This e-book is now finished – there are two distinct tours, one of the Old Town of Warsaw, which was rebuilt in a traditional style after the second world war, and one on the New Town, which was built at the same time but with a little more freedom in design. So far, the Old Town Photography Guide is complete and I am working on the New Town Tour. The introductory page is as follows:
“Warsaw is a highly interesting city for both a tourist and a photographer with a fascinating mix of apparently old and colorful homes and numerous interesting details that make each street corner a potential treasure trove of photographic opportunities. This guide is not intended to replace traditional city guides with their wealth of historic and cultural detail. It is presented as a simple to use but highly useful guide to seeing the city, finding the interesting buildings and sights and includes helpful tips about the best approach to photographing the town. As I am sure most people are aware, Warsaw was virtually destroyed in World War II, and so you are seeing a reconstructed city, but that only adds to the fascination. A final note before we start – Warsaw is a safe city, but always watch yourself and your equipment and don’t take un-necessary risks!
Panorama of some old buildings in the Town Square of Warsaw in Poland
There are three main areas described in this guide – the Old Town, the New Town (which is around the same age!) and then a detour to see some of the churches and monuments on the way to the Palace of Culture and Science – a large solid building that dominates the skyline, is probably pretty ugly in comparison with the other sights, but has great views from the tower. All are well worth visiting. The whole tour can be managed in one day, or alternatively take your time and handle each one on separate days.
The book will follow the same structure on each page – on the left is a small street map showing the immediate location, in the center is the description of the location and the route to the next stop, and on the right is an image of the location itself. Most guide books give you an overview map on one page and then separate walking instructions – in a city with complex street names, I found that very difficult to follow, and the approach in this guide will help you to find your way around without any problems.
I am sure you will find guide books and maps at your hotel that give an overview of the city and Google Maps is great for printing just the area you want to visit so this guide should be used in parallel with those approaches. If you get lost, taxis are freely available, are very inexpensive, and can be used to get back to your hotel or starting point!”
Click here for details of the Photographer’s Guide to Warsaw. You will also find a link to a free sample of the book on this page – the first two pages of the guide.
In June I was lucky enough to visit Poland for almost a week and had several photographic trips around the old Town. Warsaw was destroyed in the Second World War – dynamited and shelled to the ground, and in the following years, the center of the town was rebuilt using the same designs and techniques as had existed before. The old town now looks just like a typical old European city with an ornate town square and delightful colorful houses. I walked many miles around the old streets and probably saw everything that a tourist could see! I had planned to take a 4 hour photographic tour of Warsaw, but the tour was canceled on the evening I was free, but I think I made up for it using my own research and feet! The full set of photographs is online at BackyardImage but I have pasted a couple in below. My current plan is to create an e-book entitled “A Photographers Guide to Warsaw” which will outline a complete tour of the city of Warsaw, Poland with illustrative photographs of the main sites and hopefully save any future tourists from having to do the research I undertook. If you have any interest in this please leave a comment below. {Update – the book is now finished and available as a downloadable PDF entitled “A Photographer’s Guide to Warsaw”
Night shot of the Barbakan in Warsaw
The Syrena Mermaid Statue in the Old Town square in Warsaw
One of the challenges of seriously taking up digital photography is “what do I do with all these pictures?” They sit hidden on a hard drive and are almost lost from sight. Printing them doesn’t really work, because where do you then hang the frames? One thing I have started to do (and plan to do more of) is to create real books of my best images and then I can pick up the book from the coffee table and leaf through memory lane! I’ve used Blurb because they have an easy to use, but flexible, application to create the book, and you can also color manage the printing so that the book looks pretty close to the image on your screen. Here is an example of a finished book – you can flip through the pages on-line.
Just an amusing update to show the power of Photoshop in the hands of a skilled professional….
We were very pleased to go to Pittsburgh to see a performance of one of my son’s musical compositions by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra – a photo outside the Heinz Hall was a perfect opportunity to slightly embellish the posters. Could almost be real!
Interesting poster spotted at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh
I’ve been a little slow on getting new products onto Zazzle since the first flush of enthusiasm, but it was always in my mind to use it to show off my best photographs in calendars – these appear to be highly professional designs, and should be attractive to the right audience. My first calendar is one with my best Kauai shots, and within a day of putting it on-line, I was awarded their Best Product Award – a great pat on the back as a newcomer in this field. I’ve pasted in a link to the calendar below – feel free to check it out! All I need to do now is sell one of these fine products!
