You bracket on a sunny day, foggy day on cloudy day and when it's raining. During sunrise & sunset, inside the buildings, when you shoot cars, portraits and even your pets... every time. Sounds familiar? Well, at least it looked this way for me a few years ago. I remember returning from one of my trips (I think this was Barcelona) and realizing that virtually every photo was taken with HDR in mind.

There were some gems, photos I still love after few years that passed since then but the problem was that not every photo required HDR - some had so low dynamic range that they couldn't benefit from taking HDR. It took me many months of practice until I figured out when to take HDR photos and when it's not necessary. It also required a bit of self-discipline and thinking about the effect I want to achieve - they are the most important after all.

What you have to understand here, and what I tend to repeat over and over, is that HDR is just yet another tool in your toolbox (excellent one but still a tool). It doesn't differ much from other tools you use like tripod, lenses, denoising software and so forth. You probably don't use tripods when shooting street scenes. You also probably don't use ultra wide angle lens for shooting macro photography. You probably also don't denoise images that don't have any noise in them. I sometimes even don't edit my photos in Photoshop and choose Lightroom in which I can do it faster and easier despite the fact Photoshop in general gives me more control and possibilities...

It's the same with HDR - you should use it only when dynamic range of the scene is so wide that it won't "fit" in a single photo. You should use it when the scene requires it. Of course it means that you can or should use it quite often (and some of the scenes likes mentioned sunsets are great candidates for it) but there are cases like mentioned foggy day when your photos won't benefit much if at all from taking HDR photos.

If you read my recent tutorial about understanding histograms, then you can think that you should use HDR when either highlights or shadows are clipped. Well, it isn't that simple I'm afraid but it would be this way in an ideal world. Unfortunately if you did this way, you would often end up with rather noisy images if you tried to brighten up the shadows. It's because due to design of cameras, darker parts of the image don't contain as much information as brighter areas.

So unless you use camera with very wide dynamic range (like Nikon D800 or Canon with installed Magic Lantern - in both cases it's amazing 14 EV) it's good to take HDR when:

1. You have so broad histogram that either highlights or shadows get clipped.
2. Or when your histogram is very broad, expanding through whole range from shadows to highlights (but neither highlights nor shadows are clipped) - in this case capturing HDR makes sense if you intend to brighten up the shadows.

It means that you don't need HDR when your histogram is rather narrow and doesn't get clipped on either side. HDR stands for high dynamic range. It won't do magic and change low dynamic range scene into high dynamic range one.

Daily photo - Blue Waters

Today photo is an example where HDR wasn't necessary (and I didn't take it). Original image had low contrast and dynamic range as it was taken quite some time after sunset when there wasn't much light available.

Contrast that you see was added by me in post-processing phase.

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Doesn't Google like me?

Looks like Google doesn't like me

Well, it's sort of sad but apparently Google search algorithms don't like my blog very much for some reason. It's the 2nd time this year when my blog disappeared from search results for "HDR" and "HDR tutorial" keywords (and for a few other too). It resulted in almost 50% drop of daily visits on my blog.

Do I overuse these keywords? Maybe a little bit (but I'm definitely not spamming with them!) but it's hard not to mention them when you're focused on writing about this kind of photography. I also try to share good quality content but apparently Google thinks that my content is not worth showing in search results... well, it's frustrating and demotivating. Why write anything if almost no one will read it? For now, I won't stop blogging because I really like sharing my knowledge but if it will continue to happen I will probably consider that in future.

Daily photo - Have a sit and relax

Time for another landscape photo from Mexico. I took it during blue hour. I found the scene very tranquil, calm and relaxing. I hope you will share my feelings about it!

In this case I captured 5 exposures and as almost with all my night landscape photos I used Exposure Fusion available in Photomatix Pro. Exposure Fusion is an interesting alternative to HDR - it also increases perceived dynamic range in the final image but without producing intermediary 32-bit image (so tone-mapping is not required in this case). It also tends to produce very natural looking images. If you're interested in learning more about it, read this tutorial.

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Beginner's HDR photography tutorial. Part 3. Creating realistic images in Photomatix Pro

Today it is finally time for 3rd part of my HDR video tutorial. In today's part I'm talking about how to get realistic results using Photomatix Pro 5's Details Enhancer and Contrast Optimizer tools which I use almost exclusively in my HDR work.

