DarkBoxNotes » Black & White

Fighting the wind

zuco — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:20:22 +0000

I was just riding my bicycle on a big bridge. The wind was really strong. I had to stop and go by walk so I thought that it was a good moment to shot a picture.
It was really hard because the wind moved the camera all time so finally I found a way to fix it against the border of the bridge. Fortunately it didn’t fall down to the water ^^;
Shot with a Canon G11

Selected as one of the best pictures in 2009 at Flickr Blog

zuco — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 09:36:26 +0000

Today I found that this pictures has been selected as one of the best pictures for 2009 in Flickr Blog under the category “rain”.
I got really shocked about this and now I’m really happy. The picture was taken with a simple Canon IXY in a rainy day in Shinjuku, which is one of the biggest urban centers of Tokyo.
I saw the lady in the bike from far away and just tried to catch her in the frame. Taking the camera from the pocket and trying to shot as soon as possible. Fortunately I could take this shot.

Thank you for your comments on Flickr and feed back!

Lovely Bear – Portraits #2

zuco — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:44:18 +0000

A lovely bear could be a perfect excuse to take some portraits.

How to improvise a portrait in weird conditions

zuco — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:12:02 +0000

Last night I took a couple of beers at Shibuya (Tokyo) with some great friends: @jonnyli @gohsuket @KyleHase @papadimitriou @tangerinejp @lee_marqueses

A good friend of mine, @iMorpheus, asked me to write about how I took this portrait for his new group created in flickr, check it here.

It was a bar, it was dark, it was crowded, there was smoke in the air and I was sitting in a table, drank a few beers…
At that point the victim (Paul) was just in the right position in front of me and smoking. I had to shot a portrait!
In the bag I had a flash Sigma EF-500, Nikon D200 and a small white sheet plus a TTL cord to detach the flash from the camera to make it movable. @tangerinejp helped me putting the white sheet near Paul’s face, the flash settings were in manual at minimum power 1/64. The camera settings were f/3.2, 1/250, ISO 100 and white balance in flash mode. The rest of the job corresponds to the model, he really played the role and that’s one of the most important things. That’s why although the conditions might be bad or the equipment might be poor, if the model knows how to behave in front of the camera, and knows how to transmit a feeling, the rest is just a right shot!

Here we have @tangerinejp posing as an innocent kitten ^^;

Gundam and pixelmator

zuco — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:06:07 +0000

This was my last visit to the Gundam located in Odaiba (Tokyo) I don’t know what they are going to do with it.
Maybe they will destroy it or send it to some recycle process? Personally I would love if they left it there, only two months…
It could become like a symbol, something that people can visit over and over again, a place where geeks and otakus will love to go for a picnic, to drink beer at night or just to try to find some moral and spiritual support in a difficult moment of life. Just imagine, it could become like an object of cult and devotion… Well I’m going too far away with this…

These are the latest pics I took to it and they got modified with Pixelmator.
I will talk about this wonderful application. Of course it’s not at the same level as photoshop but it’s really powerful for a reasonable price. I just applied a simple filter after post process it in Lightroom

After apply Edge filter on Pixelmator, increase exposure and change colors to green. I like the effect. I’ll use this filter for many other pics I had, the effect is quite impressive.

It’s amazing the level of details. They built every aspect of Gundam.
Japanese are so good to reproduce until the minimum detail.

The whole set of Gundam pictures here

Previous post about it.

This is the last post I’ll talk about it, I promise (maybe…) I hope they repeat this again, nowadays materials and technology provides us with the tools and skills to reproduce big sized objects with a great detailed level and people love that kind of things!