I came across a forum discussing the benefits of posting items for sale on Zazzle. Basically, the idea is to load images and create products such as mouse mats, T-shirts, cups and other products illustrated by your pictures. I’ve opened a store and tried to create one product – a baby’s T-shirt with a lovely image of a bengal kitten – and we will see how it goes. It costs nothing to join or post products – you get a commission when the item is purchased.
Some time ago, I started uploading images onto a web site called PrintBusinessCards.com for use as backgrounds on business cards. The start up process is a little involved as you need to get the right format of TIFF image, but it is actually quite amusing going through your stock of photographs and thinking of what would make an interesting business card. Sometimes it is the strangest designs! I’ve continued doing this from time to time, and currently have 55 templates on the site. I’ve made $35 so far – not great, but the cards just sit there being picked up from time to time, and so it was worth the effort bearing in mind the fun I had in trying to be artistic. You can see my business card artist page via the link!
I mentioned, a few posts ago, that Jacqui was building a business making jewelry – with a focus on delicately encasing semi-precious stones with sterling silver wire. Her work is now for sale on an Etsy store and we maintained the Backyard theme by naming it BackyardArtisan.com! It is interesting to learn how best to make use of these stores – the search engine seems to favor newly entered items, and they are also displayed for a time on the landing page of the site. We found that the items got more page views in the few days after they were added for sale, and that slowly drops away over time. We made the mistake of entering all the items at once when the store was first set up, but now we add one item a week to maintain some status in the search process. The current plan is to try to get some traction on the site before Christmas.
The activity – which has since evolved to creating ornate and intricate bracelets – has led to an interesting opportunity though. Jacqui has been invited to become a teacher of wire-wrap jewelry at a local craft store. We will see how that develops.
A couple of weeks ago, I started work on displaying and offering my best photographs for sale using a web site created using a Smugmug Pro Account. That site, www.BackyardImage.com, is now 90% complete and I must admit that configuring the site does allow a lot of flexibility – certainly much more flexible that I was able to do with my own web site designs. I have the menu structure in place, have the basic design of each gallery straight, and have sorted out the pricing structure. Although the site is reasonably easy to use, each step did take a bit of research to get the right look for the website. I have tried both the available printers from SmugMug, and got good results from both. The site allows you to intercept a print order and create a properly sharpened and finished photograph to send to the printer, which is a great time saver – you can create images that look good on the web site and only work on those that actually sell to create a final, ready to print, image.
I want to do more on the site, but for now, it is public and available. All I now need to solve is how to get people to find it and buy some prints!
I recently bought the Canon 5D Mark ii with the 24 – 105mm lens – fantastic camera for travel and stock photography, but also one of the first digital SLRs to record full screen HDTV movies with sound. To try it out, I have filmed a few swimming pool scenes and joined a new stock site – Pond5 – to see how the business works.
The Canon is pretty easy to operate in video mode, but a major initial step is to make sure that you have the latest firmware. Canon issued a new firmware release in June 2009 for the 5D that has a major advance in video production – the ability to manually set the aperture and shutter speed. The earlier firmware automatically adjusted these which removed a lot of control of depth of field in particular. The firmware is pretty easy to handle – download from the Canon site, load onto a compact flash and use existing menu commands to update the firmware – a 5 minute task. The other key things to do is to use a tripod. Video is very sensitive to movement and a handheld camera simply results in jerky and unprofessional video – use a solid tripod, and, if possible, a fluid head to allow smooth movements if you are panning across the scene.
I approached the filming by positioning my tripod and deciding what the key element of the scene would be. Most stock footage is between 7 and 20 seconds, and so the focal point must be clear. In my trials I used a pool waterfall and focused clearly on it at maximum zoom. Autofocus doesn’t work in video, and so an approach is to use autofocus when zoomed in and then turn off autofocus – the focus will stay where it is, and you can zoom out to the required composition. I also turned off the stabilization system as that isn’t helpful on a tripod. Then, in manual exposure mode, adjust the ISO, shutter speed and aperture to get the exposure correctly set. Use a higher shutter speed for moving objects, just as you would with a photograph. Then adjust the aperture so that the exposure is shown as correct in the viewfinder. Finally, move to live view, and start the video using the “Select” button. Be careful with any movements as they need to be very smooth, and avoid big changes in the distance of objects to the camera as it is set to manual focus at this stage.
Pond5 is easy on video formats with the Canon – they accept footage straight from the camera in MOV format. Other sites require encoding of the video, which I will cover in a different post. The trick now is to see if they sell!
