These images require some correction, in order to do which I used the 'curves' tool in Photoshop, by which I subtracted contrast from shadows and highlights and added contrast to midtones. I prefer the cropped version of the image.

My work in the past couple on months has taken a slightly different route than I initially intended. In the photographs that I have taken the mostly visible element is the urban environment. I have found interest in capturing the trees in the streetlights, leaves in puddles, and especially now, while back at home, the city remains my main interest. It is the best environment to develop the idea of nature that is overlooked, unnoticed.

The elements of nature that I capture, even if rarely unnoticeable like snow and rain, I look at it from the prism of my own comfort zone, whether it is the room of my window or a window of a bus. That is just to show what we see every day, yet rarely spend time to admire.

These are the first photographs I took when I came back home, to my amazement to a snowy and to an outsider very gray and dull (to me - beautiful) neighbourhood at the edge of the capital Vilnius.

I tried to focus on the snow instead of automatically focusing on the background and got this interestingly blurry image. Even though you can not really see that the image is taken through a window, it being so added to the picture as the flowers that had been placed on the window sill created a gentle color reflection which adds to the picture which originally lacks in colour.

TRECH - the world of panoramic photography

I recently came across a great book by Nick Meers, displaying a collection of marvelous landscape photographs. The collection includes names like David Noton, Josef Koudelka and other pioneers of the art. It covers some useful technical information for photographers, as well as general overview of the particular area of photography.

Nick Meers, Cuckmere River

A very inspiring book. The images displayed differ very much from the regular travel photographs. The locations photographed are captured in a time or special weather conditions that make them stand out of the ordinary lanscape image.

Josef Koudelka

  Some of the landscape photographs, are of urban elements surounded by nature which creates a beautiful contrast and fit well with the idea of nature that is overlooked. Black and white also gives a nice effect and suits display of light rays.

David Noton

Idiotic Hat

I came accross this blog while looking for photographs from Jem Southams 'Red River' book.

''It's not surprising, as colour is mysterious. To photograph reflective surfaces like windows is to get a lesson in the ways of light and colour. Kids and purposeful adults like pure comic-style colours-- broad simplified areas of even tone, perhaps with a bit of light and dark for subtlety. But real colour is fairy dust -- it gets all over everything, and is changing constantly, mercurially. We tend to think of colour as a static property of an object (a red hat, a sheet of white paper), and there are indeed objective ways of measuring and reproducing colours: Pantone, RGB, CMYK and the like are all ways of ensuring you get exactly the right shade of green in your logo. But reflective objects reveal a deeper truth, that colour in the real world is constantly being overwhelmed by and leaking into its surroundings.''

The creator of the blog seems to have a lot in comon - love for trees, nature, reflections and other wonders of nature. Here is some of the work.

 

Idiotic Hat

''To varying degrees, of course, that is exactly where we live: there are latent images projected all over everything by light -- all we have to do is make something wet, or smoother, or change the lighting, and the truth of this becomes apparent. Except on the dullest, driest days, colours are rarely purely themselves. Our eyes and brains work very hard to simplify this for us, to make Mirror World into Comic World. But Mirror World and its twin, Shadow World, are always there, just waiting for a shower of rain, a bit of polish, or for the sun to come out. It's a delightful truth told over and over again by Impressionism, and reliably reported by those brainless objects, cameras.''

leaves at night

I took my camera to the city centre at night time. Artificial light from lamp posts allow a good visibility of contrast between the yellow colour of the leaves and the dark night sky. The longer exposure captured the motion blur of the quivering of the leaves.