The most useful photographic advice I've ever heard:

"At this point in my career, the only absolute I would offer to anyone is to not do this at all professionally, chuck the photo/art school curricula you're taking that actually offers academic credit for courses called 'Finding Your Zen Central,' and get an MBA."

© Joe McNally

1) I have the best boyfriend in the world :) Can't wait to get back to Vienna and hug him again.

2) If I ever finish PFUR and get my degree I'll be VERY surprised. I better start looking for a good English-friendly university in Vienna. No philology this time.

3) It turned out that even after a month of speaking English only your native language isn't so native anymore. It took me around an hour to get my Russian back to normal.

4) I have a new dream: I want to photograph "The Baseballs" show at least once. I highly recommend everyone to check the guys out. This is probably the best European band at present (I don't take big names into consideration).

5) Fixed focal length VS. Zoom for concert photography and random portraits? I can't choose. How can you really choose between f/1.2-1.8 and focal length versatility? I need both :((( If a 24-70mm f/1.2 lens existed, I'd consider selling one of my organs to get it. No kidding. How can you shoot with f/2.8 in low light conditions? I tried it recently and with ISO 800 the shutter speed was 1/30. But 24-70 is quite a range. Zoom + Speedlite/umbrella/small lightstand? This is a portable set, which I can afford to carry around. Concerts will be a problem, but I also have 100mm f/2.8 (which I LOVE as a portrait lens) that is a problem to work with in low light conditions. Prime + Speedlite and zoom with my feet? :D Hmmm...

By the way, I kind of regret that I bought my Hensel 500w/s strobe. It works great, don't get me wrong, but: 1) I don't need so much light for portraits. If what the guy from the photo store told me about numbers on the display was true then I never used more than 65 w/s. But what I really missed were additional lights. 2) It's not portable at all unless you own a car, and few people are dying to go to the other part of town to be photographed.

So, the first week in Vienna passed and was a success. I still haven't seen much of the city, but I enjoy its everyday life to the fullest. There are a lot of bakeries here and every morning when I go to the office the whole city smells with coffee and fresh bread. In the HP office itself we are offered a small breakfast consisting of bread and something to put on it. Local canteen is amazing. I was close to crying when I had to leave a schnitzel there, as it was too big for me to eat the whole of it. A lot of CEE managers walking around. CEE GM is sitting 7 meters away from me.
Unexpectedly cheap shoes. 20-30 EUR for something that costs 130 EUR in Moscow. I will never ever buy shoes in Moscow again.
I've been to "Running Sushi", which I didn't like much. Store bought sushi are just as good and you don't have to go anywhere to eat them.
Local trams look nice and are fast.
I also have an Austrian SIM card now :)

In general, I like that the city is much smaller than Moscow and it takes less time to get to places you need. And in terms of architecture those districts that I saw are a strange mix between old buildings that look like something we have in St. Petersburg and new buildings that look like something we have in Cyprus. Very interesting indeed.
People are friendlier :)

I learned that not only my boyfriend is wonderful, but also his parents. I had the honor of being introduced to them today and we had the first (and I really hope not the last) lunch together. And they also were the first to take pictures of us together.

Aren't we cute? :)

...64% of it is about me or my life :) (no, not the addiction part)

I'm desperately trying to finish "The DAM book" by Peter Krogh and hope that after I do so I'll know how to make a neatly organized photography archive out of a garbage pile that I currently have. What I need is develop a workflow that'll work for me regardless of what I shoot and how many years pass between the day that photographs are taken and the day that they undergo post-processing and are ready to be uploaded.

On a personal note, a new chapter in my life has begun and I'm DAM happy about it. I won't disclose more now. Maybe in a month or two :)

Finally learned why the sentence from The Holiday "Would be great if you would let me try" is grammatically correct :)

I'm going to bed now. What I need is wrap myself in a blanket and rub the bald head of my plush Yoda until I fall asleep. Love you, guys!

Rood zwart - Les Miserables

This is an excerpt from "Rood & Zwart" from Dutch version of Les Miserables.
Dutch was made in Heaven.