Next parts will cover subjects such as getting rid of halos, creating indoor images, creating night HDR images. And yeah... next part will be available much earlier than in a few months...

Note: before you watch this part, I advise you to take a look at Part 2 in which I talk about Photomatix Pro, explain its interface and talk about core features (such as deghosting or alignment). You might be also interested in watching Part 1 in which I talk about HDR photography in general and give some reasons why do we need it.

I will be interested in learning what you liked and what you disliked about this tutorial so the next parts can become better.

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Post-processing workflow: City in Motion

Introduction

I'm trying to post my Post-processing Workflow regularly but you know how it is :) Nevertheless today I'd like to share yet another one, for more posts from this series go here.

Today photo is a blue hour long-exposure HDR image from Warsaw, Poland. I took it a few weeks ago when there was first (and so far last) snow this winter. For more information about this photo, visit this post. You will find there EXIF data, precise location info, links to buying prints and quite a long post detailing process of taking this photo (what wasn't trivial by the way).

In this case Before shows one of the 0 EV exposure images and After shows blended and finished image. Quite a difference, huh?

BTW to learn more about HDR photography, read my HDR tutorial.

This photo was one of the toughest image I post-processed this year because it in fact consisted of 40 images with varying exposures that I had to manually blend. Photoshop didn't like it very much and even simple operations could take forever.

There were two main goals of blending:

• Fix exposure so both shadows and highlights were properly exposed,
• Make the light trails longer and brighter. In theory I could simply take one image with very long exposure instead of several ones with shorter ones. Unfortunately it wasn't possible. I was shooting from an opened terrace and the wind was very strong on that day. So strong that my tripod was shaking slightly. With shorter exposures (but still around 10 seconds) I could fit between stronger blows thus reducing chance of blurry photos.

Editing in Lightroom

Ok, without further ado, let's talk about editing.

As always I started my editing in Adobe Lightroom where I enabled profile corrections to remove distortion and vignetting and also changed white balance to make the image more magentish. I applied these changes to all my source exposures:

Take a look at the image above for one more second. I displayed rules of third grid on it so you can see in what way I composed this photo.

Basically I used rule of thirds - 1/3rd of height is occupied by sky and 2/3rds by city itself. Also I put virtual end of the road in one of the grid points to make the composition even more attractive.

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A word about sharks

A bit about diving and sharks

In the past I was scuba diving quite a lot. However, diving to watch coral reefs didn't sound very fascinating and exciting for me (don't get me wrong - it's beautiful but you can get bored after a while). I wanted to go deeper and deeper pushed by curiosity. I wanted to explore the world that is beyond limit of masses as you need special training to descend ther. I wanted to visit ship wrecks (believe me or not but the feeling when submarine emerges from almost complete darkness of Baltic See is hard to describe) and deep canyons.

Unfortunately I lost fun in all it (although I hope to go back underwater one day) - the diving gear equipment became way too heavy - I wasn't diving with just one tank like "regular" divers do but with 3 or 4 tanks. Also the procedure became much more complex. However, it would be cool to capture underwater HDRs ;) so maybe one day I'll try that.

One of the great things about diving is that you can meet amazing animals in their natural environment: lion fishes, dolphins, stingrays, morays, turtles and sharks. Those same sharks that are unfortunately so well known for their brute force and cruelty "thanks to" Jaws movie. It's amazing how movies affect our perspective. Killer whale or simply... orca is much more dangerous and one of just a few animals that can kill simply for fun (just like humans... as most other animals kill to survive). Yet thanks to the Free Willy movie series most of us think of it as beautiful and poor animal that is much closer to dolphins (which aren't that ideal either!). What's more even rhinos, elephants and hippos kill more people each year than sharks do.

Unfortunately I saw shark only once in its natural habitat. Although it passed about 15 meters from me and I saw it for just a few seconds, I still remember the feeling of excitement related to this event. Fantastic feeling.

Daily photo - Shark

Something a little different from me today :)

Although this photo was taken in the oceanarium in Xcaret park in Mexico through large glass, I wanted to give the impression that the shark is swimming just above viewer's head. To get this feeling, just click on the image below to see it in larger size.

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Paradise

Daily photo - Paradise

Time for another HDR photo. Today it's Paradise (I hope you'll find it appropriate :) ) - high dynamic range image I took in Xcaret park in Mexico. It's one of those rare cases where I almost didn't need to increase saturation in post-processing. It's because the colours where really there and with use of circular polarizing filter, they became even more pronounced. Post-processing was therefore more about increasing clarity and contrast this time than about the colours.

