Good stuff

Ok then...where to start? Past month was the best and most productive month in my whole life (not to mention the hardest)...

First of all, I finally got my dA page over 30000 hits! A big thanks to all my watchers, people who like my work and/or pure Internet nomads that just stumbled upon my profile...

I was working on a calendar for the biggest insurance company here in Croatia (Croatia Osiguranje)...me and my colleague Milan Krkac(Kaboom) got "jammed" in the studio for the whole week. You'll all see the results soon, I think it was worth it, it all came out great!

The biggest news is that one of my photos finally won something!

"The Nutty Oracle", photo of my dear Nina taken underwater got the first place on the Vichy's "Aqualia Thermal" photo contest here in Croatia! The theme was "water portraits" - the connection between the skin and the water...

I want to thank everyone who voted for me, thanks also to the judges that decided that my photo is the best, and the biggest and strongest thanks goes to my love for changing my life upside down, doing everything for me and basically changing me from my head to my heels...

I have many more projects in my head, many more jobs to come, etc. Looks like the things are finally beginning to happen!

Oh yeah, I almost forgot...one of my sport photos (bike) got a third place on a photo contest taken at Croatian Open University (CEKAO)
It was a big surprise to me, because bike photos rarely get something from classic photographers, it's almost as if I won (for me)

So, here it is:

A BIIIIG thanks goes to Janko Zubcevic for "posing" for this shot, and to Kaboom for helping out with the lights!

And again...if anyone needs a fun and creative photographer, gimme a call/mail...

Thank you everyone for losing your time reading this!
Have fun, bye!

Z.

Important Color-Management Issue...

Let's make this as short as we can...

It's very well known that our web browsers "support" color profiles. So what are color profiles and who the hell cares? Well...let's make things simple. When a photograph is born (digitally) in the camera, it is assigned a color profile. This profile tells your computer how to show up the colors so that we all get similar results all over the world while we look at them. Oh yeah, that's "support" only. That doesn't mean that they work properly. In fact they don't work at all. And we photographers want you to see our photos in their full glory, right? Right :)

Does your browser take care of profiles? Check out this link and see if the photo is uniform or not. All four quadrants should be the same. I know, I know, it's multi-colored and funny, but don't panic :)

At this time, the only browser that does color management properly is Safari (originally a Mac browser). The new Google's runner up (Chrome) doesn't even know color profiles exist. I'm not going to go any further, I'll just cheer up the rest of us Mozilla Firefox users. So, get the browser up and running.

Write about:config in the adress bar. The Firefox will give ya' a warning regarding that you can mess up the whole browser if not being careful. So, I'm not being held responsible if you do it wrong :)

When you're in, you'll see much of the settings written up in a similar way like Windows Registry. Just find gfx.color_management.enabled. It will most likely be on "false".

Go on, double click it and make it TRUE.

After that, do a Firefox restart (just close it up and get it running again).
That's it, you're color-ready! Enjoy the full colors and potential of the photographs that you see on the Web. Go check it now: link
Now try to compare Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox lol :)

Cheers! Zedooo

Creative Light

As you may or may not already know, my main goal as a photographer is to learn how to light subjects up creatively. I think it's a new and fun way to bring some attention to my photos. It's not very easy stuff to do, either. Sometimes it's so hard to get the ideas "flowing" into your mind...it's almost like you're totally dull and unable to do anything creative...
I sure hope I'll get my brain in the right state of mind soon..until then, here's a old idea worked off in just a couple minutes :)


Soo, let's see it then. 2 flashes and that's it! :)
One flash is "in the book" - for lighting up her face and the wall, and the other is sitting in her lap, lighting up the face of the book - covered with paper to soften it up a bit. The whole exposure is only flash, so no ambient. I do this almost every time, except when I'm outside.

Dunno, I like to control my light, and with flashes it's easy like cherry pie :)

So, what do you think? Creative or not, good or bad, any questions maybe?

As always, big thanks goes to Nina for putting up with my little tests he he :)

Making of "The Nutty Oracle"

Everyone has it's own "perfect click" now and then. For me, it's definitely "The Nutty Oracle". It is the first photo that I was totally happy with. Everything was just the way I imagined.
How do you like it?

For those of you that aren't familiar with that photograph:

Just couldn't stop myself from writing this here, I wanted to share with someone...I am very very curious, how did you make some of your best photographs? Were you totally aware of the result, or you were just lucky to get that shot?

This image was created one evening...I photographed tabletop stuff all day, and later my girl friend came.
I don't know where did we get the idea to stick her head in a very small aquarium (fish tank), but we did ;)

The light setup was very basic and simple...one light left, one light right, shot through few pages of tracing paper. (of course this photo was horizontal then, now it's vertical)

Few clicks and instructions later, this came up...

And yeah, I wanted to show you the setup thad made this, so hopefully some that you'll show me yours :)


So, here goes:














Ok, you can stop laughing now ;)

Here's another set up shot:















So, any comments/critiques?

Let's try this one out

Here's a slideshow of few of my photos, so check it out

Ok then, first post :)

Hello everyone, I'm Goran (or Zedooo, as the rest of you know me)...I'm into photography for the last year and a half, trying to learn the ways of the masters :)

The thing that interests me the most is the light and its progressive usage. The times when I thought the strobes and other means of artificial light are bad and ugly are long gone. My learning curve got way much steeper, faster and better when I found David Hobby's blog (Strobist.com)

It learned my so much stuff, that I cannot even believe what dumbhead I was before reading all of it and doing all the assignments.

I'm also into DIY, in photography and everything else. Why buy a I dunno, a ringlight for a massive amount of money when you can make your own for a few bucks :)

I'll write here about lotsa stuff, if my time will permit it.

Have a nice stay! And while you're at it, check few of my photos:

My Picasa Web-Album
My DeviantArt Gallery
My Flickr Album