In the light

Shadows, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Today was a cold, sunny day, with a light wind. I had a long walk outside with the children, taking a couple of photos although I wasn't really in the mood.

At one point I got interested in photographing the reflections of people from flowing water, thinking that the strong contrasts and interesting shapes generated by the dark water would look great in a photo. But all photos turned out bad - either a bad composition (distracting elements) or technical failures (overexposure, wrong focus).

Suprisingly, this self-portrait was something I didn't think would work at all, but after some cropping the result is the best from today. No great, but at least it shows the light and the long shadows of a winter day.

Update: Today I noticed that Photomatix Pro can open the LX3 raw files (.rw2) directly without any conversion. The images are not corrected for the lens distortions, so the angle of view is larger than 24 mm. What I'm planning to do is to try out a workflow for high-contrast scenes which are hard to catch in jpeg. From the first experiments it seems that it is not easy to find the right tonemapping etc. settings, but in one photo which I took using the internal LX3 flash I was able to combine the available lighting with the flash-lighted areas quite naturally. But this wasn't quite straightforward to do, and seems to require different settings for different images.