what-eye-see

[389]

Nicholas Alan Cope

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Perfect spot

So, my girlfriend is working in a home for the elderly and last summer she told me there will be a big celebration in the garden of the place and her collegues will gather all the grandmas and grandpas there so it would be great if I could manage to get there in the morning and start my day with a photoshoot I never tried before.

Thankfully, the people was slow enough for me to find the best focus and stumble upon scenes like this above! This old lady was chilling and reading a newspaper while the others was so busy to eat as much as they can and to listen to a disgusting, arrogant singer who was not even singing live.

I felt that old lady so much I had to take a shot about her, even my girlfriend warned me about her anger when she notices someone taking photos of her. At least it worth it and she dodn’t even notice that, in the morning sunshine, deep in the world of soap operas and one day celebrities.

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Erosion

Now let’s see something different! For an outdoor festival, I borrowed the Sigma 24-70mm f2.8 from one of my mates and after a night in the studio on the way home I gave it a try in my favourite environment: city outskirts. Walked across the Danube river as the sun slowly climbed up on the horizon and took some shots with wide open and with smaller apertures too.

And a little about the lens: the Art-class Sigma lenses are famously sharp and this particular one also cannot disappoint me if it’s about sharpness. Just look at those fine details it can draw to an APSC sensor!

But in the other hand, I feel the AF and IS switches a bit clumsy. On the festival I just talked about I didn’t know for hours what’s going on with the IS and after a while I finally figured out that the switch is very easily switchable and while setting the focal length you can accidentally turn it off. It was a real pain in the ass in a very low light environment.

And finally the last thing I must mention about the 24-70mm: it’s weight! Damn this glass is heavy! But the f2.8 aperture and the lower cost than the Canon L counterpart has it’s own price. Consider going to metal concerts regularly in order to strengthen your neck.

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The sandy beach of Kisoroszi

This one is another tilt-shift view from the Castle of Visegrád and the island tip where the sharpness is, is belonging to the island which gives the land under the small village of Kisoroszi. It is a very separated community because the only land connection is kilometers down the river at Tahitótfalu. It is hard to not love the idea of living in a small village on an island which is surrounded by Europe's most beautiful river and having an almost personal sandy beach in the backyard no matter where you live on the island.

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Castle of Visegrad

The 20th of August is one of the biggest national celebrations of Hungary because this is the State Foundation Day when we celebrate that the smaller tribes and various nationalities had become a whole nation that is still existing in the heart of Europe.

On this day we usually visit the most beautiful part of Hungary and the Danube river, where it takes a sharp right from the Tatras and running through Budapest to eventually reach the Black sea. Here is the ruins of the castle of Visegrad from where this image was shot with that awesome tilt-shift lens I already presented to you.

This was the first time I used the lens as people usually using this type of special lenses: to achive a look that is more like a miniature version of the same landscape. 

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So this image is one of my first outdoor test of the old tiltshift lens I've found in one of my boxes of things and stuff.

What is a tiltshift lens? It is a very special piece of glass and mechanics to tilt and/or shift the lens and therefore making parts of the image on the sensor blurry and other parts sharp as a needle. Tilting the lens also tilting the plane of sharpness in the image, so this way you can adjust the sharpness of a landscape photo till every part of the image is sharp, even if you use a wide open aperture! Or, of course, you can get that miniature-ish look by blurring out optically the front and the background, in other words: making the field of sharpness more shallow.

But shifting the lens parts sideways is a whole different story: you can shoot great architecture photos with a properly adjusted shift by "straightening" out the lines that are otherways distorted as we used to see. Another cool trick with shifting is that you can make yourself disappear right in front of a mirror by literally shifting your body out of the frame of the mirror still giving the effect of being right in front of it.

In order to achieve this effect, you should try shooting with the lens fully tilted on the vertical axis (up for this kind of image or down for the opposite) and an aperture like f4 or f5.6!

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So this is my Ukrainian made tilt-shift lens I own for a while now but never tested it properly because I thought it was defective. Yes, this bastard is a little bit clumsy, but if you get used to the knobs and the strange behaving focus ring, this lens is the most interesting and almost the heaviest ever visited my camera body!

Tested it's capabilities in a very appropriate environment, get ready for the results soon!

