What better way to start off my first African vacation than a safari drive in Kruger National Park? After receiving a recommendation about Wildlife Safaris (the link here would suggest I recommend them as well), we booked a four day tour. When picked up in the minivan, we were happy to find out that there are no other tourists with us. Thus three have set off from Johannesburg to the park: Efrat, Clive (the amazing guide) and myself.

The thing about driving around in the park is that you can spend hours looking in all directions and not see a thing (an interesting thing that is; an animal; preferably one of the Big Five). So it was a nice treat to see three male lions not more than 15 minutes after entering the park.

We’ve seen four out of the Big Five: lions, elephants, buffaloes and rhinos. We didn’t see leopards, even though I would have settled for one. You might wonder (as did I) why aren’t the giraffes or hippos, being bigger than some of the above, aren’t included in the Big Five. It’s because the list is made up of the most dangerous animals to hunt. And nobody wants to hunt a hippo. Or is scared of a giraffe.

Oh, I wouldn’t bother you with a photo of the waterhole where the Battle of Kruger occurred. It has lions, buffaloes, crocodiles and more almost 52 million views, but when we got there, the place was quite empty. So I’ll finish with a Wilderbeest followed by a Woodland Kingfisher (and just assume you recognized the lion and buffaloes above):

Yesterday I was 30.

It felt pretty similar to 29 and 363 days. Except that instead of working my girlfriend got me a wireless remote for my Lucinda and rented a studio for a self portraiting session. Now I don’t think I told you about Lucinda just yet. She’s the new Canon 50D I got with a Sigma 24-70 f/2.8 lens. Now I still love Lucille (Canon 350D if you recall, on sale now!) but this camera is in a different league. Okay, I got carried away. Back to the studio:

Let me describe the setup we had at the studio (since I didn’t think of photographing it with my cell phone or something): the camera was connected to the external studio flashes (an umbrella, a spots, beauty dish and a softbox, each time we used something different). The camera was  also connected to the wireless remote and my laptop. So every photo we took showed up on it and we could enjoy it immediately. Here’s a sample where I didn’t quite manage to hide the remote in my hand, so you might be able to spot it in the photo:

And then I started playing some more with the lights:

Settings? The photo above and the one below were shot with a softbox firing behind me, in addition to the umbrella flash in front.

This has been a great deal of fun. Sorry. More than that: this has been the most original birthday gift ever, and I enjoyed it so much. After three tiring hours in the studio we were famished, and had to go for a big birthday lunch. Unfortunately, it was not before Efrat managed to go all Mike Tyson on me. I barely got away…

We met at Shelly’s graphics studio. Our initial goal was to take the photos on the roof of the building. The very harsh sunlight was a minor set back compared to the strong wind. I’ll spare you the photos from up there. For my sake, as well as for the girls’. So we went back into the studio, a great open space with so much artistic stuff around every computer, wall or table. With great natural light, we started taking some photos:

Bloggers For Bazaar

Bloggers For Bazaar

Bloggers For Bazaar

This session was a great. Sure, trying to sync three models together isn’t an easy task. Apparently they don’t blink their eyes simultaneously. If they do, one would look the other way. If she doesn’t, someone laughs. But all these little “screw-ups”, when happening with the right people, are a great deal of fun. This has also been my first contact with the media, which was kinda exciting.

Bloggers For Bazaar - Behind the scenes

I really enjoyed this photography session. Increasing the awareness to the fundraising Designers Bazaar is an amazing added bonus. And here is the great team that made this happen: Dar, Shelly, Ofer and Efrat.

Bloggers For Bazaar

Our eyes are an amazing contraption. They quickly adapt to many lighting conditions, and the brain kicks in whenever help is needed. In certain conditions, your camera will fail dramatically (or just fail, depends how you look at it), be it a camera mounted on a spy pen or a new Canon 5D Mark II. The conditions I’m referring to are ones which include very bright and very dark areas. Correct exposure to the dark areas will burn the bright areas, correct expose to the bright areas will result in very grim dark areas.

