Archive for August, 2009
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Kihnu lies 12 km (7 mi) off the coast of Estonia and is the largest of more than a dozen islands in the reefs and shallows of the Gulf of Riga. It is 16 sq km (6 sq mi) in area with a low ridge running down the middle and only 9 m (30 ft) above sea level at its highest point.
The island farmsteads are enclosed by forest, which prevents soil erosion as well as protecting the islanders from the bitter northeast winds.
Huge broadleaf trees stand like sentinels in the coastal meadowlands that lead to a 36 km (22 mi) long shoreline of dunes and shifting sands where the scent of juniper is everywhere in the air. The island is a nesting place for hundreds of bird species and the coastal reef is home to the last grey seal colony in the Baltic.
The first historical documents relating to Kihnu date from the late 14th century but excavations show that the island was inhabited, at least during the summer months, from around 1500 BC.
It has at various times been under Danish, Swedish, Estonian, Polish and Russian rule, reflecting the turbulent history of the Baltic.
Since time immemorial the men here have been seafarers and fishermen, skilled at woodwork and shipbuilding, while the women are wholly responsible for working the land and keeping alive the rich island culture of music, dance and poetry.
A trip to Kihnu transports you back in time into a fascinating folk culture. The inhabitants speak their own language and wear traditional homespun costume. Each woman makes her familys clothes with intricately knitted, woven and embroidered patterns symbolising ancient legends.
The islanders are symbiotically bound up with their harsh environment, their survival entirely dependent upon cultural loyalty and community sharing. Against all odds, they have managed to hang onto their heritage at the same time as welcoming strangers to their shores.
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Over the years, you’ve probably seen plenty of indoor flash pictures that have a pitch black background and a washed-out, overexposed subject. Many factors conspire to produce these stark, unflattering shots, but one of the major contributors is, once again, your camera thinking on its own. You’re letting it decide when to turn on the flash and which shutter speed to use.
First of all, you don’t always need the flash. Indoor photography offers many opportunities for stunning existing-light portraits and moody interior shots. And when you do have to turn on the flash, you can make certain adjustments to preserve the ambiance of the room so that your background doesn’t fall into a black hole.
Flash shots may have a pitch-black background for a couple of reasons. The first problem is that the light from a typical digital camera’s flash reaches only about 2 to 3 metres. Anything beyond this range, and you’ve got yourself an inadvertent ambient-light photo.
If your camera has a manual mode that allows you to dictate both the aperture (f stop) and shutter speed, you can easily overcome these problems.
Once in manual mode, try this combination as a starting point for flash photography indoors:
• Set your film speed to 100
• Set the aperture (f-stop) to f-5.6.
• Set the shutter speed to 1/15th of a second.
• Use the forced-flash mode. (Don’t use the red-eye reduction feature)
When you use these settings, hold the camera as steady as possible or better yet, use a tripod. At these slow shutter speeds, your shots are more vulnerable to camera shake, and therefore to blurriness. Your flash will help freeze everything in its range, but the background, not illuminated by the flash, may blur if the camera isn’t steady.
If your camera doesn’t have a manual mode, all is not lost. Almost every consumer model has a night time or stow-synchro mode (look for a “stars over a mountain” icon). The intention of this mode is to let you shoot portraits at twilight. But you can also use Nighttime mode indoors to open up the background. Granted, you don’t have as much control with this setting as you do with manual mode, but you may be pleasantly surprised with the results.
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For years now, film and digital camera manufacturers have been inflicting red-eye reduction mode on their customers. Its a series of bright, strobing flashes that’s not only annoying to the people you’re photographing, but doesn’t even work very well.
What causes red eye? In a dimly lit setting, the subject’s pupil opens, revealing more of the retina. The back of the retina has blood vessels over it, hence the red colour that is caused when the flash bounces of the back of the eye.
On systems where the flash is close to the camera lens (as it almost always is), the light from the flash shines through the dilated pupil, bounces off the retina, and reflects as a red circle directly back into the lens. (the same thing happens to animals, too, except that the colour is sometimes green or orange instead of red.)
The solution is to move the flash away from the camera lens or use bounce flash. That way, the reflection from the retina doesn’t bounce directly back at the camera. But on a camera that fits in your pocket, its not practical to achieve much separation of flash and lens.
Since camera manufacturers couldn’t move the flash away, they went to Plan B: firing the flash just before the shutter snaps, in theory contracting the subjects’ pupils, thereby revealing less retina.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work very well, and you may end up with red eye anyway. The other problem is that some people see the pre-flash as the picture being taken and then move while the shutter is open. Not a good result.
Basically you have three ways out of red eye. You can turn up the lights to help contract the subjects pupils. You could also use a camera that accepts an external, detachable flash. And if none of that works, remember that you can edit out red eye on your computer, using for example, the red eye reduction tools offered in most photo editing programs.
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