Blue in the streets of Alicante
It is wonderful to stroll through these colourful streets of Alicante and taste the history and the Arab influences (the palmtree is just an example). Enjoy the pictures of the streets of Alicante.
Sources of fake news
At the top of this post the Falla that had a very prominent position at the Plaza del Ayuntamiento. Below one that received a lot of prizes.
Prize winning Falla
Another activity is the parade of Valencians dressed in folkloric costumes to take flowers to the Virgin Mary (video L’Ofrena de flors) at Plaza de la Reina. On the way going there we met this beautifully dressed lady being very proud to wear her folkloric costume.
Fallera
After sunset the streets near the Fallas are beautifully lighted, often with live music, places to have a drink or take a bite.
Lights in the evening
After midnight the day ends with a spectacular fireworks. Fallas in Valencia is another check on my bucket list. Many more pictures and videos were taken with my iPhone X, except for the top one, this was taken with my Nikon D800.
Andorra is a small country in the Pyrenees, a mountain range between France and Spain. It is a paradise for both skiers and hikers.
One hike took us to the north-western side of Andorra (Arcalis). Before starting I turned on the Komoot app on my iPhone to register my hike. I do this also to keep track of the the location where I took my pictures (see below). First we took a ski lift to take us all the way to the border between France and Andorra (the straight line on the map below).
[
www.komoot.de/tour/19808217 ]
After getting of the ski lift the first thing you see is this small lake, called Étang de Caraussans, surrounded by mountains in France.
From there we walked to the highest point of our hike: 2690 meters. There you could see three lakes, called Estany de Més Amunt, in Andorra. As you can see, all very impressive.
After taking some more pictures I walked all the way down to the starting point of the ski lift at 2220 meter. To be honest, I was glad I had taken the ski lift to get up.
Back at home I ingest my pictures in Photo Mechanic, I first throw away the bad pictures. Using the trail information from Komoot, Photo Mechanic figures out where I took the pictures (synchronisation is done based on time). Then I make a backup of the NEF-pictures on my NAS.
The next step is to open the pictures in Lightroom to process them. Although it was sunny, I really had to add quite a bit of liveliness and contrast to the pictures.
After saving them as DNG-pictures, I decide which pictures I will upload to Dreamstime. Within a couple of days I heard that all of my pictures were accepted. To give the buyers the opportunity to buy a DNG format of the picture, I also upload these. Furthermore, I do a bit of advertisement on Facebook.
Here you see all of the pictures I took during several hikes in Andorra (made with jAlbum). Enjoy!
The diagonal roof line is an essential characteristic of the building, so I cropped the picture to map the roof line close to the diagonal line of the picture. It makes the picture a lot stronger. The additional advantage was that I got rid of the glass building on the right (it distracts).
As you can imagine, I took a lot of pictures of this building. In the end, I chose the one with the person in front. It gives depth and it leads your eyes to switch between the shape of the station and him.
Last, I made the picture more lively: blue sky and yellow in the building. Especially the diagonal roof lost its color because of various shadows.
The colourful sky is one of the most fascinating scenes to take a picture of. Quite often people start to shoot too early, resulting in a very dominating orange ball called the sun. I prefer to start when the sun is almost disappearing behind the horizon. Then the sky and the sun are in balance and the clouds in the sky get an orange backlight.
The above picture was taken at roughly 22:00 hours at the end of May along the coast of Noordwijk aan Zee, the Netherlands. Right at the time of the sunset. Just a few minutes later the sun had completely disappeared.
What makes this picture special is of course the shape of the clouds and the way they are lighted. Some are dark and others are orange backlighted. Also the texture of the clouds adds to the special atmosphere of the evening. Furthermore, there is a subtle orange glow on the water.
The picture was taken with the zoomlens set at 28mm, shutter speed 1/80th of a second, aperture f/5, and ISO 100. Below you see the unprocessed NEF version. It is not very appealing.
NEF version of sunset
In Adobe Lightroom 6 I did the following:
Lightroom automatically set the temperature to 4900 (I did not change it)
set the correction profile for the lens I used (Nikkor 28-300mm)
set liveliness to +68
set saturation to +2
set the horizon straight
decreased locally the highlight caused by the sun.
The rest remained the same. This makes the picture much more appealing without overdoing is. It is important to only make subtle changes. Here you will find more of my photo albums. If you are interested in having this picture on canvas, please click here.