Consider the following photos of average exposure, correct exposure to bright areas and correct exposure to dark areas:

People's Park, Shanghai - EV 0

People's Park, Shanghai - EV -2

People's Park, Shanghai - EV +2

So what do we do? We take multiple shots with EV compensation! The photos above were taken at aperture priority with an aperture of f/16. The first image shutter speed determined by the camera for correct exposure: 1/640 seconds (high ISO used). For the underexposed image, the shutter speed went up to 1/2500 seconds (-2 means 2 stops under, so multiplied by 4). The overexposed image’s shutter speed was 1/160 seconds. Notice how the first photo is nice, but it loses details which are found in the other 2 photos (at a cost of ruining the remaining details of the image).

Next, we combine the photos into a single picture, by taking the correctly exposed areas from each photo. You can do it in Photoshop (many tutorials online) or use a program doing that thing exactly. I achieved the following result using the trial version of Photomatix (so forgive the watermark):

People's Park, Shanghai - HDR

Detailed building from the underexposed photo, details in the tree and water from the overexposed photo.

Check your camera user manual, usually it will offer you an auto-bracketing feature, which will take a normal photo when you first release the shutter, an underexposed on the second release and an overexposed on the third. You can also determine by how much do you want the EV compensation to be. By the way, using a tripod is recommended.

I spent another week trying to sort out the 1500 pictures and select the ones I want to post here. I came up with 10 I felt like sharing here. Here they are:

Part of my legs hanging over part of the great wall. It was freezing cold (I’m not that accustomed to snow anymore) but the clear sky offered good visibility. I visited the wall a day before they closed it down for Obama, so I didn’t miss out on one of the world’s great wonders. Following is a picture of a woman selling whatever in the Summer Palace:

From Beijing I continued to Shanghai where I met up with a friend. Slightly warmer there, but the visibility was terrible. Foggy sky throughout my stay there. Above is the best I managed to produce of the river side view that no Shanghai picture collection would be complete without. Below, a photo of a man practicing his symbols on the park’s path using water, slowly fading away:

Here we have a photo of a small alley (above) and a kid (below, even though I’m stating the obvious here), just before he offered me the gummy snake he is holding:

For the next 3 photos, I remembered to try and play a bit with some long exposure. Since I didn’t quite carry a tripod with me, I tried to place the camera each time on a table, garbage bin or anything somewhat stable and hold it steady while I take the 2 second photo. The results are actually not that bad. So here we have a Shanghai major street, the Venetian Hotel in Macao and Hong Kong’s river side view, just before the light show (which was very boring and hardly worth the wait actually) started:

I’ll conclude with another mandatory picture of Hong Kong from the Peak:

All in all, this has been an amazing vacation. This is my first visit to China. And I know I’ve only seen it’s (amazing) urban side, missing out on many things this place has to offer, but I’ve experienced a new culture – and quite liked it.

Lastly, I will use this opportunity to introduce Lucille 2 (not sure of the name yet…), my brand new Canon 50D. She was purchased on my final day in Hong Kong, so actually you still can’t see any photos taken with her. But I promise good things will be arriving soon…

I’m going to China Tomorrow. Flying off to Beijing, continuing to Shanghai and concluding the trip in Hong Kong, two weeks later. Yahoo Weather suggests sunny yet cold (4° C) weather upon my arrival. Should be fun. See you on the other side…

Happy Hippos - Behind the scenes

BTW – why didn’t anybody tell me that this is how I look when I photograph?

After almost  a month, I decided I wanted in on the action. Ofer has suggested it to me several times, but it was only on July 5th when my first blog post has seen the light of day. After all, it took me a while to setup Wordpress, select a theme, find the plug-ins I wanted, select a name for the blog, create a logo (easy – I can’t design – so there isn’t one) and figure out what I wanted to write about. My initial plan was try and learn all those things photographers are supposed to know, and try to share my findings with others in the process. So I’ve written several tutorials, but the last of them was “published” two months ago. Since then, I found myself adding photos I took which I want to share. I’m really happy with what I came up with so far.

