I love autumn. The colors in the sky, the colors on earth… they’re magical.
Autumn sunrise over the old nut tree. (Shot with Pixel 4; minor post-processing.)
This morning, it was the sky.
What if cameras were able to show what we see with our own eyes? Hélas! Ce n’est pas possible… pas encore.
P.S. Five minutes later… and the colors were gone.
Only five minutes later…
On 11/Sep./2021, we went to Marchaevo village. There is a nice forest right next to the village where we may go every once in a while. It’s not a very popular place so we could enjoy some peace and quiet — which is always a nice thing. :-)))
An experiment — let’s give some tangerines and bread to the red-black ants… and see what happens a couple of hours later!
Just a crop of the previous photo. I love all the details that the Pixel 4 was able to capture in this macro.
A Scottish thistle, also known as Onopordum acanthium.
Brambles. They were tasty, too, not only beautiful!
“The Peaceful Forest”
“The Peaceful Forest, Part II”
A magical web.
Birches at sunset.
The experiment, three hours later — the bread has 100% disappeared; while the tangerines were still work-in-progress. :-)
A deer, staring at our car!
When we were going back to Sofia, Ani suddenly saw a deer! A young beautiful deer. We have never seen a deer around these places — but lo and behold! here it was. We tried a shot or two, but of course, a digital zoom is no match to an optical one and the photos were blurry and pixelated. Still… more important is that we saw this beautiful animal. :-)
The deer stared at us for a minute or two, and we stared at the deer. Then it left — jumping elegantly, it soon disappeared in the woods next to this meadow.
This was the most magical thing of that day…
*update* (10:37): Ani made a better photo — still blurry but it’s better, here’s a crop:
![The forest of Marchaevo: A deer. [photo by Ani]](https://www.optimiced.com/wp-uploads/2021/09/Screenshot_20210911-194050_2.jpg)
Yesterday, it was Tuesday, just a regular day full of work and other tasks. But the kid suggested in the morning, “Hey dad, can we go see the nice plateau near Kumata chalet? After you have finished work?” and I said, “Sure, why not?”.
And so we went there — we reached the plateau right before sunset, after harvesting quite a few wild raspberries along the path leading up. :-) The air was clear and fresh, the raspberries were perfect, and the sunset was beautiful.
All in all, it was a very good idea to run away from the big city for a couple of hours! (And while high up in the mountains, we could forget all the bad news of late…)
While we were heading home, we saw a wild baby fox crossing our road carefully — we don’t have a photo proof of this but some things should better be kept in our hearts and memory, I think…
Soon, more “afternoon adventures” like this one, I hope. :-)
Indeed.
I didn’t write here recently, nor did I post new photos…
* * *
I spent many years with Nokia Lumia 830 (Windows Phone 8.1). Lumia 830 has a brilliant camera! I especially like how it “paints” light (a.k.a. bokeh) when you shoot close-ups/macro. Here are two examples with Lumia 830:
Roses in the hot summer afternoon… — 500px. (Nokia Lumia 830)
Little Magical Forest Kingdom — 500px. (Nokia Lumia 830)
Carl Zeiss optics, ’nuff said! (Of course, when you shoot portraits and make photos from a greater distance, things become much more ordinary — the limitations of the too small lens come into play.)
But the hardware and the software of the Lumia 830 became too old, this is a 5+ years old model. So time has come for something new —
— Google Pixel 4 (Google Android 11). Pixel 4 als has great optics! Here are two sample photos which I made with the Pixel 4:
Sunset. (Google Pixel 4)
Little mushrooms. (Google Pixel 4)
In addition to the good optics of the Pixel 4 (which can be compared with the Lumia 830 optics), the Pixel has a powerful AI which is able to improve the dynamic range of the photos (shadows and highlights can be well balanced), it can shoot in portrait mode (put the subject in focus and “blur” the background), it can shoot stars, and more and more… But I’ll write about the Pixel 4 in more detail maybe some other time… :-)
…Often, it can be as fun as sailing on the ocean! :-)
(This is Esperanza, a 40-footer sloop, sailing in nice 15+ knots of wind on a sunny Sunday afternoon, on Iskar lake. 21/Jun/2020)
So nice — a domestic dinosaur…
…who also happens to love Fabuland animals! ;-)
I made the photo today, Aug. 11, right before sunset. One of my first experiments in HDR post-processing.
