Another one of this cloudy day

Cloudy sky over Bau Rouge beach

Same place, same day but a few hours later than the one posted here.

I think i can give you some reasons about why i don't have posted anything here for about one week.
I had to change my main computer and i'm still in that task. Reinstalling softwares, rebuiliding monitor and printers profiles, checking files copies etc ...
I hope i'll be able to post something new before the end of the week.

A winter day at the sea and 5 sites to discover

Mediterranean seascape on the Presqu'île de Giens

About this image :
Same day and same place that this one posted a few monts ago. They are though very different.

The five sites to discover :

http://www.markpaulda.com
I met Mark on Flickr. He travels a lot in Europe and his galleries are full of landscapes, cityscapes, abstracts etc. I love the dynamism of his images.

http://www.danielsroka.com
Daniel is a master of botanical abstracts. His work is very beautiful.

http://www.brucepercy.com/
Stunning images from many parts of the world.

http://www.adamgibbs.com/
Photography by Adam Gibbs. A master of large format film. Visit and enjoy, i can't say anything else.

http://www.colourlovers.com
Not a photography site but can be very useful to anybody who works with colours.

Another HDR seascape at Bau Rouge beach

HDR seascape at Bau Rouge beach, Provence

Just a very short post to say that i have to move to the northest place of Provence during a few days and so i'll be offline until next week.

Big sky over the sea, other versions should come

Big sky over the Mediterranean sea

One image from monday evening.

The sky is an HDR work from 4 exposures, softly tonemapped and the ground and sea is from one of these four exposures.

I also have another one done with a HOYA ND 400 filter giving a really other look to the sky (and of course to the sea). I'll try to post it in the next days.

Morning light at Bau Rouge beach and 5 sites to discover

Morning light at Bau Rouge beach

Regular readers will easily recognize the vertical version of an image posted here a few weeks ago.

The five sites to discover :

http://www.chasejarvis.com
Chase Jarvis is a famous and creative photographer. You will discover some stunning various images in his galleries. His blog where he shares thoughts and links is also very interesting.

http://www.roentarre.com James wey often comments here. His galleries are full of very beautiful images and he runs an original blog where he posts serious articles about some technical aspects of the photography. I don't know an other place to read about this subjects.

http://www.antoninkratochvil.com/ Impressive black and white photography. Between many photographic awards, Antonin Kratochvil won the World Press in 2003.

http://www.magichourtravelscapes.com/ The site of Kah Kit Yoong and Winnie Ho. I'll make short about it or it will never end. It's my favorite kind of photography and the 2 authors are some masters.

http://www.gulker.com I discovered the blog of Chris Gulker some months ago while looking at my blog's referrers. That's not really a photography blog although the author is a very serious photographer. It's just a blog from a long time blogger who daily shares various thoughts and pieces of life. I really like it.

One more dusk at Bau Rouge beach

Mediterranean dusk at Bau Rouge beach

It was about one week ago. I was at home and in the end on afternoon i noticed the clouds in the sky and thought they could give some interesting lights at the sea.

I drove to the beach and arrived at dusk. I had the time to capture some other images before this one at the other end of the beach, you'll see them here in the next days i think.

I also have here a view of this scene at dawn.

Blended Mediterranean colors - Zooming through the Hoya ND 400 filter

Mediterranean colors

When i was a teenager i was very kind of the zooming effect and used it on many portrait shots.

A few times ago i started to play again with that, mainly in relative low light and for this one in full day light but with the help of the Hoya ND 400 to slow down a little the exposure.

A little more about me - complement to my ImageKind interview

Bau Rouge sunrise

I opened my ImageKind gallery just one year ago. I was tempted to do that sooner but i was a little frightned because i found really hard to search (and find) something on their website. So last year i found that the website was really better and i took the decision.
The IK team was very nice with me because i was a featured artist a few weeks after and they also featured the above image on their homepage.

A few months ago, i received an email from Emily at ImageKind asking if i would be ok for an interview. I hesitated a little because of my english and said yes. The interview was published two days ago on the IK blog. You can read it here. I'm very happy that's this feature arrived just for Earth Day.

After reading it i thought that it would be a good occasion to add a little more and so answer the few people who sometime ask about my life.

As told in the interview, i made some scientific studies specialized about computer things. I think i met my first computer when i was 12. It was a gray box made by Rockwell with a keyboard and a display made of 2 rows of red leds. After i had a few personal computers like Amstrad and Comodore. I bought my first PC in the early 80. It had a 640x480 monochrome display, 640 kb of ram, a 20 mb hard drive and the cost was about 1 500 euros ...

I had my first internet connection in 1987 or 88 i don't remember exactly. It was in the European Center for Nuclear Research where i was writing software to catch in a few seconds the billion events produced by particles shocks. It was a very exciting time of my life where i met some of the most famous physicians. We where working with some huge Vax computers and also some "home made" ones refreshed with water. They were looking like huge things with many pipes all around.

A few years after i had my own Compuserve connection with dialup modems. I'm not sure but i think that the first one was really under 9 600 bps.

After that i spent a few years working in the software industry before i became self employed. The move to photography is described in the interview.

Another very important thing in my life was rock climbing.
I spent around 20 years with just cliffs and boulders in my mind and was living with some friends sharing this passion. We were chasing the sun and the most overhanging rocks. Living this life while beeing in the same time a software engineer was a little tricky but also very exciting. I won't write more about this now, climbers and surfers know what is this way of life.