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Follow me in Social Networks

Follow me for more updates

If you like my work and would like to stay in touch with me, you can follow me in various social networks. I'm most active on Facebook and Google+ (for the reasons described here) so here are the links to my profiles there:

• Facebook - I'm most active on Facebook. I don't only post new images there but sometimes I also give some tips and answer various questions (also from private messages).
• Google+ - another social network where I'm quite active although on Google+ I mostly post images and comment on friends images.

I also post images quite regularly on 500px, so if you're there make sure to add me to your friends too.

Daily photo - Resting horses (painterly)

A few months ago I shared this High Dynamic Range photo, which I took previous winter in Polish Tatra Mountains. Today I would like to share the very same image but processed in a completely different way - using my painterly technique (which in recent month became one of my favourite techniques by the way).

If you would like to learn more about this technique, watch this short video where I explain it.

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Evening in the Garden

"Middle" exposure in my photos

Recently in a comment to one of my posts I got a question what "middle" exposure in Technical details section under each photo referred to. So here is short explanation for anyone interested.

As you probably know, most of the time I'm making HDR images (you can read more about this type of photography here), what means that I need to take several photos and then merge or blend them in Photomatix Pro or Photoshop. Number of these photos usually ranges 3 to 7.

Each of these photos has different exposure, eg. for today photo I captured 5 photos with exposures of 1s, 2s, 4s, 8s and 15s. The "middle" exposure is exposure of median photo, in this case it's 4 seconds.

You can also think of this "middle" exposure as the exposure I would use if I wasn't taking a HDR photo.

Daily photo - Evening in the Garden

Today photo is a high dynamic range image I captured in the gardens of Barcelo Maya Resort hotel in Mexico. It was gorgeous blue hour with a really blue sky (thanks to no clouds) what contrasted very nicely with warm yellow light of garden lamps.

I composed this shot in such a way that the path leads the eye through the image. Also the path has shape of S-curve (although not that obvious at first glance). As I mentioned in the past, composition using S-curves looks very appealing to the eye, so if you can find S-shaped object in your frame, make sure to use it. Your images will look much more attractive to your viewers.

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Beach at Night

Astrophotography - where Sony NEX-6 is not enough

As you could read in my review just a few days ago, Sony NEX-6 camera is a really great mirrorless camera that can be used in many cases instead of much heavier DSLR. Where it didn't work for me, however, is astrophotography. Or I should rather say landscape photography featuring night sky as astrophotography is something much more complex that usually involves photographing distant galaxies and stars.

The noise produced by NEX-6 sensor, which is rather low, is still too high in most cases - at least for me. Also I don't own any good and fast prime wide angle lens for NEX system at the moment, and quite frankly I don't intend to buy one (as my primary system is still Canon). And even if I did, I'm not sure if that lens could beat my excellent Canon f/1.4 L II. Which I really love for images it produces.

And as you can see here I really like this kind of photos. Stars make the images look surreal or out of this world.

Daily photo - Beach at Night

Despite what I said in the paragraphs above I still made some attempts in capturing night sky while I was in Mexico. I had to, as the sky there was absolutely gorgeous with thousands of stars (I don't remember seeing such clear sky in a long while). I was about 100km from Cancun where number of hotels was much lower so there wasn't that much of light pollution.

And today photo shows one of these attempts. It is a bit similar in concept to one of my other photos, Have a rest under the sky which I took in 2012 on Fuerteventura island. I just regret that I wasn't able to capture more stars in below image. Maybe next time.

BTW if you would like to learn more about star photography, make sure to read my free tutorial.

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Tutorial: Understanding Histogram

Histogram - one of the most popular and useful tools photographers have at their disposal.

It's displayed on our cameras when reviewing photos, it's present in Photoshop and Lightroom, many photographers mention it as an essential tool for their workflow. Histogram can be used to evaluate exposure, improve contrast and prevent highlights (or shadows) clipping.

If you would like to understand what it's really about, make sure to read this tutorial.

Introduction

First of all, what on Earth histogram is? It's really simple. Histogram is a graphical representation of distribution of data and it is represented as a series of adjacent rectangles which height shows value (the higher the rectangle, the bigger value it represents). In other words histogram shows you how many members out of a whole group belong to a given class or category.

