Same place a same time as the last post. This post will show deep sky objects (AKA smudges), all of them will be 100% crops and they look less impressive than previous post. It is caused by simple conditions used for taking photos - static camera, short exposures , insufficient focal length and manual focusing.
I was waiting couple of months for these photos. I have found a place with pretty dark sky, but my visits there were always around full moon or weather was pretty bad. But a week ago I got lucky. Weather forecast seemed perfect for 2 or 3 days and it was around new moon.
Year ago we went to short trip to Austria. This post is about hike and visit of ice cave. I am a bit afraid to call it a hike, because time spent walking was similar to time spent waiting for 2 cable cars (plus way back down).
We wanted to book some activities on Holiday Island, but they were either full or happened only once a week on day we were travelling. Only trip that we managed to do was to visit nearby Sun Island. It is resort operated by the same company so boat ride was for free. We just needed to pick one of departure times and sign for it on reception.
Sun Island is bigger, maybe 3 times and also more developed. It even has a pool. From my point of view, it was overcrowded. So we made very good decision when we picked Holiday Island - it was more suitable for us. That, however, does not mean all those hundreds of people on Sun Island picked badly :-)
Holiday Island is quite small - just 700 meters long and 140 wide. I am surprised I did not get bored during those 7 days. Maybe because I took many photos. We are going to look at Holiday Island with different perspective now.
I have too many photos from Holiday Island, so I need to split it to 3 parts. That's the reason previous post did not contain many Maldives "postcards". But it is main point of this post - to show why people are going there - white sand, turquoise water, green palms.
I was forced to take 2 weeks off in my work in February 2015. We were thinking "Why should I sit at home and then have less available time for proper summer vacation? Let's go to some warm place". But where to go during winter? Europe is cold, it has to be somewhere further away. Sri Lanka had raised occurrence of some virus in January, so we were afraid to go there. What about Maldives?
We bought Lonely Planet, only to realize Maldives are not ideal for individual holiday makers, and even worse for travellers - distances are huge and accommodation expensive, unless you want to stay in capital Male. Not to mention food - islands open for tourists are usually handled by single resort, so they have only "single" restaurant and no shop with food. Self catering in Maldives is probably as expensive as half board.
I did not expect to write this post at all. But after writing 6 other today...well, I can write anything :-)
These are results of my astro photography experiments I have done last summer. I have used Tamron 90mm/f2.8 that is not ideal lens for astro photography without rotating with sky during exposure. So I was limited to 2 seconds exposure and I decided to crank up ISO to 12800. Why such a stupid set-up? Well, I wanted to take photo of M31 Andromeda Galaxy and NGC 7000 North America Nebula.
This post contains macro photos of bees, bumblebee, butterfly and a fly with flowers. Originally I wanted to post photos from April, when I spent some time shooting bees on Bear's garlic (Allium ursinum), but then I remembered I have very nice captures from last year.
Some flowers from early March. I was surprised how many snowdrops were flowering. I have never seen so many of them.