Leuven - pictures of Oude Markt

To continue on previous post - a few pics from Oude Markt in Leuven. Oude Markt is a nice medieval square in the center of the city. Cobblestone surface, old buildings on all 4 sides full of cafes, bars and restaurants. You can see how it looks in a usual week day evening.











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Pictures of Leuven

I didn't realize that I have too few pictures of my home town until I got a request from a customer a few weeks ago. Luckily the weather is nice lately so I went to the center of Leuven to take some pictures.

The City Hall of Leuven is nice, so I took some photos at the end of the day, when the lights started to turn on but the sky wasn't completely dark yet.


A few more pictures of the City Hall



I went also to Oude Markt the same day. For those who doesn't know Leuven Oude Markt is a nice old square surrounded by medieval buildings - it is full of bars and restaurants and some people call it the "largest bar in Europe". It will be the subject of my next blog post.

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Some of my tools

Just a quick note about a couple of tools that I use in my photography process.

As part of my backup process I record my photos on DVDs. I don't like simplified consumer version of Nero software that came with my DVD writer, so I tried some free tools. I tried several of them which I didn't like - some for uncomfortable interface (e.g. many clicks needed to add a folder to a disk); some failed during recording (which I wouldn't expect to happen at all these days with mature technology). Finally I chosen imgburn that I prefer over the others: http://www.imgburn.com - reasonable interface; some advanced features, and good reliability.

The other tool that I use often is FTP client. Again I tried several options and for the last year I use Filezilla: http://filezilla-project.org, which I know also recommended by many other users.




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Good time to photograph tulips

It's great time to photograph tulips now while they are blooming. It's a long weekend in Belgium and in neighbor countries and the weather is nice. A good place to go is Keukenhof in Netherlands, not far from Hague. Thousands of tulips of all different sorts and colors, and many other flowers.




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Trying macro photography

I've tried macro photography with Canon EF 85mm f1.8 lens having +4 lens attached; and with old manual Russian-made Helios-44 lens + cheap Chinese extension ring.

The option with EF 85mm and +4 lens means full electronic control with autofocus.

Cheap extension ring is a piece of metal only, no electronic connection between camera and lens. This is why I used old Helios-44 - because it has manual aperture control.

The result with EF85 is in general good, but chromatic aberrations are strong on contrasty edges (depending on particular scene of course).

Helios-44 resulted much less CA however the transition between area in focus and completely unsharp part isn't very pleasant to my eye. EF85 produces a softer blur.

I must note however that the comparison isn't fair because I tried 2 lens in different conditions. Now as I noticed some interesting point I'll need to find some time to make a real comparison.


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