One week before Easter holidays we decided to close this winter skiing season properly and as everyone knows the best place for that in Sweden is Åre. We were quite lucky with the weather as locals said it was snowing just before our arrival and began melting right after our departure. Anyway, this time I used my pocket camera instead of the system one since the real purpose of the trip was actually skiing, hence the quality (and quantity :). Comparing to my previous visits, during first couple of days the sight distance was amazing. I wish I had more time and better equipment and tripod to produce some quality high dynamic range panoramas but... let's leave it for the next time.

The last days of November I have spent in a cute suburb of Amsterdam, the city of Leiden. As usual, this time of the year it was getting dark quite early. Therefore since the nature of my trip was strictly work related, shooting the sightseeing set of pictures took place during the dark hours. However, early Christmas decorations make the photos look rather interesting (not only due to the postprocessing :). The picture of a candle that I personally like very much has been taken in one of the Leiden downtown pubs.

Buona serata! Another very nice trip to Italy is over as well as another evening has been spent beautifying the results. I'm going to publish more pictures from that trip but for now only the Venezia part is ready. It is always a good idea to visit this city but from photographer's point of view much more so in fall. The warm and foggy weather this time made the architecture incredibly soft and even more polyfoil. Must-sees are carnival masks, glass, and of course canals and gondolas...

Last week I implicitly became an "official" photographer of two local events: FORMATS'05, International Conference on Formal Modelling and Analysis of Timed Systems (Uppsala, Sweden) and ARTIST2 Summer School (Nässlingen, Sweden). The conference took place mostly indoors and the school - on a small island in the Stockholm archipelago, located about 50 km north east of Stockholm, which has been converted into a modern conference centre, but retained its old genuine character. The weather was perfect, the Baltic sea cold as usual (too cold to swim without having sauna first :), and the colourful fall of leaves hurried the last days of the warm Indian summer.

Yesterday before the planned dinner and sauna Rafal and I went to Sunnersta, he was skating on inlines and I was biking. It took us approximately 2.5 hours to complete the trip and I managed to produce some pictures on the way. We admired a beautiful sunset while having a rest on the lake. However immediately after that it became quite cold so we had to move our limbs and rush back home where Pavel and Oleg were waiting...

Couple of sessions made by new 350D: Night Road to Sala and A Day in Stockholm. I used a tripod in for the first one but it still looks shaky, probably a remote would have helped. The second session is my first try in daylight conditions. It was a calm and gloomy day, perfect scattered light for rich and dynamic pictures Even though I didn't manage to catch the sunset, the flushy light made the buildings shine on the leady cloud background.

This blog is to be devoted to photography. After a couple of years of being an amateur mostly party photographer I've decided to go further, to put some extra effort in order to make my shooting more interesting. I realized that even following extremely simple rules and techniques may turn your photos to masterpieces and make you surprise yourself. Also more advanced equipment makes for manifold possibilities and geting more fun. There are plenty of books about general principles of composition, colors and photography in general. However one simple thing that always works is worth mentioning - practice.