StarDestroyer.Net BBS

So I went to Prague and came back. Go me.

These are the shots from my digital camera, the rolls from the other two aren't developed yet. We stayed just outside the centre in a totally kickass hostel, doing the big tourist traps during the day and savouring the local alcoholic produce in the evenings (PROTIP: plum brandy tastes like tractor fuel).

If you ever have the chance, take a day to see the city, but don't expect to be entertained much longer than that. There are some very interesting sights to see and places to visit, and you can certainly spend a week there during the summer months, but off-season you can see pretty much anything worth seeing in three days, tops. That said, it certainly was worth it. The city has some amazing history and architecture behind it, and if you bother to learn a few words of Czech the locals do get a bit friendlier (address someone behind a counter in English and they are efficient but distant; open with a badly-pronounced dobry den and you get a beaming smile).

So then... welcome to Prague:



I kid. This too is Prague, but most of the city is hardly distinguishable from any other Western European capital. You see some remnants of the Soviet era, but most people seem to prefer ignoring that period never xisted. All the historic sites do their best to pretend nothing happened between 1945 and 1990, and the city looks like it went through some sort of crash-modernization in the last twenty years; vintage trams with LCD monitors and all that.



We made the mistake of getting off the tram at the museum; instead of walking into the cosy alleys and medieval squares of the Old City centre proper, you end up on a grimy boulevard filled with jewellery shops. It's a really poor first impression of the city.



The National Museum. This was a bit of a let-down; the building's nice, but it doesn't offer much to anyone who isn't a die-hard fossil fan. It didn't help that it was free the day we visited and thus completely overrun by school children.





Pražský Hrad, the 'castle' (more of a citadel, really) that towers over the city. It's a handy visual reference point.



One of the few images I have of the Jewish quarter. I was a bit hesitant to visit the Jewish neighbourhood, since I don't know that much about Jewish history and architecture.

I could not have been more wrong.

Each of the visitable synagogues had expositions and artefacts of Jewish life and history in the city, and it was one of the best days of my visit. One particular exhibit hit me like a punch to the gut; a collection of artworks, drawn by Jewish children from Prague during the Second World War, including pieces that were recovered from the concentration camps. If you have even the vaguest piece of humanity in you this exhibit is hard to get through, but it is more than worth it. I have seen the hall with the names of those killed by the nazis, I have seen the cemetery, but if there's one thing I won't forget it's those crayon drawings.



The Astronomical clock at city hall with some ghosts.

Next up, the Castle. It's a short climb that gets you some great views:







Beautiful Gothic architecture at the cathedral.

We got to see the changing of the guard at noon. It's your typical guard ceremony - shouting, parading, sabres and all that. the music was better than I expected though, very Thunderbirds-y.











Prague's City Hall (well, the half that wasn't grenaded to rubble by the Nazis) has a dungeon that used to be a pub, the dungeon has a pit, the pit has a... CD:





Going up the City Hall tower. There's an elevator, but the stairs (well, gentle slopes really) keep you fit.







Charles Bridge tower. Once more onto the stairs... this one has a hilarious video playing in the hell on the first floor which runs for twenty minutes and explains diddely-squat. It's a shame, because the building itself is amazing.





That last one is taken on the roof. When I say roof, I mean roof, as in "don't trip over the shingles" roof.





A few random shots from the part of the town across the river.

More when the rest is developed.

Nice pictures. I really like the tall shots of quiet streets, it's so rare to see anything like that here. Especially since every road is straight. as. an. arrow.

The one on the roof (DAREDEVIL!), what's up with those supports on the bridge on the left side, that aren't..connected to the bridge? Are they just to break the rivers flow so it doesn't hit the pillars of the bridge as hard?

Are they just to break the rivers flow so it doesn't hit the pillars of the bridge as hard?

Dunno. We thought they were meant to keep ships from hitting the pillars.

Personally I don't like most of the pictures I took. It's not easy to get the sights of the city on a photograph, and even harder when you don't have the time to loiter and try to find the right place to shoot. Most of these were taken on-the-fly and it shows.

