POTD - Leonid Mamchenkov

Dogs

Dogs are not something you see every day in Cyprus. A couple of decades ago, dogs brought some serious desease in Cyprus and many people were sick. Many dogs were killed than and some really strict laws were developed to control the migration (import), vaccination, and dog carantine. As a result, streets are full of cats…

Some people still do prefer dogs. Not all of them know how to properly care for one, but they still take them.

Someone came to my neighboors today and brought a dog. They tied it up in the coridor and left it there for few minutes. It started barking and making all sorts of noise. Olga noticed it first it told me. I came out and saw these beautiful eyes. I mean there were really something! White dog, light blue eyes and black border around the eyes – all made me go “Wow!”.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-03-26_POTD

Finger activity

Fingers are Maxim’s most active body parts without a question. He moves his fingers all the time. And I mean all the time. He moves his fingers when he sleeps, eats, baths, dumps the load, plays, goes outside… You get the idea.

With all these movement, some of the figures or gestures he displays are really funny. The problem with capturing them though is that they don’t stay. He changes the location and position of his fingers constantly. Rarely, when he focuses on something else, like sleeping or eating, his fingers stay a few seconds in the same place.

We are having lots of fun watching him move. The best time is when he is awake and his fingerwork happens simultaneously with his funny faces. At this time he can impersonate anyone – Eminem, The Presiden of The United States, Cyprus taxi driver, Marilyn Manson’s fan at the concert – anyone.

Sometimes I am fast enough with the camera setup to capture the complexity…

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-03-24_POTD/

Rethinking ‘Picture of the day’

This has been on my mind for some time now, so I decided to finally do it. My ‘Picture of the day’ project is going well. In fact, it grew out of the original idea. These days I am blogging a lot and many pictures that I post to the ‘Picture of the day’ can be instead used to annotate my other posts. So, instead of creating two posts – one POTD submission and another a regular story without a picture – I will do one.

Here is how it will work. If I have a picture and the story, then I will write a single post with text and image. If I have just a picture, I will post just a picture in the relevant category. And only if I have a picture with some photographic value, I will create a post in the Photography category, with the picture and the description of the value, lighting conditions, and stuff like that. I might leave it as just a picture too, but I will try to avoid the laziness like that.

All these single pictures will still remain in the POTD directory in my photo albums.

Sunrise

It has been a while since I photographed the sunrise. I did a lot of them at some point, but then I just couldn’t see anything new in them anymore. This was mostly due to the fact that I photographed all my sunrises from my office window.

Today I suddenly saw a slightly different view. It was there for about two minutes only, but luckily I wasn’t grumpy enough to miss it. I grabbed my camera and made the shot. At times like this I am really proud of myself.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-03-23_POTD

Picture of the day

Today I was photographing Maxim (again). He was very calm and was looking towards the window, so I used it as my primary light source for most of the pictures. I have also tried flash, but Maxim didn’t responde well enough.

With these series I was trying to capture emotions and different faces that he was making. Unfortunately, most of the aethetically pleasing images went terribly wrong in the technical department.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-03-22_POTD