La Traviata – an open air opera in Lednice
In the middle of August 2013, I attended the 4th annual open air opera in Lednice, Czech republic. These events are being held each summer in the courtyards of beautiful Czech and Moravian castles. This year’s, the opera of choice was Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata. The tragic lovestory (as is the norm with operas) features Violetta Valeri, the famed Parisian courtesan and Alfredo Germont, a young bourgeois from provincial family.
So far, I’ve seen and photographed three operas in Lednice – Nabucco, Carmen and La Traviata. I must say this year’s production had the most talented singers. Miroslav Dvorsky, the Slovak tenor, sang the role of Alfredo. The role of Violetta was sang by Michaela Katrakova, the young soprano from Czech republic and I must say her performance was excellent.
The stage desing was seriously lacking though. There were only a couple of pilars on both sides and the entire middle section had nothing but black drapes. I think it looked very amateur-ish and it was also very challenging to photograph. Nevertheless, I managed to capture quite a few nice photos (click on the photo to see larger version).
Grand Prix Bratislava 2013
Last sunday I attended Mercedes Benz Grand Prix, the 48th annual show jumping event held in Bratislava, Slovakia. This prestigious 4-day equestrian event is usually held at the end of july or at the begining of the august, which means the most harsh sunlight during the day. The extreme heatwave, which has been torturing us for the past few weeks, made the shooting conditions even tougher.
Sunday saw two show jumping finals and one dressage show during the intermission. The dressage show featured four Lipizzaner horses, which is a breed closely associated with the Spanish Riding School of Vienna, Austria.
As I mentioned earlier, the shooting conditions were tough because of the harsh light and unbearable heat. There was some strong backlight during the morning and extremely strong light during mid-day dressage show. Towards the end of the day, the clouds covered the sun completely, so the end of the day was over-cast. Most of the riders were dressed in contrasty clothes, so the positive exposure compensation was needed at times. I also did considerable amount of shadows and highlights recovery in Lightroom 4.4. I was also happy with the AI Servo performance of my 1D Mark IV and I feel I finally figured out how to use this great camera.
More than 40 photos can be found on my blog:http://hutera.blog.sme.sk/c/334578/Grand-Prix-Bratislava-2013.html. I also posted some of my favorite photos in higher resolution below.
Nocturnals in the Light of the Day
This weekend, I attended the 7th annual Fotopark Exhibition, held in Bratislava. As the title says, it’s a photo exhibition held in a park. I covered the last year’s edition and my rather surprising win in the last year’s report.
A slight change of the scenery
The exhibition is traditionally held in a big park on the waterfront of the river Danube. A few weeks prior to the exhibition, Bratislava suffered a large-scale floodings. Because of this, the exhibition was moved to the less affected part of the waterfront. There were around 50 photographers showcasing their work. A different setting and a smaller amount of photographers resulted into the intimate atmosphere of the event.
You can’t please everybody
Last year, the jury said I should focus more on the night photographs, since not many people do that. I took their advice and put together a portfolio of night and twilight photographs I captured earlier this year:
The Night of Wonders
Purple Nights
The Wheel of Time
Obscured by Clouds
On The Cross-Road
Twins
During the day, I talked with quite a few people who were quite taken with my collection. I was the only one who showcased this kind of photos. I got lots of technical questions which I tried to answer as clearly as possible. I hope I inspired at least some of the visitors to try it themselves, even though it’s quite hard to get the night photos you’re at least partly happy with.
When the jury came to evaluate my work, they said something in line of “yeah, it’s quite good, better than last year, but we’d like to see something more extreme”. They were talking about the ridiculously visible Milky Way photos, that are very popular these days (That might change soon. Ian Plant has a different opinion about them). I answered this kind of phots are almost impossible to get in western Slovakia because of light pollution. I’m also not a big fan of “unrealistic” photos that are obtained by using astro-trac for several minutes to capture the Milky Way and then blended together with the regular twilight photo. The jury’s answer was “but the viewer doesn’t care about these things”. I guess you can’t please everybody.
Landscapers rule
Last year I wrote about the position of landscape photography in Slovakia. I have a feeling most professional jurys consider landscape photography as a second-class “art” that’s just there to please amateurs and uninitiated. The jury’s primary argument is, that there’s so much landscape photography in the world that no one’s original anymore. The competition is simply too great and therefore it’s pointless to showcase photos that aren’t unique, out-of-this-world etc. I’m very happy to report that the photo set that received most votes awarded by the visitors were landscapes. The jury also awarded the honorable mention award to the photographer who presented his mountain photographs from High Tatras National Park. Perhaps this is a sign of changing times and over time landscape photography will eventually get more recognition.
Final thoughts
Seven years is a long time. I’ve made a tremendeous progress since the first edition and I’m always looking forward to see complete strangers admiring my humble efforts and talking with about my photos. I’m not sure what I’ll be exhibiting next year, but perhaps I should make an effort to seek out another exhibitions and try something new in addition to this traditional exhibition.
Me with my collection of photographs. Photo courtesy of Andrea Hulalova
