CT Wedding Photographer Val Nanovsky

Today I had the opportunity to play a bit with some photos I had taken on a family day trip to New York City. It was Christmas time back then and that day I took the family and went to the city to relax a bit and enjoy the atmosphere – the Big Apple is an absolutely unique place around this time of the year.  I had no plans for serious photography, and didn’t even take the tripod with me – just wanted to play with my, then still new, fisheye lens.

These photos were taken handheld, while walking. To me most of them are “been there, seen that” type of shots. Initially I thought that most of them would come out blurry and go directly to the Recycle Bin when I get back home. But when I saw them on the monitor I was surprised how many of them came out sharp.  No major editing was done. Actually for the most part I only resized the photos, and added  a watermark.  Some of them were slightly tweaked in DPP.  One or two were cropped.

Have fun,

Val

Many of you might be familiar with what color and dynamic composition mean to me – these elements have always been present in my photos in one form or another. At one point I started thinking of combining them in order to get even punchier results. That’s when the image below was born.

The main part of it – the building – was originally taken several years ago in downtown Toronto. But something was missing in that photo. The composition was kind of staticky, and its colors were quite washed out. Needless to say, the image was left untouched for quite a while. Then, about a year later, I took another image – that of the sky – in Northwestern Bulgaria. Finally, last year I went to the St. Pete/Clearwater area down in Florida and photographed the sea gulls. All three images were taken with different cameras.  The sky was not even digital – it was taken on then my favorite medium, Velvia 50, so eventualy it had to be scanned in.

I’ve always had this internal debate about how far I should go with digital editing and how truthful to the reality my photography should be. This is a really long topic to discuss in a single post and I will certainly write about it in this blog some time in the future.  But the problem definitely applies to this image, which is a pure composite, quite close to the point where I wouldn’t even call it a “photograph”.

Anyway, in short I combined the Toronto skyscraper with the Bulgarian sky. Back then I could only dream of having a fisheye lens, so to distort the building I used the best alternative I knew at the time – Photoshop. I colorized everything to enhance the stormy mood and added the sea gulls from Florida. The distortion was certainly not even close to that of a fisheye lens – it was a completely different non-linear, sine pattern – but to me it did the trick. The building now looks much more interesting and the whole composition is much more dynamic. There was clearly a sense of urgency here, and I was really pleased with the result. That’s how this image was born. I will certainly be adding more photos of this type to the blog, and eventually, to the web site.

Dance of the Storm