Negative mist

Usually the mist does not look like that, you'll need only a bit of imagination

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Archive: Cheese (NSFW)

A cheesy editing effect for all those who swear converting a picture in black and white makes it automatically more artistic.

The Archive is a series of older photos involving some degree of nudity. All the pictures are taken a few years ago, but were not published to the blog (most of them were not published before at all), thus the name of the series.

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Editing a bit of drama

Not having anything planned, I didn't carry a tripod with me, so here is how I made it: the singe RAW (.cr2) image opened with UFRaw (the GIMP plugin version) and saved as 3 JPEGs: -1, 0 and +1 exposure. JPEGs imported in Luminance HDR and assembled as not a very obvious HDR, edit levels for more drama and export as one JPEG. Some final tweaks with GIMP and the result is this.

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Smoke in colors

Continuing the play with smoke photography, a next step was editing it, so fired-up GIMP and made this. The photo is real, the coloring is post-processing.

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Parenting: surrounded

I got the taste for multiple exposure composition for the parenting series. I guess I should calm down a bit for the future :)

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Parenting: flight

Continuing the "parenting" series, today is the time for some flying.

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Making of Parenting: Xmas

For those who liked my Xmas picture in the Parenting series, I am breaking some of its magic with a 'making of': tripod, remote trigger, multiple shots, loaded as layers, masks.

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Parenting: Xmas

We are near Christmas, so it was obvious one of the pictures in my parenting series will have a Christmas theme. Actually my first concept for it was "preparing to set the Xmas tree on fire" but I ducked it to prevent any possible domestic debates.

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More waterdrops

The cinemagraph before opened my appetite, so I made one more: the same place, the same rain, one single cup from the pack.

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Waterdrops

A little cinemagraph with the rain dropping in and around the small cups.

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GIMPing

I got some homework to do: photoshopping some animal pictures, but since I don't like Photoshop, I used GIMP instead, therefore my action should be called GIMPing.

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Perfectly safe!

If I am already in the April Fool's Day with demotivational images, I guess I can continue with a picture I took yesterday at Comic Con Eastern Europe in Bucharest

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April Fools

Busy with a lot of things, I forgot today is April Fools' Day, realized it only today at noon, so didn't have the time to plan anything. But wanting to do something, I used the little one, my Ace in the sleeve.

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Advertising: event photography

If so far I flirted with event photography, this year I am getting serious in this, showing how it can be done in a professional manner. From the various types of events, from corporate to anniversaries and ceremonies, the wedding are the most important and their season is closing fast, clients should waste no time in booking the services, as soon many photographers will be fully loaded. Preparing for this year's season, I launched a few weeks ago an event photography website targeting weddings, baptisms, anniversaries, corporate events, spectacles and such. There is also this set of posters, sampling some of my works and capabilities.

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Photo editing tutorials

Lately I wrote on my general blog a couple of photo editing tutorials, both of them are targeted at GIMP, since this is what I use on my day to day work. Of course, the principles are general and can be applied to other similar tools.

The first one is about watermark removal on photos submitted to Wikipedia, this is something perfectly legal, since those pictures are submitter under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

The second tutorials refers to creating customs grids to be used on photo editing but also in graphic and layout design.

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Purple haze tutorial

I rarely cross-post things from one of my blogs to another, but now my sarcastic howto edit photos for an iPhone 5 look is somewhat on-topic here, so if you want to make a bit of fun about the defective iPhone camera while learning a tiny bit of GIMP editing, go read it.

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Referendum

The political situation in Romania turned as bad as expected, with the democratically elected president suspended by a rogue government and we are heading for a referendum this Sunday. Fortunately, the European Commission acted and made the government to respect the law (the government tried to put a government order in place of the law and eliminate the presence threshold for the referendum), so in the light of this, the most effective way to act against it, Romanians who want to preserve the democracy have as the best option to boycott the referendum, this way it will be invalidated in the case of a small voter turnover. Hopefully, the fraud won't change the numbers from a projected 30% presence to the 50%+1 they need.
In support of the democratic action, I made a few images based on my old photos encouraging people to avoid a communist future for the country by boycotting the referendum.
Personally, I won't vote and on top of that I will be out of the city for the next few days, I am going to the sea side (expect pictures).

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Vienna: beer festival

Another totally random encounter in Vienna was a beer festival taking place near the city center, a few hundreds of meters away from the St. Stephan cathedral. The setting was not very different from the festivals at home, the same tables and chairs, some different brands of beer and food, a much larger orchestra playing.

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Old photo, new edit

I needed a pictures with water drops for a little photo contest among a small group of friends, this is what I tool the roses, skin and water drops series, but unfortunately I had some publishing restrictions suddenly appearing on it, with no time for new pics, there is a "plan B" to activate: get an old pic and make the best of it for the contest. So here's the old pic with today's editing:

And if curious, the old version from about 3 years ago when I was a newbie photographer with beginner's gear and a lot less editing experience:

However, I expect some (trolling or not) to prefer the older version (these days I am reading a book about "extreme" editing makeover, so is not impossible I went overboard or was misguided).

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