They could be to deflect things like ice floes, logs, and other big rubbish and keep them from jamming up against the bridge pilings. Enough flotsam could start to dam up the space between pilings, creating a hazard to navigation and slowing the river upstream of the bridge as well as raising water levels a little. I don't know if that would pose a hazard to the bridge itself, but it would definitely interfere with the river as a useful and safe waterway. Of course, this assumes that the river flows from left to right in the photo.

It's too bad you were rushed through, since haphazard holiday snaps are so disappointing when you want to recall the sights. My trip around Europe almost eight years ago netted me five or six rolls of poor-quality snapshots, and I'm rather frustrated that I was so careless making photos back then. That said, I think your location in the 15th, 19th, and 23rd photos offered potential for good shots if you'd had the time to play around with angle and focal length, and if the conditions were a bit better. Is it overcast so often, or are the clouds part of a seasonal weather pattern?

#15's a funny story - we got into that part of the castle ten minutes before it closed, after we were already ushered out of a closing exhibit, and we literally had to run through it. It was a damn shame, since we passed Franz Kafka's former home and I didn't even notice it...

I understand the angle, but what do you mean when you say "focal length"? Did I just mis-focus? (Probably sounds like the dumbest question ever, but me and terminology... yeah).

#19... maybe you noticed that all the high-up shots were taken while tucked behind parapets I'm not good with heights. Really not good at all. In the City Hall tower it took me a good five minutes to work up the courage to step outside, and I while I wished I could have stayed there a few more minutes to really capture the view, it was bad enough taking those shots and a few with the Argus. It's a damn shame, too, since those were some of the best sights in the city.

The clouds were, I think, seasonal. We didn't see sunlight for almost the entire trip; every day was full, bright overcast combined with a smoggy haze over the city.

No, focus was fine. Focal length refers to the distance between the rear nodal point of the lens and the plane of the negative at infinity focus (cribbed directly from Adams); the upshot is that lenses with a long focal length have a narrower angle of view but 'bring you closer' to whatever is in that field, while lenses with a short focal length have a wider angle of view but 'set you back' from what you see, relative to normal vision. Normal is a lens with a focal length about equal to the diagonal of the negative.

You could, e.g., stand on a high vantage point and then use a longer lens (I would try my 135mm first) to pick out a photogenic section of that sea of rooftops, or to funnel the view more directly down that canal. Alternately, the colored housefronts in the alley in #15 look like they would be worth getting out my 55mm or the 28mm wide and dry-framing different angles of those. That kind of thing - but all the looking around does require several minutes per frame, so it's not really possible when you're in a rush.

Phantasee wrote: The one on the roof (DAREDEVIL!), what's up with those supports on the bridge on the left side, that aren't..connected to the bridge? Are they just to break the rivers flow so it doesn't hit the pillars of the bridge as hard?

Those things are there so that Vin Diesel can drive motorboats over them (compare XXX)

Nice pictures, and yeah Prague is awesome. I shall check my photos at home to see if I can dig something up to complement your shots.

Nice shots .
All of my shots of Prague were lost when my camera conked out. (Holocause memorial trip in 11th grade). .

You need to crop some of the first shots though (elbow, half head in the shot). Nice stuff .
See, that's the difference between film and digital - one's a good looking, high quality cheap piece of hardware. The other's small, easy to use and takes about 5 minutes for you to have your pictures (which are free to take/no film).
Welcome to the dark side

Quite nice. I've been meaning to go to Prague, but most of my friends are only interested in savouring the local alcoholic flavours. And by "local" I mean the cheapest booze/beer they can get, regardless of taste or origin.

Bloody barbarians

Dooey Jo wrote:Quite nice. I've been meaning to go to Prague, but most of my friends are only interested in savouring the local alcoholic flavours. And by "local" I mean the cheapest booze/beer they can get, regardless of taste or origin.

