Winner at GDT!!

I am very happy to say that finally one of my images has won a “highly commended” award in the GDT European Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2009, “landscape” category. Thousands of images compete every year in this contest, most of all in the landscape category. Therefore, this is one of the main nature photography contests in the world…so I cannot but being extremely happy with this result!

You can see all winners by clicking this link.

http://www.gdtfoto.de/content.php?siteloc=386

Thanks for reading and great light to you all.

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Photo of the Week

I was driving along a backroad and saw this scene from the corner of my eye. I was quicky struck by the graphical quality of the thin ribbons of golden light standing in the middle of the darkness, and the mistery of the place, where almost all trees were bare and looking dead. Light alone seemed to make this place alive.
I stopped dead and run to look for a decent composition making order of the chaos of the forest. I had just the time to load the 617 camera and take a couple of images. Then, the sun went down and the forest came back to the “reality”.

617 camera, rodenstock 180 5.6, velvia 50, f64, 40 seconds or so, image scanned in imacon scanner

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First scanned 617 slide

Finally, I purchased a virtual drum Hasselblad Imacon scanner to scan the 617 slides I have been taking in the last months. I got it from the US company Bitec, which I could not recommended more. They have delivered an incredible service and support, and the owner of the company, David, is on of those guys who know how to make a client happy.

Basically, this scanner is  big machine specially designed to scan film and transparencies where you can obtain huge files for 35 mm, medium format, panoramic and 4×5 large format slides or negatives. For those who are not familiar with these machines, the transparency or negative is taken between magnetic flexible holders that are “swallowed” by the scanner and turned around a drum, so that the scanning is always made perpendicular to the slide. No distortions, no loss of resolution, best quality. Nowadays, it is simply the best machine one can buy for scanning film and/or slides.

I have scanned one of the last images, taken last week, and the quality is really impressive. Absolutely no noise in the shadows, huge resolution, and nice colours rendered. Now, once I press the mechanical copal shutter of the large format lenses of the 617 camera and develop the velvia 50 roll, it is only a matter of a few minutes to get a huge and impressive digital file of 1 GB, which can produce outstanding prints of more than 2 meters long. Very soon I will update the web with a lot of panoramic images as I scan them in this new machine. Stay tuned.

By the way, I will start soon to propose scanning services for very competitive prices. If you are interested in squeezing all the quality you can from your slides or transparencies, from 35 mm to 4×5 large format, let me know and I will get in touch with you.

Thanks for reading and great light to you all.

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Photo of the Week

From now on I will try to upload a very recent photo each week, saying something about it. I think it is the best thing you can do in a photo blog. Therefore, as normally I cannot renew the webpage content every week (that would make people crazy), this is a very good way of showing some of the very last work. As long as I am not on a photo trip and there is no connexion around, you will find here every monday or tuesday the photo of the week with some words about it.

This week I come with an image quite different from the vista view, an image that would fall very well into that category called “intimate landscape”. Elliot Porter used this name for the very first time, to refer to those images where the horizon is lacking, and where the viewer is “forced” to concentrate the attention on a portion of the landscape, a micro-landscape if we want, where the whole is summarized by a part that reflects the essence of the place. This is the case of the Verzasca valley, a natural treasure located in Ticino, southern Switzerland. The water there has polished very beautiful gneiss and granite formations leading to a real wonder in terms of patterns, colours and textures.

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