The picture got accepted by Dreamstime within 2 days.
During my recent visit to China I visited four universities. One of them was NPU, where NPU and the University of Twente signed an agreement about student exchange. Below the official ceremony.
Signing Ceremony NPU
After this ceremony I was lucky to do some sightseeing in Xi’an in the Shaanxi Province with two Chinese friends. During the Zhou dynasty it was the capital of China. First, we visited the Terracotta Army, some 50 km outside the city. It is incredible to imagine that these terracotta soldiers date back to roughly 200 BC, and were only discovered as recent as 1974. These soldiers and animals were buried with the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, to protect him. The Terracotta army is a kind of funerary art.
My youngest friend persuaded me to climb the seven story high pagoda. Well, I made it, and took some nice pictures of Xi’an. The first version of the pagoda was built in 652.
At night it is very nicely lit and close by every evening there is a nice fountain performance with music. The squares in the neighbourhood are crowded with groups performing dances.
Xi’an at nightDancing in Xi’an
This concludes the first day of my visit to Xi’an. After a good diner at Xi Bei You Mian Cun Restaurant with my friends I went back to my hotel.
Xi Bei You Mian Cun
Look here if you are interested in my second day visiting Xi’an. Here are the pictures of Xian that have been accepted by Dreamstime. I used my general-purpose Nikkor lens: 28-300mm.
And here are my album of the pictures I took of the Terracotta Army.
Normally I visit The Hague for business reasons, for example to visit the ministeries. This time it was a short holiday with the family. We stayed in a very nice, spacious apartment of Stayci near the Grote Markt. Every morning we had a luxurious breakfast with Anne&Max near the Saint Jacob Church. It was a real treat.
It just happened that we walked by an Escher exhibition in the former Winter Palace of Queen Mother Emma in The Hague. M.C. Escher is a famous Dutch graphic artist. Besides his earlier work on sketches of buildings, towns, and landscape when he was in Spain and Italy, he is most famous for his “impossible figures”, like the one below.
Belvedere
One evening we had a wonderful diner in Restaurant La Passione (Italian cuisine). The food was really exquisite. We will definitely visit this restaurant again. Below you will see the owner preparing my dorade with sea salt crust.
Restaurant La Passione
One museum that is always worthwhile a visit is the Mauritshuis (see bottom, yellow building). They have paintings of, among others, the famous Dutch painters Johannes Vermeer, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Jan Steen. One of their pearls is of course the Girl with a pearl earring of Johannes Vermeer.
Girl with a pearl earring
Strolling through The Hague was really enjoyable. The variety in architecture gave us the feeling that we were abroad. However, the main reason for going was to show our youngest son the political center of the Netherlands: het Binnenhof, with het Torentje (office of the prime minister; see below), and de Ridderzaal (Hall of Knights, see top).
Homepage Dreamstime
The posts on Peter Apers Photoblog have two purposes: on the one hand, I like to share my knowledge and experience of photography and, on the other hand, I like to share the beauty of my pictures. To do so, I always include a link to a relevant album in my post. I have been doing this now for more than a year.
Via Google Analytics I have noticed that, besides supporting family members, only every now and then somebody looks at my posts and albums. To increase the traffic to both of them I started a Facebook page Peter Apers Photography and started to write posts on the blog of Dreamstime.
As it turns out both are quite popular. My latest post at Dreamstime about Machu Picchu ended up on the homepage of Dreamstime for more than a week (see picture above). More than 870 people looked at it, genetaring a lot of traffic to my albums on my NAS. Also, the posts on Facebook are doing quite well. The last one on my visit to Yellow Mountain reached more than 160 people.
My albums on my NAS are produced using jAlbum. From such an album I can directly generate a post on Facebook. To also create a link to the relevant post on my photoblog, I include a few lines and a link to the post on the front page of the album. To attract people to my collection at Werk aan de Muur I also make posts on Facebook based on the pictures I have there.
The result is that my albums are viewed by a handful of people on a daily basis. The blogs on my Photoblog still attract only a few people. All in all, the sales have not gone up substantially yet, despite the increase of traffic to my collections at Dreamstime and at Werk aan de Muur. I guess I have to invest more time in this. Here you find my pictures at Dreamstime and here at Werk aan de Muur. Enjoy!