Bloody barbarians

Pilssner, Berechkova (sp?) = good
Plum brandy = avoid like death itself

This takes me back... I was in Prague three years ago with school, wonderful city, except for the times when you can't move for the souvenier stands EVERYWHERE.

Two of my rolls have gone missing. I had someone else pick up my photos and they only brought back one set. Hrmpf.

I'll swing by the photographer tomorrow to pick up the rest. Still, here's the best ones (or rather, the ones that don't show people acting like idiots) of the Argus' first roll:



View from a cute little restaurant tacked onto the side of a hill.

















Not bad for a fifty year old brick, eh?

That clock looks pretty neat. What's up with it?

The Argus's shots look kinda smokey/hazy, nah? A little yellow, too. I finally got the brightness set right on my monitor, but it has a tendency to wash colours out a bit, but the earlier pictures in digital were just fine, so I'm assuming it was the camera.

The clock is very nice.
You need to start getting used to getting closer to your objects though. And as before, there's a yellow-brown muddy tint to these photos.

That clock looks pretty neat. What's up with it?

It's the Astronomical Clock, which is part-clock (with cute little animatronics, like a skeleton ringing a bell on the hour), part-astronomic computer. Wiki has the manual

The Argus's shots look kinda smokey/hazy, nah? A little yellow, too.

And as before, there's a yellow-brown muddy tint to these photos.

Yeah, I don't know where that comes from. I kinda like it myself, it's a lot easier on the eye than the digital's sterile look. It's either the film or the lens, don't know which.

Bounty wrote:

And as before, there's a yellow-brown muddy tint to these photos.

Yeah, I don't know where that comes from. I kinda like it myself, it's a lot easier on the eye than the digital's sterile look. It's either the film or the lens, don't know which.

It works with brown earthy landscapes. With cities - not so much.

I can't seem to get rid of it in the GIMP, either. I tried making the clock more neutral using the other shots as a reference but the effect stays there.

As for getting closer - how close is close enough? I was always told to step back, but that's with the digital where you can crop like a madman.

Bounty wrote:I can't seem to get rid of it in the GIMP, either. I tried making the clock more neutral using the other shots as a reference but the effect stays there.

As for getting closer - how close is close enough? I was always told to step back, but that's with the digital where you can crop like a madman.

It's not a rule - Close enough that the branches don't crap up your frame, and to get other stuff out of your FoV. It's not a rule, just a recomendation (And a very good one I must say).

I think it's something crapped up with your camera or how it processes the film internally, it shows up constantly in your shots.

I have the other two rolls. Not much to write home about, I'm afraid - the Zorki wasn't loaded right (badly-cut leader that slipped and the roll didn't engage the sprockets right, I think) so it's improper spacing all over the place and the start and end of the roll are botched. These are the salvageable ones, all about as viscerally riveting as watching paint dry:











As for the Argus, it's just more of the same, really. I don't like posting shots with friends in them, so all that's left is buildings and vistas that you've seen before.

I like shots 2,4,5,6,7 and the last shot. The colours in 2 and of the red tile roofs are good as well.

What was the weather like? Your skies are always overblown. (White - outside of the dynamic range)

What was the weather like? Your skies are always overblown. (White - outside of the dynamic range)

Fully overcast, bright sun above that. It was basically a shiny white blanket.

Bounty wrote:

What was the weather like? Your skies are always overblown. (White - outside of the dynamic range)

Fully overcast, bright sun above that. It was basically a shiny white blanket.

Sounds like Alaska.

Bounty wrote:As for getting closer - how close is close enough? I was always told to step back, but that's with the digital where you can crop like a madman.

Death wrote:It's not a rule - Close enough that the branches don't crap up your frame, and to get other stuff out of your FoV. It's not a rule, just a recomendation (And a very good one I must say).

I'm going to have to up Death's ante and say that the ideal "close enough" is "as close as you need to be, and no further." You want to position yourself at a distance and angle so that nothing is in your frame that you don't put there, and you oughtn't put anything in your frame that doesn't serve the purpose of your photo. Maybe for snapshots all you need to worry about is fringe clutter; for more deliberate photos you want to pare away all extraneous details.

