I said in my last post that I'd try to post some photos from Geneva, and here are a few so far. I'm here for the weekend, so I'll post some more on Sunday as well; I'm hoping to get out to CERN to shoot the Moiree Globe at the birthplace of the internet, among other things.
There are a few themes I come back to again and again when I take photos, which are reflected in the shots below. For example, one of my favorite themes is pigeons. They can be found in a very wide variety of locales, and I always look for opportunities to take pigeon shots. They make very willing models, and you can put them in front of famous landmarks as I did below, or use them to add a twist to urban landscapes (e.g., Prague, Kiev). I love the way their frantic flapping blurs in low light (Venice), and I also like to lie down on my belly to get shots from their point of view (e.g., San Francisco). I'm not too proud to do the corn-seed trick to get them to come close, either (e.g., Venice).
Another of my favorite photo themes evidenced below is night shots. I'm often busy all day on business trips, leaving no opportunity to take pictures during daylight hours. So I always pack a good tripod for night shots, which makes photography an option 24 hours a day.
When I find myself unable to sleep in the middle of the night due to jet lag, I usually grab my camera gear and take a walk to snap a few photos. In the last year, that habit has scored me some fun photos in various cities (e.g., Sydney, Ghent, Kuala Lumpur), as well as the last few photos below in Geneva. Every business traveler seems to have a favorite jet-lag tip, and that's mine: pack a good tripod!
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If you know the right people at CERN you can get to go the interesting places, down the various pits, etc, see some of the big experiments. Contact your HPC folk in MSResearch, they should have names. Don't waste your time with the artwork!
Really interesting set of pictures Doug - keep them coming.
Appreciate the tip, Steve, but it looks like I'll have to do that next time. I just saw on the CERN web site that they're only open for tours 9-2 on Saturday and closed on Sunday. It's too late for me to make it today, so tomorrow I'll go over and see what I can see but I guess I'll be outside the fence.
Will do, Chris, thanks!
I'm getting weird about the HPC business. Something I attributed to HPC and might not be it is the way that foregrounds and the Geneval haze and cloudiness impacts the background (as in the top two shots in the first column). I love that, especially in the second one, yet I wonder how artificial that is? Still, I love it.
The last shot with the moon is amazing. How hard did you have to work to get the white balance "right" for the moonlit clouds?
Very perceptive, Orcmid, that's exactly what I did -- used Photomatix on the shots you mentioned, and all of the night shots. And for the final one, I tried every common white-balance setting, and to be honest I don't remember which one I used for this image -- tungsten, I think. I knew it was a dramatic shot, so I took it every way I could think of and then sorted them out in Photoshop later.
Just got back to my hotel room, after taking a ton of pictures at Geneva bars and nightclubs until 4:00AM. More on that later, I need some sleep. :-)
I said in my last post that I'd try to post some photos from Geneva, and here are a few so far. I'm here for the weekend, so I'll post some more on Sunday as well; I'm hoping to get out to CERN to shoot the Moiree Globe at the birthplace of the internet