Fireworks Rijeka 30/6/2009

I was at the opening of the Summer Nights at Rijeka (“otvorenje ljetnih noći”) the previous Tuesday. I was there only because of the announced fireworks. The opening show was to last 50 minutes with fireworks which were “never seen before”.

And I wasn’t disappointed. The fireworks were great. The music in the background was great too. The explosions were colossal, the range was mind boggling. There was even a moment when they launched some into the sea and from the sea there were flying fireworks. Absolutely fantastic. But the fireworks that fascinated me the most was some which burst in yellow glowing dust which slowly descended over a large area with a great sense of 3d space. It seemed like some cgi trick in some fairy movies.

Well, I’m not here going to melt like an ice cream but here are some of the pictures from the event.

You can see the full gallery here.

Accidents do happen

A car went down from the road straight into a sea in the middle of last night. Interestingly enough, the driver wasn’t hurt at all.

 

 

Croatian National Geographic Magazine's special edition book

Today I got a book in my inbox and boy was it a surprise. It is a book made and released to mark first five years of Croatian edition of National Geographic Magazine. In it you can find 12 best croatian stories that were published in NGM over this 5 years (so it is a selection of 11*5=55 stories). The special reason to be content is that in the story about Lastovo island there are my photos as well. In other words, the story that was published in NGM more than a year ago was featured now again this special edition book, and that includes my photos. Dad has even greater satisfaction to be content because his photos are in Lastovo story, and in island of Vis story too.

I'll try to get a scan of those photos and upload it here for you to see what I'm rambling about.

Rab Dive off 2008

I was kindly invited to a be an underwater photographer for AIDA competition at Lopar (Island of Rab), Croatia. I gladly accepted because it was first time I had a chance to shoot apnea divers.

Divers were competing in three Aida disciplines: free immersion, constant weight (with fins) and constant weight without fins. First discipline was on the first day, the second and third on the second day. What amazed me was the timing of the dives. All the divers are given in advance all exactly the time of their dive and they were very strict about it. Around 10 minutes before their dive they had to relax/prepare for their dive. They only get one chance so they obviously took it seriously. Couple of minutes before their dive time they were literally towed by another (safety) diver to the pontoon with the judges and the rope. At exactly 0:00 they had to dive.

I was a bit impressed how fast those divers go down and up. That presented a bit of a problem though. But this problem wasn't the only one. The other problem was that when shooting the diver from below you have excess of light coming from the surface, and when shooting from above there was substantially less light because the sea isn't very bright. You can see the problem on the next image.



As there was such a big difference in lightning it was impossible to adjust the camera to shoot divers passing by (the first problem). I figured at the end of first day to adjust the camera to P (also known as automatic mode). The results were okay, but I had to manually compensate for like -2 stops. That way I shot pretty much all the pictures the next day. I couldn't adjust the camera just for shooting from above and shoot only from above and vice versa because every diver was separated by 10 minutes. So I would only get a handful of photos to play with later which wasn't my intention. I wanted to have as much photos as possible at the end to see what photos were good (and why) and which ones were bad (and why).

So in the end I did some ok photos as you can check out at photo.adriasub.com.

Archeological excavation at Pakoštane, Croatia

Month and a half ago (13.5) I went to en archeological excavation of an ancient ship found near the town of Pakostane in Croatia. Naturally, I went there as a photographer.

The team was part Croatian, part French and another archeologist from Greece. We stayed there for a bit more than two weeks.

The ship itself is from around 300AD iirc and was very old in that time because she has many lead patches and couple of relatively new wood frames. One of the more interesting things about this ship is the fact that the whole keel is missing which is odd. I heard couple of theories on to what happened to the ship. The most convincing one tells that the ship was probably burned in a ceremony (of good fortune) similar to the one still practiced on one of our islands. What is the evidence for that?

1. the ship was very old so it was probably leaking all the time and economically not really feasible.

2. archeologists found many pieces of tree branches which were carbonised and also they found parts of the ship which are carbonised too.

3. the water line was much lower, probably 4-6m. As one geologist there said that the average water level in 2000 years rised for around 2 meters. But on this part of the Adriatic (or at least Pakostane) the water level was even lower because there was large tectonic disturbances approximately every 200 years. So we can conclude that the ship was probably on the shore line because now it is on the depth of 2.5m.

4. small lead spheres were found which indicates that part of the lead patches melted.

5. grass seeds were found in the soil indicating that the ship was on or near the grass at the time.

The excavation and documentation was to me (first timer on an archeological excavation) very slow and I found out there that the ship was found in 2004 and this was, I think, third excavation to date. In this 3 weeks they uncovered the last parts of the wreck.

The team itself was great. I actually never worked with french people before, and I had some reservations which were quickly dispelled at the moment I met the team. Croatian part was good and was much boosted with the help of archeologists from the university of Zadar. French team was great, very friendly, helpful and hardworking.

My job there was to photograph every find archeologists found at the site, all the phases of work (both below and above the sea level) and to do some photographs of the surroundings (the town etc). At first at home, I thought it would be relatively easy because after a dive I would just delete the bad pictures, copy the rest to an official computer and my working day is finished. Boy was I wrong! The dives itself lasted for around 2 hours. Then after the dive I was regulary assigned to be a security person (aka the loser who is baked on the sun laying on the rubber boat and transferring people off the site to the shore and vice versa) for at least 2 hours. Wasted, when you came to the apartment, I had to wash and dry the camera housing and flashes (actually I did this between the dive and the security role), transfer all the photos to the laptop (there were around 200+ of them), and then all the fun started. First I had to delete bad photos, then put each of the new finding in each separate folder, then pick photos which represent the phases of work, then, all the best photos go in the third folder, then some additional photos in this folder and some other photos in that folder... It was plenty of work to occupy me for the whole evening until I wasted and went to sleep. Things complicated a bit when I found out I could make great "panorama" photos of the site. But it was hard work in photoshop and to render single panorama, photoshop needed at least 15minutes. And after 15min. I could find out that images I provided to the photoshop were no good for making panorama... So I had to do all thing all over again. In the morning just before the briefing I copied all the pictures to the official computer.

I could write a book about this excavation but I won't bore you or myself with doing it so. Just enjoy the photo gallery.