You snapshoot like I snapshoot, and like pretty much everyone else snapshoots: "This [object or scene] is really neat, and I'm going to take a picture of it. How can I get as much of it into the frame as possible from where I am standing right now?" This serves the purpose of the snapshot just fine. But most good photographs require deliberation, and that deliberation usually boils down to focus: "What, exactly, is it that I want to show people in this photo? What details make [large object or distant scene] worth looking at, and how can I frame and compose so that the photo is distilled down to those details?" Ultimately, closeness is about your creative control over the image. Being far away from something lessens your ability to use positioning to present the object as you want to and increases the odds that people or other objects will obstruct it; it dilutes whatever made the scene strike you in the first place; and it distances the object from the viewer of the photo, weakening or eliminating its impact. Even in Ansel Adams' landscapes of Very Big Things, the photos themselves bring those things within the grasp of the viewer; he feels that he could hike right over to those monoliths if he was actually there.

Death wrote:What was the weather like? Your skies are always overblown. (White - outside of the dynamic range)

White also = white, and light gray = light gray. Thin overcast looks like this to the naked eye as well; Bounty's skies are just bright and plain, not blown.

This kind of overcast is great as a light source when you want even lighting but its brightness tends to distract the eye from the stuff on the ground, which is evenly lit but still darker than usual because of the clouds. It's best to try to keep it out of the frame where possible, unless you are exposing for the sky specifically and can underexpose a bit.

Bounty wrote:I can't seem to get rid of it in the GIMP, either. I tried making the clock more neutral using the other shots as a reference but the effect stays there.

Death wrote:I think it's something crapped up with your camera or how it processes the film internally, it shows up constantly in your shots.

The camera doesn't process anything; it just shines light on it. If these were prints or scans or prints, the print itself would be by first line of suspicion. Next would probably be the lens coating if there is one, since it might have degraded some with time. I'm pretty sure one of my 55/1.8s with a slightly decayed coating gives a faint yellow tint when I look through it at bright white snow. It could also be the scan, though I would expect the effect to be more varied across all those frames. It probably isn't the film itself, though, since all but the shadiest, dirt-cheapest of films are pretty consistent - and also the effect persisted through three rolls.

All my scans are done by the same photographer from the same film stock so I doubt that's the cause. The lens sounds like the most likely culprit. It doesn't have a cap, lord knows what it's been exposed to.

Meanwhile, the Zorki's shutter has sorta decided to call it quits after just a week. Either I can try to fix it, or that's the last I-22 pictures you'll see until I can get a Leica-compatible body cheap

You snapshoot like I snapshoot, and like pretty much everyone else snapshoots: "This [object or scene] is really neat, and I'm going to take a picture of it.

I collect. When I shoot something, my natural instinct is to get all of it, not some part that'll leave me wondering what the rest of the scene looked like - which is probably why I have series of shots of the same building when it couldn't fit in the frame the first time. I suppose that'd be awesome if I was trying to document burglaries, less so if I want interesting pictures.

Bounty wrote:All my scans are done by the same photographer from the same film stock so I doubt that's the cause. The lens sounds like the most likely culprit. It doesn't have a cap, lord knows what it's been exposed to.

Meanwhile, the Zorki's shutter has sorta decided to call it quits after just a week. Either I can try to fix it, or that's the last I-22 pictures you'll see until I can get a Leica-compatible body cheap

You snapshoot like I snapshoot, and like pretty much everyone else snapshoots: "This [object or scene] is really neat, and I'm going to take a picture of it.

I collect. When I shoot something, my natural instinct is to get all of it, not some part that'll leave me wondering what the rest of the scene looked like - which is probably why I have series of shots of the same building when it couldn't fit in the frame the first time. I suppose that'd be awesome if I was trying to document burglaries, less so if I want interesting pictures.

Well, have you thought about working as a police photographer?