Last point : in the interview you can read that i'd love to run my own gallery. I've a place for that in the French Alps, just near Switzerland. I'd like it to be a nature and landscape gallery. Of course i would display my own work but i'd also like it to be a place where some other artists could organize their own exhibitions. That's not only a dream and i really think to that. Our life is just not ready for that now ...

Because flowers will die, buy a photo for Mother's day

Mediterranean colors at Bau Rouge beach in Provence

Yesterday i was searching with google about a calendar software and i found peoples selling flowers for mother's day. I realized that very often these flowers are most expensive than many of the prints you could find in my Print On Demand galleries.

So do not hesitate, a beautiful print can be an original gift which will stay for a lifetime.
You can have a look at my galleries at ImageKind and RedBubble.

A little blog improvement

Birth of the day at Bau Rouge beach - Provence

I've just added a new little box in the sidebar to help for browsing photos.

Morning gold at Bau Rouge beach - long exposure with the Hoya ND 400 filter

Saturday was the first sunny day here after one week on unstopping rain.
This bad weather complicates my work about shooting gardens and pools and i have a very few time for personnal images. I just did a very short visit to the sea in the morning before a pool session planned during the week but reported because of the rain.

Note : If you're interested in long exposure photography, you can have a look at some tips i've posted here.

An orange touch in the deep blue

A winter afternoon at Bau Rouge beach

Last rays on the sand beach

Péllegrin beach in La Londe les Maures - Provence

Same place, same day but i would say half an hour before the one in my previous post.

Just some blue

Mediterranean blue

I don't do very often this kind of minimal shot. I had spent the end of the day waiting for dusk on a sand beach in La Londe les Maures when i turned my lens to the horizon. The 120 seconds exposure is just due to the low late dusk light. If i remember well i had 2 Hitech GND filters mounted in front of my lens to avoid a too strong over exposure of the sky.

Increasing my long exposures collection - one more with the Hoya ND 400

Le Pradet near Cap Garonne

I don't know why but that's something i've always loved to do : Returning often to the same place and capturing the same frames under different lights ...

Yesterday i started the week before 5 am because i had to be in Le Pradet to make some shots of the main city beach at dawn time. A few hours later, my job was terminated and i moved to this wilder place and took this one plus a few ones with waves breaking on these rocks.

For this one i used two filters : the Hoya ND 400 to give me the 20s exposure under the strong light and a Hitech GND to give a little more pop to the foreground.

One new beach view in Toulon

Le Mourillon - Toulon

A file from one month ago, processed today. Done with a Nikon D200 and a Hitech soft GND filter.

My other views of Toulon are here.

The typical dawn on the jetty and a few tech thoughts

Dawn on the Mediterranean sea - La Londe les Maures

Argentière beach at La Londe les Maures. Same day than this one but a few hours before.

While commenting on my previous post, Mark Alan Meader gave me the link to this dpreview article about dynamic range. It made me think to a few things :

• It reminds me this other dpreview post about the Ricoh CX1. During the past years, camera makers were mostly communicating about the high number of pixels they put in their cameras. For compact cameras i'm not sure that increasing the mega pixels was always a good thing. It seems that now they're looking at other aspects of image quality and i think that's nice.

• About the Iridix technologie :
  I don't use the D-Lighting option in any of my Nikon cameras but i'm pleased to know how it works. In fact that's very similar to what we do when we use masks to apply different curve settings to different parts of the image. I tend to prefer this manual craft work instead of an automatic one but that's certainly because i'm an old time photographer who prefers to decide himself instead of giving the decision to an electronic chip :)
  Of course in camera D-Lighting can be interesting on a consumer camera or when shooting jpeg.

  This kind of work about dynamic range certainly gives the best of what can be captured by the camera sensor but it's not HDR photography. When the contrast of the scene exceeds the sensor capabilities you can't catch it all in a single shot and no algorithm will reveal the uncaught details.

I thought you could like an other purple dusk at Bau Rouge beach

Purple dusk at Bau Rouge beach - Carqueiranne

I can't count (perharps my readers can) how many times i was there during the past year. Beleive it or not i had never noticed this white rock before :)

A rainy morning at the sea - Last of the serie

Le Pradet near Cap Garonne - Provence

A long exposure under the clouds and some tips about long exposures

Le Pradet near Cap Garonne in Provence

An other one with the Hoya ND 400 filter giving a 90 seconds exposure in this early and cloudy morning.

Some days ago i received an email from a reader of my french website asking how to determine the exposure time in this kind of images.

On most DSLRs the exposure metering stops at 30s. What to do when you need more ?
First, if you're not familiar with long exposures you can try the scientific method :) Increase the lens aperture (decrease the number) and/or the ISO speed until you reach some values where your camera can meter. Then return to your real settings and try a little extrapolation. If your camera says 25s at f14 and ISO 400 you can try a 100s exposure at f14 and ISO 100, but it's an approximative value.
With digital and when the light is stable you can first try your scientificaly computed settings, look at the histogram and adjust. But at dusk time for example the light can decrease rapidly. If you try a 90  seconds exposure, look at the histogram and find it too much on the left you will want to try 120  seconds but  it will probably be too late and increasing the exposure length will just increase the digital noise in your files ...

So my real advice would be : try, practice, learn to know the light until you become good at guessing the right settings without iterating tries.