These pictures are jumping the line a bit because I’m excited about them. Here’s a picture I took in Jodhpur of the tons of eagles that gather around 330pm every day because this one guy feeds them. I don’t have a good lens for wildlife, it only zooms to 70mm and Sony is notorious for their slow autofocus. I decided to work with my limitation though and found the birds still looked cool from far away when I shot them as silhouettes by lowering my exposure and shooting right into the sun. I learned from the Pingxi Lantern Festival that if anything is moving in my picture I should be shooting in burst mode because my reflexes just aren’t that fast which meant my camera was taking pictures a few times a second when a bird flew right in front of me and I got this picture that I’m pleased with:

 

 

Picture #2 flashes way forwards to Meteora which is in Greece. It’s got these towering rock formations where a bunch of psychos build monasteries a long time ago. There are two towns which anybody in the world would call one town that nestle right up against the rocks, and then you hike up some beautiful little trails way up to the main road where you can actually look down on the monasteries:

 

The last picture is of Santorini, an island in Greece. Specifically this picture is looking at the town of Fira from a restaurant perched way up high in the northern end of the town. I’m pleased with this picture especially because I had to do two weird things to make it. I waited until way after sunset so I could take a very long exposure, 2 minutes I think, without the picture being way too bright and useless. The long exposure blurs the motion of the waves and makes the water look more glassy. This can be done much better, but this is where I’m at right now. The next thing I did was use Lightroom to create a digital tilt shift effect. This is a well known feature on Instagram that simulates tilt shift lenses that create the effect in analog, but I didn’t know how to do it in Lightroom until just now. Anyways here it is:

 

 

 

All three of these pictures are still in kind of draft mode, I think they look a little over processed. But I’m excited about them.