Countless Reasons to Love High Tatras

I perhaps do not know of any single photographer of landscape who would not nourish a special bias for a place or two and I'm of course no exception. I was grown below magnificent High Tatras so one can easily guess what my favorite spot is. The truth is that I have far less good Tatras images worth sharing than what the place deserves. One of the reason is that I enjoy just being out there much more than anywhere else and I do not feel distracted when I sometimes return home without even pulling a camera out of the bag.

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Photo of the Week - June 19, 2011

I moved to Geneva in 2007 and since than the surrounding mountains were the primer target for my photography and I have been trying to get up there as often as possible. I have quite a stressful day job, so it has also been giving me the opportunity to relax and handle the daily stress a little bit better. I very often came back home from my mountain hikes physically exhausted, but with fresh mind ready for another day. When some time passed by, and we were getting more and more settled here in Geneva, I have begun to pay attention to other photo locations in my neighbourhood, and guess who was the first obvious candidate. Of course it was the lake, one of the biggest in Western Europe. To give you a brief description, the lake is split 60/40 between Switzerland and France. In Switzerland itself it goes trough three cantons (Geneva, Vaud and Valais) covering the total area of 345 square kilometres. While the entire world knows the lake under the name Lake Geneva, the locals - meaning all the many great cities on the Swiss and neighbour French shores - call it Lac Leman.

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Notes from Iceland II.

Continued from here. Hveravellir can be read as Hot Spring Fields and also looks and smells like that. In general, it's rather small geothermal place with smoking fumarolees and with colored boiling pools. You can jump and relax in one of them. It is an interesting experience to see and walk around but I was much more amazed by the surroundings of the road that led us there. Well, the road was sort of different, more adventurous of what we in Europe normally call road - our landcruiser proved to be the right tool to drive on it safely and relatively comfortably. Everything else around made me feel like I returned millions of years back in time. This is how the Earth must have looked like when it was being created.

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Photo of the Week - May 29, 2011

This is one of the few photographs I took on Iceland, during my second trip in summer 2010, where luck played bigger role than precise preparation. There is very special thing about long exposures, you never know what the result will look like until you really see the final photograph. In this case the exposure time was 140 seconds and the ice formation was facing the incoming tide very bravely without being moved too much, so even on the big print both pieces of ice are still reasonably sharp.

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...Let It Snow (Continued).

I took this image on our first trip to Lofoten in January. It was well after sunset and some 100+ kilometers ahead of us to Svolaer. We were returning from the place called Å, the tiny village situated endmost in the Lofoten islands. We scouted for locations to return to on our next trip as we had already decided to stay in Reine next time. I admit I have not paid too much attention to where we were when shooting this photograph because we were late and in a hurry. Moreover, Ota left me with my two and a half minutes exposure all alone. Despite the dull sky, I tried it at least for seeing how this rather unorthodox compositions would look like. Did not have too many other options as there was an ugly little quay on the left from houses.

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Unspoiled Nature of Poloniny

The photograph for this week was created about a year ago when we were shooting our book 15 Treasures of Slovakia (you can browse through it online here: http://www.lightharmony.com/treasures). Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians were added on the UNESCO World Natural Heritages list on long ago, in 2007. You can find them in the very eastern part of Slovakia, on the border with Ukraine and Poland. Some of them are part of the youngest and least known national park called Poloniny. The forests are absolutely unique for being preserved in their original conditions and untouched for several thousand years. Not too many people know that they contain the world's tallest beech trees.

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Joe Cornish - A Photographer at Work

I'm sure I'm not going to surprise many of you nor I'm going to be very original when I say that Joe Cornish is one of the few photographers that I have been looking at in search for inspiration for the past few years. I've been a happy owner of couple of Joe's books with The First Light sitting in my bookshelf on a special place. It was the very first book where I could find exactly what I was then looking for - stunning images in combination with educational stories. Even now, it's never boring to browse through it and enjoy photographs full of colors and empathy for various subjects, just to use some of superlatives one can say when looking at Joe's work.