And during all this time, I’m still taking photos of Ofer for Cupcakes.co.il, my favorites (some never shown in her site!) are shown here:

Ofer - A Colourful Summer	Ofer - Onot Maavar
Ofer - Going Under	Ofer - Not all that glitters is gold

If you made it this far, I’ll share another small thing with you: I’ve decided on trying to write Haiku poems. This is my first attempt:

Squill of autumn late
Blooms free
As far as my eyes can see

Thanks for listening

Usually it starts small. An idea. A conversation. A meeting. A gathering of several people with all the Guitar Hero equipment (except for a PS3, TV, amplifiers or anything which produces sounds other than their vocal chords) performing in the middle of the street.

It sounded like it could be a really cool thing to see, or daft as hell. So last Friday we went down to Rothschild avenue to see to the first Acoustic Heroes show, so we can judge for ourselves.

Acoustic Heroes Concert

It seemed like a nice chance to let my camera out for some fresh air (as well as also holding a Nikon in my hand for the first time in my life). But as it turned out, we (that means Efrat and Danna) did a little more than just judge. Having to make up for no sound guitars and hardly heard drums, the singers had to work harder. And with no playlist, there were several “so what shall we sing now?” pauses (with occasional suggestions from the viewers).

Acoustic Heroes - Making money

As you can see, entertaining the public can help you raise money. I think enough was made to cover the parking costs.

For more info on this experience (plus a video!), visit Ironia and Ehudk.com.

Acoustic Heroine

All in all, I had fun. And I can’t wait for the next show.

Yacht 1

Now I know I have the oldest and least capable camera compared to the others. Sure, I love my Lucille, but holding a better camera in my hands makes me want more. I also knew that everybody will bring their camera to the sail. Now was my chance to be special once more. I decided to leave Lucille at home and take my old Olympus camera with it’s underwater casing. The casing that cost me as much as the old camera did, and is the reason why I don’t throw the 3MP camera away. I wanted to take photos from the watery side of the yacht. Because I can

Yacht 2

First thing I noticed is that the camera operated slow. Real slow. Slower than it did several years ago? Probably not. But I got used to something better, and going back is hard (which again supported my “don’t touch a new camera unless you’re buying it or you’ll regret it!”). Second thing I noticed is that just like riding a bike, I remembered all the buttons, locations, and little things about the camera (which tells me that I still don’t know Lucille as good as I should).

Yacht 3

The sail was great. Good people, good food and good alcohol make a winning combination. And the course? Really glad I took it. Now I need to see how I take this up to a higher level. My guess is I should mainly practice, practice, practice. But by judging how many photos I took recently (I can see by the time passed since my last post) I should start listening to myself and just go out with a camera in my hand, and see what comes out.

Kids in marina

Nude photography is different. And not just because the model doesn’t have clothes on. Suddenly, the entire body is your subject. When what you see is pretty much what you get, the beauty of the photographs comes from the angles, the light and shades falling on your subject, the unique cropping of frames (where sometimes you can’t even tell who or even what is photographed) and generally speaking – your creativity.

We met with Rodi Almog at the abandoned train station in Jerusalem. A beautiful location, with big (broken) windows and holes in the roof, making the sun rays light up the area in many different (and amazing) styles. Graffiti all over making a very interesting background. Isolation helped make sure we won’t be bothered by anybody.

There was nothing pornographic about this encounter. Not even erotic in my opinion. Sure, after Rodi has given us the guidelines for the session, there was the first moment of embarrassment when Navit took off her dress and you realize that there’s a naked woman standing in the room with you and ten other people holding cameras. Rodi also kept instructing Navit on how to pose next, something most of us were too shy to do. But throughout the session, everyone were focused on the next frame, and where to take the shot from:

All in all, this was fun. I loved the location. The coffee break in the middle was welcomed. I got more than 600 photos there. 100 were deleted straight off the camera. Choosing the above four was no simple task. Uploading these also wasn’t easy. But once again, this course has proved to be an amazing experience, exposing me once again to something I haven’t done yet…