MPJ

Most of the popular digital and DSLR cameras are perfectly equipped for macro photos. Taking a great photo by zooming to the scene not farther than 20-30 centimeters is a little effort and requires only clicking the shutter button and leaving all the technicalities to the camera's automated software. Even the cheap lenses can do that without a problem. While ago I collected some of those photos and wrote a little about macro photography and how to record all the close objects not very distant from our nose. But, can we do closer than that? Can we take a photo of an object like top of the pencil, as close as couple of millimeters away from the lens, for example, like the one in this photo: Dot-sized larvae of cricket or grasshopper invading our balcony flowerpot Well, not with a consumer camera, not without specialized optics. However, "augmenting" our smartphones to do the magic is just a little effort. And yes, I took above photo with only my smartphone, addi...

I read about a man once, and I honestly couldn't remember who he was, but in the nutshell he returned from the tourist trip with tons of photos and when his friends asked him why he didn't upload them online yet, he said that he needed to enrich them with words first, otherwise they would be just a pile of nice colored moments taken in time and saying very little or nothing at all about the trip and all the sites he visited. The same is with me and the same truth goes with videos as well. Let me be honest about watching other people videos online and browsing private photos uploaded to social media - I am simply not impressed with many of them, because they lack the story. With me, there is no point of uploading a nicely taken photo of you and your friends in front of some historic place or monument and explain nothing about where were you, why were you taking that photo or without saying little something about the place itself. With videos it goes even further - filming a Yo...

There is a mountain just couple of kilometers south of our weekend house that is actively blocking our view toward unknown and beyond. It is not too big, just about one kilometer high, rounded in shape, overgrown in surrounding forests with large plains on the top. In the past, from the years of my early childhood till today I had different feelings about that mountain. First, it was the real edge of the world when I thought there was nothing behind. Then I grew into my teen ages when I unsuccessfully wanted to conquer it and plant a flag on the biggest rock of the highest peek possible. When that was over I dreamed about living there in a forest shack in sort of utopian kind of equilibrium with nature itself. There was a time when I just hated it for blocking my nightly sky from the southern constellations and galactic center lying somewhere in the direction of Sagittarius and Scorpius. Now, I only want to pay her a visit someday and see how mountain was looking at me all those years...

In the past couple of years, every now and again I was uploading video clips to the YouTube that I made either for the blog intentionally or for some other "publishing" reasons and I've just realized that they piled up to the number big enough I can safely pronounce almost two dozens of them today to their public status and officially publish them. It's not really that big "contribution" to the video community but still here they are. Hopefully some of you would find them inspirational and interesting. If you do, following is the home page of the official channel where you can subscribe for the future or contribute with new YouTube community social features. Milan's Public Journal YouTube Channel Similar to the blog's threads and for better classification of all videos within the channel I created several playlists and filled them with videos of mutual theme or place or event. One of latest video files, the short movie Viktor and I made this su...

In the past shooting close-up images was in the area of true professionals. It required expensive equipment and large SLR photo cameras with special lenses capable of taking photos in true 1:1 ratio. In simple words it means that the object you are photographing appears in the same size in camera's sensor as in real life. Well, contrary to what we might think today with all those cheap compact and digital SLR photo cameras to take truly astonishing photo of amazing micro world it still requires not so cheap lenses and matching specially designed flashes. Nikon P500 in 'action' However, new digital photo world in its 'blooming' era in previous decade brought something else to the scene. Something equally important and with quality far beyond we used to in previous 'analog' world. Actually, two new things are introduced in the business - computerization of the camera and large worldwide competition between leading manufacturers. First one brought simp...

When I bought my first digital camera back in 2003 (HP PhotoSmart C850) new digital era started for me and beginning from that date I currently have about 6000 photos and 1000 videos in my collection or 67.7 GB of storage space occupied on several computers or HD media. Comparing to sum of up to 500 analog photos I scanned from pre-digital era this is really a milestone in everybody's family collection. Early color photos - Analog SLR, Polaroid and Point&Shoot Pushed by my father's old analog photo laboratory when I was a little kid I got interested in photography. We always tended to make some not so ordinary photos - nice black&white and early color photos with having not only people on them. There are plenty of out of ordinary staged photos. I remember we even made montaged photos including couple of UFOs we made out of kitchen plates, modeling clay and fishing strings. It looks like photoshopping today destroyed all that productivity, since there is no need...