POTD - Leonid Mamchenkov

Beach

Today we started the beach season at Kurium beach. Unfortunately the water was still way too cold to have a proper swim. We planned to also seabath Maxim for a bit, but had to cancel it. I think there were overall about 10 people in the water for the whole length of the sandy strip. Not only the water was very refreshing, but it was rather windy too. Not the ideal conditions just yet.

Anyway, I walked up to the neck depth and stayed in the water for the whole 10 minutes or so. Olga and Tatiana went half the way, but spend there about 15 minutes.

While sitting on the beach, I entertained myself with photography. It’s been a while since my last beach visit, so I saw some things from a different perspective. This time I am more satisfied with the results than I usually am. I guess that will not last too long though..

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-06-22_Kurium_Beach

Tree in the park

Call me retarded, but only today I found out how to do exposure compensation with my camera. Basically, set it in either Av or Tv mode, take a measurement, than switch to manual (M), use the exposure measurement acquired and modify it slightly. There’s a small indicator on the exposure scale which shows how much is compensated.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-06-20_POTD

Building arrow

This is one of a few office buildings that I pass every time walking with Maxim. For some reason only this building touches my feelings. It seems so solid and straight that I feel the urge to distort it somehow. I was trying to convince myself that this building is no different than any other, that all of them have straight lines, squares, angles. But I couldn’t. So, today I decided photograph it using a wide angle lens that would provide enough distortion for me to feel satisfied. When I saw the picture at home, I was surprised to see that the distorted building looks like an arrow.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-06-20_POTD

Cat The Model

I just love photographing all live creatures. My problem is that I am too shy to photograph people unless I know them very well or unless I am keeping safe distance and do it fast. My other problem is that I don’t have a macro lens to photograph bugs, flies, and other insects. And my yet another problem is that I don’t have any pets. All of these problems make finding subjects pretty tough for me.

Today, while walking with Maxim in the park, I met this cat. She (yes, it was a she) had some business around the bench that we were using, and she didn’t mind me photographing her at all. She posed for me in different locations – on the ground, on the roots of the tree, up on the tree, in the bushes, etc. I made something close to 100 shots. Almost all of them came out good, and those which didn’t still had some potential. In order not to have a bunch of similar and thus boring pictures, I decided to play a bit with Gimp and postprocess them differently. Needless to say that I got bored somewhere half the way. As usual. I started deleting pictures. Or processing them in a fast, copy-paste manner. Or ruining them on purpose.

Anyway, I still managed to get a good number of pictures and hopefully they wouldn’t bore you too much while you’ll be looking at them. Let me know which ones you liked better.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-06-18_POTD

Jesus house

I know that everyone and their brother are buying property in Cyprus, but I find it very hard to believe that Jesus himself came here and bought an apartment on the third floor of the building next to Starbucks coffee. Maybe someone is trying to pretend. Or maybe somebody is waiting for The Second Coming and wants him to have a place to stay. I don’t know.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-06-18_POTD