CT Wedding Photographer Val Nanovsky

This is the second part of my Bulgarian Landscape story. The topic is seascapes.

Although the photos are organized as if they were taken chronologically, they were actually taken in different days, even different years. What unites them is that all images were taken in early morning, starting at around 3 o’clock and ending around 10 AM.

All photos were taken on Fujichrome Velvia except 17 & 18 which were taken on Kodachrome.  To produce the blues, the pinks and the purples I have used a gold & blue polarizer – my all-time favorite filter for landscape photography. The digital editing was minimal – I wanted to preserve the natural look of film as much as possible.

Enjoy,

Val

This one has an interesting history. I took it at exactly the same time as Engulfed in Silence, pt. I, but for some weird reason it never really seemed interesting to me and I never paid much attention to it. It’s been residing in my RAW database untouched… until recently.

About a week ago I  was browsing through my old stuff and saw it. I am still wondering how come I never noticed that  photo. The way I look at my own work obviously changes over time and it’s really interesting to me how things progress in my head. Who knows where I’ll be several months from now ;-)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the final result.

Engulfed in Silence - pt. II

This image seems to have caused quite a stir online since I took it. The original date was around November 2007, and the location was Nubble Headlight, Maine. I had just purchased my (then) new Canon 5D and this was one of the first test shots. I never expected it to become such a hit, to be honest. I was experimenting with one more element – a Canon fisheye lens, borrowed from work. Up until that moment I had never had a chance to try one of these babies on a full-frame body, and this turned out to be so much fun. Later on,  when I purchased my own fisheye it brought so much to my trademark style. A lot of people now associate me with these lenses.

Let me tell you a bit about the image itself. It was stone cold that day. I was out with a couple of friends from my camera club and everybody was freezing. Speaking of freezing, I have a really spicy story to tell you, but that will be some other time ;-) Fortunately there was no wind, but it was stone cold. You could  take your fingers out of the gloves just for several seconds to quickly focus, make the necessary adjustments and snap a photo. There was this ghostly silence that night. I don’t remember hearing any sounds at all – not even from the breaking waves -  hence the title, Engulfed in Silence. This shot was one of the many I took that night, and I really like the way it came out. When I got back home, I adjusted the levels, colors, and took out some unwanted elements. Below is the final result.

The image later won the Photo of the Week contest by Calumet Photographic and still keeps earning high rankings at a number of photo forums online and other offline competitions.