Howdy,

Today I`ll tell you a few things about a toy that`s really fun to use.

The Supersampler!

It`s a Lomography camera with 4 lenses and each lens exposes 1/4 of the frame. The lenses have individual shutters and the camera has 2 shooting modes: Instant Shutter (4 exposures in 0.2s) or Delayed Shutter (4 exposures in 2s).
I got this bad boy as a birthday present from my best-friend two years ago, and only managed to expose 1 roll. It`s fun but i`m a control freak so this camera will probably see 1 roll / year at most.
The good part is that you can`t go more low-maintenance than this. So for everyone looking for a Lomo camera. Go ahead and buy it. It comes with a big album full of insanely sick photos.

Samples? Sure, why not!?

Catching up on stuff.

I finally managed to get done a big batch of photos for the Dear World project. First thing: Share with the whole World. Second: get some sleep!

The project is pretty simple: ask people to send messages to the world by writing them on their body.

Alexandra Sandu and Ioana Toma are also working on this project. It was brought to our country by GRASP

Make-Up: Ioana Toma

Hello there!

Not to disturb the previous post about the Samsung NX200, I`ve decided to make a 2nd entry with samples, some … artsy, others … not so much, but rounds-up the 1st review a little bit.

For those of you with “pixel-peeping” as a hobby, I have uploaded many of these photos, with a terrible watermark, in a Picasa Album.

Samsung 18-200 f/3.5-6.3 @ 200mm

Samsung 30mm f/2

Samsung 60mmf/2.8 Macro

Samsung 85mm f/1.4

So here we are, the day we drank wine from sunrise to sundown:

We started the trip in Dijon, took the highway all the way down to Beaune, than we headed futher down towards Puligny-Montrachet. That was the southern-most point of our trip, that day. From there we went to Meursault, Volnay, Pommard, Nuits-Saint-Georges and from there straight home. We had one to many glasses of wine to tell the difference anymore.

Montrachet is one of the most expensive vineyards in France. It was featured in the first season of Oz and James Big Wine Adventure (ep. 4 or 5, I believe). Here we took part in a tasting of 4 white wines (after all, we were in white-wine land) and a rosé. We chose based on selling price of the bottle on the market. I have to admit that both myself and Jo tasted the difference between the cheap (13Euros / bottle) and the expensive one (72Euros / bottle), but in-between … there wasn`t such a big gap to justify the price. They were all very good, so from my point of view … i`d probably go for 50 bottles of the fist one.

Next tasting that we really enjoyed was at a Château de Meursault. Above ground is a museum, and underground it`s the wine cellar. They have the biggest wine cellar that I have ever seen. And because people actually buy their wine, the cellar only stores 2-3 year old wine. I admit, they have a few bottles left from `76-`06 … but no more than 30-40. And imagine that what you see in the pictures below is just half o the real thing, `cause they have their proprietary bottle shape that stacks “head to toe” so you actually see just the bottles facing inside, the ones facing the walls are hidden from the view.

The tasting here was good. 7 white wines 2005-2008 and we sensed some of the subtle differences between them. Price wise … the bottles were 25-90Euros.

We ended our wine tasting adventure at Château de Clos de Vougeot where we got a lesson about red wine … the hard way.

“Have you ever tried an aged bottle of wine”
“No”
“Are you looking for a bottle of wine to drink now … or later?”
“Now”
“Than you came here for nothing”
“…”
“Well, how will you know if what i`m serving you is good for you if you haven`t tasted an old wine”
“Well … that`s why we`re here , we want to learn as much as possible”
“Young man, what we sell here today is 16 month old wine that, for you, tastes like any other red wine. You have to KNOW how this wine will develop after 20 years, after 30 years, after 40 years.”
“Yeah, sounds plausible, now … show me the wine !”
(so she did – she put 3 bottles on the table)
“Try them, tell me what you think”
“The first one is ok, the second one is bitter … ”
(this is where she lost it a bit)
“You don`t say it`s bitter … you say, it has power! character!”
“Lady … it`s bitter, cut the crap!”
(she was actually right, out of the two of us, I was the farm boy …)
“Now tell me which one would you buy, and then i`ll tell you the prices”
(there was a huge difference between the first and the last so I chose the last, but then she struck me with the price)
“The one you chose is 90 euros / bottle, and you have to store it a minimum of 20 years in a cellar at 12*C and proper humidity before you open a bottle”
“And the other ones?”
“The middle one is 45E and the first is 23E/bottle, and these you can open after 15years … but 20years is better”
(we than talked about other stuff, but I realized why an old bottle of wine costs so much … it costs 90E/bottle now, store it for 20 years and 200-400% just because you`re a fancy restaurant … and there you go … 1000$ / bottle)

Overall, that day we had a blast. Good thing we had a driver to get us everywhere … well hydrated.

We arrived in Lyon 1h before sundown so we managed to get a map from the tourist info point, and went on foot north from Place Belecour towards the Opera, and then up and down on parallel streets in between these points.

All the people were photogenic and dressed really good. It was like Paris, minus the black people (no, i`m not racist … I call them how I see them).

The city is spread on two hills and is crossed by to streams of water. It`s magnificent.

On the Fourviere hill they built a cathedral: Notre-Dame de Fourviere, it`s the most beautiful cathedral I have seen to date, and the interior … breathtaking.

I`d love to tell you more about Lyon , but words could never match the city`s beauty.

The next day we headed back home (near Dijon). We were in for a surprize …

Tomorrow I`ll tell you about Bourgogne and the wine adventure. Don`t miss it, I have allot to blabber about!