Let's consider following example (I know it doesn't make much sense but anyway...). Let's say you have a group of 129 people and you are interested in how many people have given height. You could represent this by a table or a graph - histogram:

Each of the rectangles in our example corresponds to given height. From it you can easily see that height of 175 cm is the most common, with 30 people being that tall. You can also read that there are fairly few people with height of 190 or more centimetres.

In case of photography histogram shows distribution of luminosities (instead of height). Luminosity is a measurement of brightness - that is it tells how bright given pixel is. The higher the given rectangle is, the more pixels have given luminosity. Take a look at the example histogram from Adobe Lightroom:

As you can notice it looks slightly different - there are no spaces between rectangles and there are no numbers on it. I'm telling you why. People from the example above, in photography correspond to pixels. Let's say you have a 18 megapixel camera. It means that photo captured with this camera has 18 million of pixels. Now, you don't need to know if there are 165 or 167 pixels that are completely black because it won't tell you anything usefull (and such small differences doesn't really mean anything) so photography histograms typically doesn't show any numbers nor scales. What's important for you is to be able to see relative differences between various luminosities. If you see that the rectangle corresponding to black is twice as high as the one that corresponds to white it will mean something. If you will see there are no rectangles corresponding to shadows it will also tell you something.

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In the Cenote

Updated review of Canon 70 - 300 L lens

Today I decided to update my review of Canon 70-300 L f/4-5.6 IS USM tele-zoom lens. You can read the updated review here.

The reason for this update is that initial review, which was written at the beginning of 2012, missed some important bits of information. It's because by that time I owned this lens for just a few weeks, so I didn't know everything about it (and my knowledge about photography was much smaller than now). It was a mistake - I know - and nowadays I try to review gear and software at least after a few months of using it.

BTW I think that current version would be more helpful for anyone considering buying this lens.

In the nearest future I plan to update a few more reviews on my blog for the same reasons, especially review of Canon 5D MK III camera. I also consider updating a few tutorials so they will be more up to date.

Daily photo - In the Cenote

Today photo is actually a crop from this panorama that I took in one of the cenotes in Mexico and I shared just a few days ago. It's not a simple crop though - apart from using cropping tool in Photoshop I applied completely different processing. Panorama I mentioned was processed using realistic processing, this time I decided to go with my painterly processing to make this place a little bit more magical.

To learn more about this technique, make sure to watch my video tutorial about it.

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Colours at sunset

Daily photo - Colours at sunset

Today I will share just a high dynamic range photo, without much text. Sorry - I'm quite busy working on a new tutorial (which normally should be available later this week). Pretty colourful photo I should add. I took it at the end of sunset in Puerto Aventuras, Mexico. The colours were really gorgeous and vibrant - water was blue (and crystal clear!), there were some oranges on rocks, greens of algae and pinks & purples in the clouds. Really beautiful. I wish I was there right now :)

If you would like to learn how to create such images yourself, make sure to read my free HDR tutorial. If you prefer to download it or print, I suggest you take a look at the PDF version.

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Sony NEX-6 Review

Image quality is one of the biggest strengths of Sony NEX-6. It beats my backup DSLR (Canon 50D) in this category.

I promised it, and here it is - my complete review of Sony NEX-6 mirrorless camera. After using it for a few weeks now I can say a lot about it. Do I like it? Is it good replacement for DSLR? Find out by reading this review.

Please note that today I won't talk much about the lenses. I hope to review them separately. Especially the Sony E f/4 10-18 lens which is pretty fantastic. And one of the best ultra wide angle zoom lenses I worked with.

Introduction & Parameters

You can get Sony NEX-6 in a few packages:

• As a body alone for around $750.00,
• With a 16-50 mm kit lens for $900.00, or
• With 16-50 mm and 55-210 mm lenses for $995.00.

I went with the last option. Additionally I got Sony E f/4 10-18 mm lens which I mentioned at the very beginning of this review. So I currently own 3 Sony E-mount lenses - they cover almost all focal lengths that are interesting for me.