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Let It Snow...

As I'm slowly processing my shots from Norway, some look really odd and different from what I usually appreciate because of lighting conditions. I simply was not too lucky this time. But having been there with no other agenda, after a little while I got excited about thinking of how to deal and experiment with what the nature offered. It was often snowing so I had to put my equipment into a harsh weather testing quite regularly when trying to shoot something. And I must confess it failed every now and then. Apparently, Hasselblad does not seem to have designed its H1 for rough outdoor conditions. Especially metering system in the viewfinder suffered badly from the wet and cold. I had to restart the system couple of times, or even remove the viewfinder and clap it back on. To my surprise, P30 back passed with no fault whatsoever.

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Michael Kenna - Photo Exhibitions

I would call myself a lucky man, since I have had a chance to visit two of Michael Kenna’s exhibitions during the last six months. The first exhibition took place in Amsterdam in November 2010 and my wife had actually organized the whole trip for me (including personal meeting with Michael) as an early X-Mas present:) I was very excited when I arrived to Amsterdam and a few hours latter I was heading to the gallery for the opening ceremony. To my big surprise the exhibition did not take place in a big fancy gallery as one would have expected, but in the very small one, the smallest I have ever seen:) In this case it was prime example when the saying “size does not matter” was proven more than true. The gallery had an amazing atmosphere and the photographs were absolutely awesome. I spent quite a some time observing all the pictures and at the end I got enough courage to go and meet face to face the photographer. I did say to him something like “ehm, my wife sent me over here” and it was like saying a special secret code. He was fully aware of the whole deal and we started to talk and talk about photography, personal life and much more. One hour later I felt I should let other people to have a chance to talk to him, so I asked him to sign some of his older books I have in my collection and I left with my mind in the sky.

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Notes from Iceland I.

If you’re flying to Iceland one day, it’s likely you’ll take Icelandair because there’s not too many services that connect Reykjavik with the continental Europe. In such case, don’t miss your chances to browse though the on-board entertainment options and listen to the Icelandic music (not talking about folk, which I avoided by miles). Apart from the usual suspects as Sigur Ros and Bjork (remember Sugarcubes? :-)), you can get to hear less known bands and musicians that are often nothing short of pure reflections of a meditative remoteness of the island. There’s no better preparation for ambient mood of the place than giving ear to Ampop or Blindfold in your headphones and watching icy toppings of volcanos, wrinkled faces of glaciers, black sand beaches framed by white lines of crashing waves or countless veins of rivers deltas as the plane have reached Iceland. And yes, if tired by the melancholy, play Emiliana Torrini.

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Welcome to Land & Colors

I have met Marek many years ago thanks to one of few (those days) servers related to photography and we become very good friends over time. Together we started project called LIGHTHARMONY more than five years ago and now we are trying to move further with Land and Colors project, which should give us more active interaction with outside world and allow us to present not only our photographs, but also our thoughts and experiences relating to photography and traveling more frequently. Land and Colors project is also here to provide a unique opportunity to all of you to buy our limited additions of fine art prints (see more here). These fine art prints will be printed digitally with the highest standards regarding permanency and color accuracy and we will also do our best to offer you the highest standards in terms of aesthetics and artistic feel.

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Launching Land & Colors

It's been 5 years since I started to use the internet to communicate my photography. At that time, it all was much less interactive than today and the static web gallery could usually be at the top of any ambitions. Fair enough, we have been successfully running our lightharmony.com site, which still attracts lots of attention. No wonder as you can find there the selection of best work of some excellent emerging landscape photographers from Czech and Slovak geographical space. The website is simple and the communication goes one way - we present the images and if we're lucky, some people will stumble upon them, browse through them and share them. Do not get me wrong - I love what we are doing there and will continue to do but I have a feeling I need to move closer to establishing my own identity. This is why Land & Colors was designed by Ota and me.

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