Luckily, i was able to fill last day of the weekend with some great stuff. we got up lately, had a lazy breakfast with remains of yesterday's pizza and a coffee, watched 'Deep sleep' with astonishing Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe (novels by Raymond Chandler were my extreme fave reading 20 years ago, especially 'The High Window' ) and...
And I still had a lot of time on my tips, and the sun was shining (i.e. it was a photo-friendly weater!). So I grabbed three lenses, 1 camera, 2 spare batteries, and headed to the Novodevitchii Monastery Necropol, the cemetary I wanted to walk and shoot so much... but alway put that plan away due to the poor light and bad weather.
So, the rest of the day I well-filled with the frost, great cemetery walk and, again, a great photosession, evening cycling, and some night photography. The images will need raw processing and god knows when I be able to shape a poper posts out of it, but let me share a few here-and-theres asap.
The Moscow Triumph gates (built by V.Stasov, 1835) at St.Petersburg
Note the bokeh -- I didnt use anything special, just the soviet manual fish-eye lens Zenitar 16mm. It is the 1st time I use it for the night shoting, I never expected it will bring on the table bokeh like that. I am very surprised, in a good way!
I am so in love with this Zenitar lens.. haha... probably like some of my friends are in love with Helios-44, another vintage and manual product of the soviet industry. Mmmm... for serious commercial shooting probably you probably better choose something more reliable, giving 100% clear result, ofc this is not the case... but for the fun of the process and artsy-fartsy playing, it is great. I am having so much fun with it, that... I mentioned that I borrowed 3 lenses with me today -- 50mm 1.4 and 16-35mm -- and, you know, I had not even a slightest desire to change fish-eye to something 'more reliable', 'crystal clear' and 'precise auto focusing'.
Now let me rewind it to 5 hours before. This is the Novodevitchii Monastery at Moskovsky ave, that has necropol I was so eager to visit. I headed here at 14:00, and reached it apparently by 14:30. It is not that far from my apartment.
[//]:# (!steemitworldmap 59.896716 lat 30.324708 long Novodevichii Monastery Nekropol (1) d3scr)
The sun wasnt that high.. the window before the end of the day and poor lighting was just about 60-90 minutes. So my walking was intense. At times I was running across the alleys a bit like a hare, trying to check every corner. Of course, I failed. This necropol is sufficient and requires a day dedication.. or maybe even more.
Same location, just another shot with different manual settings: I had to adjust everything manually, and at times tried to play with settings in 2-3 iterations, to get a proper result. It was a bit time consuming, but.. I guess worth it.
Probably, it all turned to good: my late visit... if I would came earlier, when the sun supposed to be higher, I would not get results like this. And, again, if I'd visit this place in August or September, everything would be green or yellow (actually, I wanted it to be yellow...) and the pics would be completely different sort, not like these lonely, praying, naked trees and branches... oh, my random unsupposed luck!
I wanted to check how this Zenitar 16mm lens work at contra light... results are good and bad -- it works, and gives nice results, but always providing some (not annoying) artifacts.
This certain picture (hi-res is clickable) has three (!) different sorts of it... these flares are not annoying to me, they are weird and shaped in an intresting way, but... still, they are.
Thanks to the frost, I had some beautiful sight of the leaves touched with frost (also thanks to the cemetary authorities who dont put much efforts into leaves-cleaning. God bless them! Seriously!!)
The alleys in the distant and perhaps less-visited areas of the cemetary, were all green from the moss, and even it was green with some silver (thanks to the frost). Miraculous pictures!
I spent almost 20 mins in the corner, trying to get a decent macro shots of some beautiful frost on the moss and the maple leaves.
Please check the full version of this image (clickable). I insist, my dear friends!
uff! probably time to round up the post and go to sleep. to be continued!
ps. you probably won't believe, but I found some fungi, as well!
@ewkaw, do you believe me? moss, frost... and fungi!
thank you for stopping by!