Experiment

Today I went to the abandoned factory Rog with my friend Nikolaj. I planned on having a session there, so we went there to try a few improvised lighting setups, so I'd be ready for the session and wouldn't be loosing time with finding the right setup. Ok, setup is probably not the right word, since I only have a single Canon 430 EX flash unit and a 95 cm reflector. So we played around with different reflector positioning, bouncing the natural light from the reflector and flash from the ceiling or just flash of the reflector (in most cases). I hoped I'd be able to shoot with available light only in some parts of the factory, but unfortunately that wasn't possible. Besides that, my favourite prop was gone, a bed, a part of it really, made from wood and some kind of fabric, similar to velvet. I planned a big part of the session (with a female model, not with my friend:) around that bed. So I don't think I'm going to have a session there. What a shame, I was so happy, because I thought I found a great spot for my next session...

This shot was taken with the Canon 18-55 kit lens wide open (f3.5:)) and Canon 430 EX flash bounced off the reflector on the lower left and window light on the right:

Assistant

Today I was assisting Ciril Jazbec, who's in my opinion one of the best Slovenian photographers. We were shooting portraits of talented, promising young actors, painters, web designers etc for one of the slovenian magazines. The session took place in an abandoned factory Rog in Ljubljana. The environment was awesome.
It was a great experience working with Ciril and watching him in action. I took only a few photos, since we were on a pretty tight schedule, so nothing special came out, I'm posting these two photos, so you can see the environment we worked in.

Full Frameless

Yeah, Canon 1Ds mkII is gone. I had to return it yesterday. Damn, it was fun using it, I was doing real min DOF shots for the whole weekend. I plan on buying Canon 5/6D and Canon 135 f2L 'till the end of this year anyway. So sooner or later I'll own the min (or mean:) DOF machine and use it all the time, not just from time to time like now. I can't wait...

These are the last photos taken with it. It was on Sunday during the "coffee time". I took just a few shots and those two came out pretty interesting.

1st photosession with Mina

I gotta say it was a good day. Session was great because I was working with the beauty and the beast. Mina was the beauty and the beast was Canon 1Ds mkII. It was pretty warm (12C) so she didn't freeze in that mini-skirt.

All the photos are straight from Rawshooter (we finished the session 3 hours ago), so no Photoshop postprocessing is done. I've taken all the shots, except of the first one (with 50 1.8) with Canon 85 1.8.

1Ds mkII and my "retarded" friend

Lately I really enjoy taking these kind of photos. Relaxed, stupid and without any pressure on me (there sometimes is when I do something serious). Besides that it's really fun for me and my friends, we're laughing out our asses when we're reviewing the photos. Some of you that are reading this, are probably thinking that this is a waste of a 7000 euros camera. But it's not. It's not even mine, besides that I have a session tomorrow for the cover of ONA magazine.

All of the photos are taken with Canon 1DS mkII and Canon EF 85 1.8. Most of them are shot wide open, the rest in the f2-2.5 range.





Another, normal friend joined the "session"

And here's another I took right after I got the camera. Unfortunately battery was almost empty so I managed to take just a few shots

Slo-foto.net bowling party - part deux

I've already posted the best from this party, now I'm posting the rest, so that people can see some more of their photos.









His style is wild:)

Adsense and a few tips for increasing revenues

This post is going to be totally non-photographical, but still very useful to many of the visitors of my blog. As you can see, I've already put google ads on my blog, which are already bringing me revenue. I like adsense, because it's so easy to use. Once you've signed up and copy/pasted the code, all you have to do is wait for the commercial ads to work (at first public service ads will be displayed, for which you will not receive earnings), this may take up to 48 hours (it took less then 12 hours in my case). From then all you'll have to do, is to make your site interesting enough to get a lot of visitors and to keep them coming back.

A few tips that will increase revenues:
1. match every aspect of your AdSense ads to the theme of your website. What you want to do is remove the borders from your AdSense ads and match the background color of the ad to your website. Additionally, you want to match the color of the AdSense links to the rest of the links on your website plus choose an ad format that makes the ads look seamless
2. ad placement:
-the closer to the top of the page the better
-the closer the left of the page the better

Ofcourse there are many more tips floating on the web, I've written down just the most important ones. Besides that I'm pretty new to adsense and I'm still looking for ways to improve ad revenue myself.

Here's a link to the official Google adsense help center where you can get more detailed info o how to get started, everything about earnings, improving performance etc.