Before going any further take a look at some of the most important parameters of this camera:

Vendor	Sony
Released on	2012-09-12
Weight	345 g (including battery and memory card)
Dimensions	119.9 × 66.9 × 42.6 mm
Megapixel count	16
Sensor type	ASP-C
Supported file formats	Photos: RAW, JPEG, RAW + JPEG Videos: AVCHD 2.0 (MPEG-4 AVC/H.264), MP4
ISO range	100 - 25.600
Shutter speed range	1/4000 - 30 s, bulb mode
Video resolution	Full-HD
Burst mode FPS	10
Built-in flash	Yes
Wi-Fi	Yes
GPS	No
Other	Swivel LCD screen, Electronic viewfinder

The biggest advantage of Sony NEX-6 for me is its size and weight. It's really small and light. It looks and feels like a typical compact camera (it's even smaller than some of them!). Together with a lens it weighs less than Canon DSLR body alone. It's so light that when I had it in my backpack I needed to check it's really there or whether I forgot to take it from home. It's really light. Dimensions make it look less professional what is also an advantage because in some places of the world professional photo equipment is now not allowed.

With its small size, comes one issue though. If you have large fingers or try controlling this camera wearing thick gloves, you might have some problems as the buttons are rather small and in such circumstances I ended accidentally pressing wrong buttons.

I also really loved electronic viewfinder - it's the best one I have seen so far. It offers full coverage of the scene and very nice colours and resolution. What's more it can also show virtual horizon or real-time histogram - both features are very useful and can help you take better shots.

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3000 downloads of HDR tutorial

3000 downloads of HDR tutorial eBook

I'm very happy to announce that after just 3 months since its release my free HDR tutorial eBook has been downloaded 3000 times! When I shared it initially I didn't expect such good results. I hoped for 1000 downloads or so, so I'm very positively surprised! Thank you everyone who downloaded it. And thank you for all the positive comments I got after sharing it! I hope you learnt something from it :)

BTW if you liked it I would really appreciate that if you could share a link to it so more people could read it.

If you haven't downloaded it yet, you can get it here. If you're still not convinced you should read it, I'd like to mention that in it I share almost whole my workflow - from taking HDR images, to post-processing them in Photomatix Pro. Besides I give some general tips and talk a little bit about the theory. So if you like my High Dynamic Range photos and would like to learn how to capture such images yourself, this tutorial can really help you.

Daily photo - Mountain huts

Today I would like to take a short break from sharing photos from my trip to Yucatan, Mexico to keep you interested (there are still plenty of images from this trip I'd love to share though!). Instead I decided to upload photo I took last autumn in Polish Tatra Mountains. It shows a few mountain huts in Hala Gąsienicowa.

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Welcome to the Underworld

Cenotes

Cenotes is an underground river system which is pretty unique to Mexico. It consists of about 8000 natural sinkholes which are believed to be connected to each other thus making one huge underground river (as far as I know there is no proof for that so far). As cenotes (which are sinkoles) were created as a result of collapsing of lime bedrock you can imagine that water in the cenotes is crystal clear (lime is not very friendly for animals and plants), that's why they are Holy Grail of scuba and cave divers from all over the world.

A cenote can be open (no "roof" about the pit), semi-open - there is roof but with a whole in it and they can be also completely closed (cavern). Bear in mind it's not official classification.

Also some of the cenotes were important for the ancient Mayas for sacrificial offerings. Others were important played important part in their beliefs and mythology, eg. they believed that one of the cenotes didn't have bottom (it probably was some kind of a portal to the underworld). A few years ago Polish diving expedition tried to prove this theory wrong but they didn't make to the bottom. So this legend can still be true.

Daily photo - Welcome to the Underworld

Today daily photo shows panorama of one of the cenotes (no surprise there, eh?) - the biggest one in Mexico which is available for tourists (about 7000 out of 8000 aren't available publicly). It was semi-open one, meaning that there is a "roof" but there is a hole in it. Now this hole made taking this photo a real nightmare. Light entering through it was very bright while the rest of the scene was almost completely black. It goes without saying that dynamic range of this scene was huge. Extreme. I took 11 exposures at 1 EV spacing but in fact I should take even more as with this approach some highlights were still blown out. However, I decided to not restore all the highlights because this way the image looked rather unnatural.

To create this photo I had to manually blend more than 50 photos. It took a while and was a really difficult (and also a good exercise in manual blending ;) ) due to the fact that neither my computer nor Photoshop liked file that big. Occasional crashes and hangs didn't stop me, however, and after about 10 hours of blending and a few more hours of post-processing you can see final image :)

I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do (and I really like it!).

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