2014
Feeling Timisoara (2014-07-09)
First and foremost this picture is flawed in almost all regards: blurry due to the motion, lacking in contrast due to the glass, spotted due to the dirty car's windshield (and lots of sensor dust), crooked colors due to processing, and over-the-top a busy and feature-less scene. I guess it makes you want to close your eyes and move forward.
However I consider it as the best picture that describes the town I live in, Timisoara, at least some parts of the town, or for that matter any Romanian (or maybe eastern European) city... Look at all the eye-bleeding billboards, all the entangled cables, crammed side-walks... It makes me also want to close my eyes and move forward...
Technical details:
- shot in a July evening around 9 PM, as the sun was setting (maybe 20 minutes before), from a moving car at about 40 Km/h; (I was the passenger...)
- however the speed of the car was not enough to create the motion blur, thus I've used f/16 for 1/10s at ISO 100; (the exposure mode was manual, and the values were determined a few blocks before;)
- due to the small aperture, lots of sensor dust, and flat textures, some of the spots that appear to be from the windshield are actually from the sensor; (the rest are from squashed bugs...)
- regarding focus, although usually auto, this time the lens (at 50 mm) was pre-focused at about 10 m (maybe between 5 and 10?), thus yielding a wide depth of field from a few meters to infinity;
processing was done in RawTherapee, with the white-balance on the reddish side, some contrast added (but not too much as to retain the gloomy look), then upping the saturation in the "dull" tones to pull-up the billboard colors, but pulling-down the "pastel" ones to remove the redness from the sky;
- the camera was a Pentax K-30 and the lens a Pentax DA 50-200 WR;