Portfolio -Dutch tulips and Northern Lights

The section PORTFOLIO contains two new items - Dutch tulips and Northern Lights from Norway. What do have these two in common? They both contains pictures where the main motif is the colour itself. When I began with photography, one of the rules I read in the books was "photograph colors" - and it obviously works well!

Here you will find my best pictures of DUTCH TULIPS and here the best of NORTHERN LIGHTS.

The complete list of best pictures according to the themes are found in the portfolio under the menu item “PORTFOLIO”.

Tip – lens hoods Do-It-Yourself

Last week I came across an interesting website www.lenshoods.co.uk where you can download for free the schemes of almost any type of lens hood. So far I was lucky not to lose any of the hoods of my lenses but I’m aware that the original lens hoods can be damn expensive – for example the spare hood for the super-telephoto lens canon EF 500mm F 4.0 IS can be bought on Internet for some 600 USD! The above-mentioned web page contains 1:1 scale drawings of a number of hoods for lens of Canon, Nikon, Sigma, Tamron, Tokina, Pentax and Olympus brands. You can simply download the drawings, print them in real size on the paper, cut out and fold to be ready-to-use. Of course, any better material – firmer and waterproof, can replace the paper that the hood is made of. Besides th fact you don’t need to pay a lot of many for the original lens hood you can also spare the space in your bag and carry the lens unfolded. Some people may feel as a drawback that the hood must be attached to the lens with the use of elastic band and alternatively by a sticky tape but to me this seems to be good compromise for its price. The web page also contains a script that creates the drawing of a lens hood according to your demands. The documents with hood drawings for crop-factor-made lenses can be found on the website www.lenshoods.net

Portfolio - Landscape

Next on the list of the "Best of" photographs from my gallery are the pictures of landscape - although Im mostly concentrating on birds, there are surprisingly high number of landscape shots in my database. The best pictres from the landscape category can be seen HERE.

The complete list of best pictures according to the themes are found in the portfolio under the menu item “PORTFOLIO”.

PF 2011: Let us not be blind

There is so much of beauty and miracles in the world but most of that we pass by everyday without a notice. Our whole life is made up of tiny, seemingly unimportant details and stories. Some of us desire to be successful, some want to be rich or quest for the meaning of life. In the frenzy of modern life we lose the ability to perceive what really is important, genuine and beautiful.

I’m not a good story-teller so I’m attaching to this „muse“ a story told by somebody else – maybe you have heard that story already – it is all about how blind we are to see extraordinary things in our lives, about the naivety we lose, about how we would like to be but we are not…

Magdalena, the best Christmas gift...

I do mostly bird photography but it is great pleasure for me now to focus on this little mammal called Magdalena :-)

Our daughter Magdaléna was born 19.12.2010.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!

Jiri, Eliška and Magdalena

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BirdLife Community launched

Everyone interested in watching, photography or conservation of birds certainly knows BirdLife International. This association is the world’s largest global alliance of conservation organizations that share a joint mission to conserve wild birds, their habitats and global biodiversity. BirdLife International has Partners in over 100 countries, with 2.5 million members and 8 million supporters with these numbers still growing...

European Bird List up and running!!

Dear birders, photographers and simply all the people that have something to do with birds! yesterday 13.5.2010 we launched the project that we have been working on together with Jan Veber and Robert Doležal (Dodin) for last few months. It is a virtual space where all the birders from all over the world can present their bird observations, share their experience, compete and communicate with similarly “affected” individuals. We will work on the project further and to do that successfully we need you – the users who will keep the web alive and improving. We believe that the project will attract your attention and that you will join it as some 30 people already did during the first day after the project birth!

Join the project at the address

www.europeanbirdlist.com

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Beyond the camera - Manos Papadomanolakis

Be updated - newsletters

It was the nature photographer Alessandro Carboni from JuzaForum who suggested me to establish a mailing list where everybody could be updated with new information from this website. I have welcomed that idea – sometimes I do the updates twice a week, sometimes it takes me month or even more and I know how this feature might be helpful with websites as is mine – I like reading articles of other photographers but do not have time to check their websites every day.

With the „News subscription“ function you will be getting regular newsletter about what is going on this website – either it will be a new article or new photos in a gallery. The only you have to do is to sign up for the mail newsletter in the left menu under the heading „News subscription“ – after subscribing your name and mail address and email confirmation you will be added to the mailing list that I will use then for sending the newsletters. Your subscription can be cancelled anytime later. I hope you will find this new feature useful and will eventually sing up for the news updates.

Jiří Sláma

New czech wildlife forum at Photomecan.eu

Beyond the camera – Edwin Kats

I encountered the work of this talented photographer recently during browsing the Image critique forum at www.juzaphoto.com. Although Edwin is quite new on this forum, his pictures appear pretty regularly in the „Photo of the week” section of this website...

Beyond the camera - Olivier Seydoux

In these short profiles I would like to introduce some of the photographers, whose work is an inspiration for me and whose pictures are always pleasure to look at. Let me begin with French photographer Olivier Seydoux, whose pictures I found last year during browsing the PBase internet gallery...