The next day we hopped in the card for a 280km on the freeway towards Chamonix.
As expected, it rained allot. We were really hoping for good weather there. There`s no worst way of visiting Chamonix than on a rainy day. We had two of them!

The first day we took the special train that takes people to The Glacier (Mer de Glace). It was just like the iPad … magical. Mostly because when we got there, sun rays were protruding through the clouds just to make everything look good. I bet that on a clear day it`s way better, but we had to be grateful for what we had.

Mont Blanc was in the clouds so we decided to visit every street the small town has. We had lunch at a fancy restaurant (hey, might never know when we come back) and ended the day at a local pub, hoping for a better weather the next day. When we arrived at the hotel I tried some long-exposure shot from the balcony. At 5am , lacking sleep, I walked out on the balcony again for some more long-exposure shots. The day was looking grim.

At around 9am we decided to use our all-access passes to go across from Mont Blanc up in the clouds, with hope that if we`re that high, we`ll see the mountain top above the cloud blanket. That didn`t happen. The clouds were to thick and all we did was get wet and freeze.

We did a last effort to get to Auguille du Midi (tallest point to reach by gondola). 3842m. It`s the point from where we would have seen Mont Blanc if it weren`t for the pesky clouds. We froze our asses up there, and it snowed like crazy.

We did the smart thing and got the first ride down and left for Lyon.

Tomorrow I`ll tell you why I love Lyon.

After our 5 days in the Netherlands, we took the Thalys train to Paris Nord, hopped on the metro towards Garre du l`Est and from there after a 3h ride, we hopped off in Dijon. We stayed at a Motel ~50km from Dijon but we spent the 1st day in France in the town renowned for it`s Mustard.

The old town is beautiful and we were blessed by 30min of sun in the afternoon … just to really enjoy the trip sipping a coffee on the street. The last picture represents a huge graffiti on a sidewall of the fish-market (Les Halles).

Tomorrow I`ll tell you a thing or two about Chamonix.

So, as you probably know I made it. I`m an architect.

So to celebrate this and a friends 30th birthday (2 in 1) we headed to the Netherlands for a week. 4 out of 5 days it rained cats and dogs, but we managed to squeeze some strolling time in between the showers.

The pictures ar here just to reboot the blog. Mainly because people wanted to see the pictures on the blog and not have to search for them on Google+ , Facebook, Picasa and where not.

Enjoy.

Hello again,

Long time, no see. We`ve been through such a busy month that I neglected the blog completely.

Highlights:

• we packed our bags for USA, and by the time you read this entry, we`re probably over Switzerland, or over Greenland or maybe we just landed at O`Hare – Chicago (depending on your time-zone)
• we aced the final exams of our 5th year of Architecture.
• we went swimming at the seaside last week-end and it was great.
• I sold my Leica gear (buh bye dear friend) and some of the Nikon lenses we hardly used.
• I got a Nikon 17-35/2.8 that I love. It just blew me away from day one.
• I bought my first polarizer filter and I can barely wait to see it in action … outside!
• we posted a new CityHall Ceremony over @ the Wedding part of this site.
• we posted Fritz`s Wedding also over @ the Wedding site. You have to check this one out, we had a blast.
• we got to spend two days with Oana, Alexunu and Serban in Vama Veche, and as CS always says “pictures or it didn`t happed” … here are some.

• and who said you can`t do macro work with a wide-angle lens? (in my defence… it`s a heavy crop)

I`ll try to update everyday for the next 120 days but I might have days without internet access so if I skip some … oh well, you`ll live.

And the last “thanks!” goes to George for the Kruder & Dorfmeister song.

So, the photography workshop weekend is over.

We had a great time and met some very interesting new people. Besides the little problems we had with the tethering cable and one lousy chair that thought “Saturday 29th of may it`s a good time to die”, we managed to teach about studio lighting, how to work with the model and how to post-process the RAWs to an end-result.

Saturday:

Alexandra did great on her presentation managing to explain how to build your lighting set-up from the ground up and why we shouldn`t learn more than 3 setups by heart.

Vlad covered almost all the bases about the photographer-model interaction. And I say almost because I`m sure he could have talked 3h more if we had let him.

And I did my best at showing them what It can be done to fix a portrait photo. I kinda rushed it a bit at the beginning trying to make up for the lost time and that was frowned upon but then I slowed down and we managed to go only 1 hour past the 19:30 mark.

Sunday:

We divided into two groups: Alexandra played the role of the assistant setting up the lights and light modifiers for each participant and when their time was up I was the one to review the photographs, pick the best ones and play the graphic artist part for them answering every question the best I could. I have to admit there were some request I found easier to answer with a plug-in for PS … but those situations rarely occurred.

At 8PM we wrapped things up and went for some beers.

And because it`s not a photography workshop without pictures I`m going to post some just for fun, and in the end you`ll see some before / after shots…

Yes, you guessed it! We`re the ones behind all this! And we couldn`t have done it without the help of our beautiful models, the support of F64 via Kiko and our studio “assistant for the day” Arnold.

Random snaps…

And Alexandra, our model for Saturday`s presentation…

Sunday was the “shoot it / retouch it” day and i`m going to show you a picture “before / after” of each participant:

P.S. You can use the arrow keys to browse the photos once enlarged.

1. Cosmin Ene

2. Florin Novac

3. Dorin Anghel

4. Claudiu Pana

5. Elena Ioana

6. Radu Pencea

7. Daniel Vrabioiu

8. Mihai Balan

9. Mihai Nica

I hope all of you enjoyed the workshop as much as I did.

P.S. If you have the time, do write a few words about it over at F64`s page.