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We are many

- Iceland, Kirkjufell, Kirkjufellsfoss

This is the waterfall known as Kirkjufellsfoss, because it is near the very famous mountain Kirkjufell. And in the background, that is not Kirkjufell, but another more interesting, jagged mountain torn apart by glacial ice eons ago.

And why the title? Because when you finally hit Kirkjufellsfoss, you will feel like “yeah, another waterfall, cool”. Literally on Iceland, there is a waterfall in every hundred meters along the ring road.

But there are even more tourists than waterfalls. On this photo I had to remove eleven people in order to give you only the beauty of Kirkjufellsfoss. Iceland is not like on the photos you see around. You will have a hard time if you want to exclude any distracting tourists from your shots and sadly we haven’t got the time to wait for the best moment when nobody is in the frame and sadly enough even pro photographers around there was like “hey dude I can see clearly you are waiting for the best shot for half an hour but what if I just go in front of you right in your frame and steal your moment?”

The moral of the story is just that: don’t be a douchebag and if you see a photographer waiting in one place for the moment, try to do the same and wait for your own and don’t steal other’s.

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Trash for some

- Csepel művek, Csepel, Budapest

These colorful spirals was waiting for transport to a trash dump near a factory that is making metal stuff from various alloys. This is pure trash for the people working there and was a pile of fantastic artifacts for a photographer like me. Took many shotsh here with various focal lengths and f stops but I think 35mm f2.0 did exactly what I wanted to show: the texture, the colors and the depth of this pile of metallic tentacles.

The second one is the side of the same trash container with tiny particles that didn’t make it to the container itself.

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Heavy Machinery I.

- Csepel művek, Budapest, Csepel

This is one of the remaining sites where actual heavy industry survived the de-industrialization of Budapest. These pneumatic hammers are shaking the ground near a building where people are still living. Sundays included.

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“Pali”

- Csepel művek, Budapest, Csepel

Pali is a short for the name Pál (Paul) in hungarian and that’s the only information about what is behind this door. Csepel művek is a World War era industrial district of Budapest and it was the greatest industrial enterprise in the hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It was called Manfred Weiss iron and steel works and yeah, they produced iron and steel there in very large quantities back in that day.

This door is in the backyard of the last remaining iron and steel foundry, but sadly enough it was closed because the photo was taken on Sunday. We are planning to go back and check it out on a weekday because the security guard on the next corner - who was a guard at the aluminium plant near the steel foundry - told us something like “Yes, there is still a steel foundry of sort, but they don’t even have a guard…”. Now while the district is still operating, the steel and iron production is mostly gone and the buildings are for rent as warehouses and offices and luckily all of these little parts are separate businesses, therefore the old factory roads are now functioning as regular roads and the whole site can be explored! There are some bigger businesses with security guards like the one we met at the aluminium factory but they are very kind people and even if they don’t let us take photos about the stuff they are guarding (i bet the aluminium works could be a great place to take photos), they told us stories about the site and guided us to the abandoned parts of Csepel Művek to take some great shots before we go.

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Guide Stone Pile - Iceland, Northern region

These stone piles was made by the first inhabitants of the island and are used to navigate through the tundra by horse. Many tourists are building up rock piles like this and local people are trying to destroy all of them as soon as possible. Why? Because after a while even locals can’t tell which one is an ancient pile and which one has made by an ignorant tourist just to take a selfie with it and put it up on Instagram.

So please, if you ever visit Iceland, never wander from the designated paths in order to keep this beauty as it is for the coming generations! Moss in iceland is very fragile and need hundreds of years to recover if you step on it so please don’t do anything like that!

This image was taken with a telephoto lens at 135mm, from the tarmac of the Ring Road, on the way to Dettifoss (which is a very famous waterfall since they filmed the opening scene of Prometheus there).

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Black Sand Beach

Iceland, Black sand beach, Southern region 2017

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Mountains of the Ring Road Iceland Northern region - Akureyri 2017

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Hverir geothermal region This part of Iceland is pretty active like seeing a big rocky mountain with steam clouds coming from it like this is not an exotic sight around here. And the sulphuric smell of these hot clouds is really a thing to experience at least once in a lifetime! By the way, Iceland is literally a huge spa island because the water coming from every shower head in every household is coming directly from the ground beneath the landmass. This is just beautiful. - Hverir, Iceland / Northern region 2017

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The “rhino rock” - Hvitserkur, Iceland 2017