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Construction imaginary
It is relaxing to try and see images where there are no obvious ones and it is enriching to try and transform their raw shapes into something more. You have the tools, yet you need to add your own vision to tell an interesting story. A story that may not need words, only deep and quiet perception. I find the process healing… “The technology you use impresses no one. The experience you create with it is everything.” – Sean Gerety
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Playful water lilies
Yesterday I was asked what definition I would assign to a “photograph” and after some pondering, I came up with this: A photograph is a rendering of reality that may be documentary but also emotional, abstract or even somewhat imaginary, yet still preserving the core of that reality. Well, but what is that core, you may ask, it sounds sort of vague. And I would say that it is the hard-to-grasp distinction between a photo and an image… and we would be at the beginning again. You know, some people say that photography excludes digital art. But digital art has many faces, right, and some of it may preserve the aspect of…
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Structured
Sometimes I find my surroundings way too showy, chatty, loud and unstructured, almost to the point of hurt. It’s a relief then to create images like this. Images withstraight linesclear directionminimalist contentcolours limited to shades of black and whitejust some grain and wispy patches to let the scenery breeze Sometimes I struggle to add text to my posts but fortunately a picture is worth a thousand words…
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Glassworks cutting room
As I mentioned in the previous post, last summer we visited old glassworks in Harrachov. It was interesting to see how the glasses are produced manually by men blowing into hot glass pieces and forming thus shapes of the glasses but the part of the glassworks that got my full attention was the room where the clear glasses are decorated manually by cutting their surface by a grinder, creating so various ornaments. I was absolutely taken aback by the quiet atmosphere of that room and I wished I had opportunity to spend at least an hour or two by absorbing the light, the colours and the objects and their mutual…
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Glassworks still life
The other day we visited glassworks in Harrachov where we participated in a guided tour. Imagine a large hall with old furnaces in the middle and several glassblowers showing how glasses are made manually and then tilt your head back and look at the humble “exhibition” of glasses, sitting high under the ceiling and creating a serene still life… Amid all that activity, this quiet spot felt like a touch of eternity.
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Still life in an old hammer mill
While looking for photos for my project Technical last year, I came across quite a few interesting places I might not have visited otherwise, such as this nook in an old hammer mill in Dobřív. I love the contrast of the two ways of processing this still life photo, that dreamy imaginary on the left and the reminiscence of the old times on the right. What a different world many of us live in nowadays…
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Hydroelectric power station
Last year I started a photo project I call “Technical” and one of the places I visited when looking for interesting technical views was an old hydroelectric power station “Čeňkova Pila” in Šumava mountains. It is not used anymore but you can visit it and have a look at its Francis turbine to admire the technical work. As a visitor without special rights you usually have quite limited options when taking photos. I wish I could have had more time for extracting interesting details and I wish I could have used a tripod because there was little light and I had to shoot with ISO values climbing to the stars……
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Colouring folders in Lightroom
There are many ways how to organize your digital photos and the workflow of their editing… Long time ago I chose for organizing my photos that highly recommended system of creating folders for individual years and inside them folders for individual months and finally inside the months folders for particular days when the photos were taken. I had been faithful to this system for quite many years until some time ago when I decided to change that. On the one hand I had too many folders, some of them with just a few photos, on the other hand photos from the same place were scattered among several unrelating folders. As…
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Birdhouses
Sometimes life is full of colours… …and sometimes it’s void of them… …but it’s always open to possibilities and creativity. Two weeks ago I visited the town Příbram and came across this interesting set of three birdhouses. They were situated quite high and behind a fence so I didn’t have much possibilities for finding the best angle for capturing them but I tried my best to get the gist of the scenery. I edited the photo but was not happy about the result. So I edited it more, highlighting the birdhouses, dodging and burning, adding textures to the background and deploying blend modes. I liked that result much more, I…
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Curious attraction
It is a curious feeling to be taking a photograph you expect no one else would like. It is a feeling, as though you were entering a universe that holds no attraction for potential visitors but for you. Yet you hear the calling and you can decide whether to follow it and perhaps seem foolish or ignore it and throw away expressing something deep inside you what might take you further. I love this great adventure of photography teaching me to be myself, to look at the world around me through my own eyes, and to go deeper than to the longing to create something everyone would admire.
