Some portraiture

  Now that I'm having a solid light stand and a nice new shoot through umbrella, it means I just have to start shooting. So far I've been doing mostly nature photography, but now I'm having serious thoughts about getting in to shooting people. Most likely it will be a pain in the beginning, but with hard work I suppose I will over come the obstacles that are lurking behind the flash and light stand. It's not that I haven't photographed people before, but those lights! Here's two shots with the lovliest of the models...

New toys

  After a great amount of thinking, I finally ordered a light stand, holder for a speedlight and a shoot through umbrella. I placed my order on Thursday evening, and was hoping the delivery to arrive earliest on Monday, but surprise, it came today. As there is ambient light less and less, and this will go on at least till the end of December, I'm happy that I can use some light from a speedlight flash unit to boost my images and even practice some portrait photography with an off camera flash. Naturally I started immediately shooting with my new toys. Opened the package, and way to go... Cats of course!  

Window

  Old walls and windows make a great subject for photos. Wish I'd had small steps with me when sI saw this window. From a bit higher point of view the otherwise straight vertical lines wouldn't fall back.

Fall foliage and waterfalls

Even if I don't enjoy too much of the thought that winter is soon here, the fall, which usually precedes gives some fantastic photo ops which demand to take a walk out in the forest and shoot the always so beautiful fall foliage. I've been waiting for the leaves to throw away their green color and take over that amazing yellow and red, and finally when it happened I almost didn't find time to go and photograph it, but finally I made some time for it and here's some images. I love water and waterfalls so in all of the images there is silky water streams as a result of long shutter speeds...

  

 One of the first fall foliage images for this year. Nice sunlit image, almost too bright so that I had hard times to get the shutter speed enough slow...

 I love those huge, old and warty beech trees.

  To end up in this place I had to get my feed wet, not only once, but a few of times. Next time I hope I'm wearing rubber boots.

  One of the final images I made. Beech trees and a waterfall... Even if I personally love this picture, it seems that not everybody does. Showed it on 500px.com and it got only six views and one like... Maybe the waterfall is too small and tiny and faraway in the background? So I made a test and put up this next one...

A couple of hours and it's had 316 views and 39 likes etc... Some times it's just strange how we people like so different kind of images.

Dalmatian Pelican

  Had a chance to visit lake Kerkini in northern Greece this week. This lake is famous for its Pelican population. Of course there is lots of other bird species too, but for me the most interesting was Pelican. Not that there were too many of them, but at least a couple so that I managed to make a few frames during our 20 minutes stop...