Nik Viveza Software

Three pairs of images to show the power of Viveza (Nik Software) to put life into backlit subjects or night images. The left image has been processed with Lightroom to get as much as possible into the shadow and highlight areas of the raw images. They were then processed with Viveza and show the strength of the software to adjust difficult images. The final stage will be clone out the street lights in the Church image.

Moscow Metros

I took a lot of images in the Moscow Metro as there were no restrictions on photography other than finding space to raise the camera. The trains were generally dark green rather than London's red ones so monochrome conversions don't lose much impact and sort out the colour casts. Each station had its own theme - often with impressive sculptures and paintings. I will post a few more when I have sorted them.

Catkin Time

Beautiful sunny day here in Cambridgeshire today - temperature up to 12 degrees. With the very mild start to the year it is not surprising to see hazel catkins in full bloom. Ruby, one of our red setters had to get into the picture in the background. The lichens are developing well in our small woodland plantation - very strident yellow in the sunshine.

Avenues

I am gradually sifting through the Russian photographs and will continue to post images as I find ones I like as, at the end of each year, I turn my blog into a book and it is good to have a complete record of my favourite images from trips. Here are some 'Avenue' views that I liked at the time of taking.

London Dusk

I have been sorting through some London images from last year as I need an image for an exhibition later this year and decided that three of them had potential for monochrome prints while two of them definitely require colour for impact.

Night Shots

I have started processing the images from the Russian trip. Here are a couple of night shots put through Silver Efex. The statues are outside Park Inn where we stayed in St Petersburg. It was snowing very heavily at the time. The tram is also from that city.

Winter Arrives in St Petersburg

As you can see, it snowed on our last morning in St Petersburg before flying home. I am looking forward to processing these images fully but I am putting up a selection of them now so as to complete my diary of the trip. A full gallery (or more!) of my favourite images will be put on my website in due course. Most of the images seem to work best in monochrome but there are some colour images around the city ending with a good bye to some very cold pigeons!
A wonderful trip and many thanks to Berni, Anatoli and Anya who showed us the rich heritage of their cities.

Moscow Square

Moscow Square is at the end of Moscow avenue, the longest in the city (9km long). It was built in the southern suburbs of Saint-Petersburg in the 1950s. At the rear of the square is the impressive building that housed the Soviet of Leningrad. In the centre of the square is a statue of Lenin, dubbed "Lenin dancing." In the area there are many very well-built accommodation buildings from the Soviet time when profits did not govern the rules of construction.

At the end of the avenue is the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad. This powerful and impressive monument was built as the focal point of Ploshchad Pobedy (Victory Square) in the early 1970s to commemorate the heroic efforts of the residents of Leningrad and the soldiers on the Leningrad Front to the repel the Nazis in the 900-day Siege of Leningrad during World War II. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, which was dedicated to the city of Leningrad and was completed on 27 December 1941, is played as a musical testament to the 25 million Soviet citizens who lost their lives in World War II due to the German invasion.


I took a brief walk in the icy winds to the beach at the back of the Park Inn Hotel. A bleak place in winter looking out over the Gulf of Finland.

Catherine's Palace

My original plan was to find a trip that included the Peterhof Palace and Gardens but it seems that these are not visited by groups in the winter. However, Catherine's Palace at Pushkin provided many of the images that I had in my mind when thinking about a trip to Russia. There was enough snow and the grey skies were perfect. These images are straight from the camera - there are quite a few metal statue coverings that I think I will remove but these images will give an idea of the beauty of the lake and gardens.