Grüner Veltliners from Wachau region are the best!!!

James Freaking Intveld said "Hi" to me...!!!


© Carey Fenner Latham

Today is a sad day. Uli, one of our EMEA pre-sales gurus from Düsseldorf, left Moscow after about a week of hanging out, providing trainings and generally making HP Russia a cooler place to be. I was lucky enough to show him a little part of the city - several hours of walking from HP office to the city center plus an unbelievably interesting conversation about almost everything from DataProtector to motorcycles. I changed my opinion on Germans, I think :)
Now, I don't want to let him go completely without leaving a trace in this blog. I want to share a little something with you that he sent via e-mail.



And this is a nice bonus from "What the Duck" comic strip :)

Here's another one from that set. I personally like B&W more, but others seem to prefer it in color.



Jeremy, we need to talk :P

How do you guys make this butterfly-shaped shadow under the nose??!! At what angle should the light fall on the subject? 45 is clearly not enough. 3 meter ceilings be damned.
I still like the results of a recent photoshoot I did in cooperation with my friend the_great. 2 of them are also available in pink (clicked the wrong button in Photoshop and liked the result). Didn't have time to work on 3 others, and 2 of them look much like #2, so I'm not sure whether I want to upload them at all.


( Pink )

1) Second package from Amazon (including Kyle Cassidy's masterpiece "Armed America") is on its way to me (it's currently in Leipzig).

2) Reading "Light: Science & Magic". An unexpectedly usefull book.

3) I went to Equiros (an equestrian exhibition) yesterday!! There's nothing more pleasant than a horse licking your hand!!! Mine was licked by a lovely arabian mare called Primavera :) Unfortunately, there's not a single good photo of the licking, the one below is the best attempt of my friend to take a picture with a DSLR :) (no one can take a decent photo with my camera - except me and pros :)



Oddly enough, the best shot of that day was of a horse's rear end, even though I took it just for fun.

From August 7 to 11 I expect 3 amazing photography books to arrive at my door:
- "The Moment It Clicks" by Joe McNally
- "Light: Science and Magic" by Fil Hunter, Steven Biver, Paul Fuqua
- "Master Lightning Guide for Portrait Photographers" by Christopher Grey

I think I finally got used to be under constant pressure at work and am ready to do something besides it and that something is what I like to do best :)

The next order from Amazon will include "The DAM book" by Peter Krogh, "Concert Photography" by Tom Mulhern and (at last!) "Armed America" by Kyle Cassidy.

After "The DAM Book" arrives I plan to open my "Photography" folder and delete everything.

I was watching Discovery the other day and saw this trailer of "One Way Out". My jaw dropped. His name is Jonathan, he's a British escape artist. If you're a Discovery regular you should know him already, as the first episode of the show was aired on January 26, 2009 (for those of you from the States).

Now, most people dream of meeting the president, Liza Minnelli, Britney Spears, Harry Potter etc. As for me, if there's one person I want to meet in this life, it's this boy.

Check him out at Jonathan Escapes.


Find more videos like this on Jonathan Escapes

We had a photoshoot for HP Software Russia's booklet recently, and this time I was a model! I only will be in group shots (only pre-sales people, incl. my father, were "eligible" for portraits), but I'm still happy. The photographer promised that he'd send us JPEGs until the end of this week. We'll see. I usually look terrible when photographed by other people, even professionals :)

Also my birthday is coming soon and I started planning a small party (only my favorite HP employees will be invited). Today I learned that favorite wines of one of my guests all cost from $150 to $200 per bottle. So you can either buy a Canon Speedlite 580EX II external flash or 2-3 bottles of wine. When I cried on my team lead's shoulder because of this he said "You're not going to buy this wine, are you?"

1) My manager Martin is the best man in the world. Not only we get along great both as colleagues and as people, but he is also the only person who feeds my addiction to Austrian white wines :)
Brought me a bottle the last time he was in Moscow (he pays a visit approximately once a month) - for great closing of Q1 and Q2. Should fire me after Q3, though, because a great number of deals worth no less than $1.000.000 can't be signed now thanks to me. I've been working alone since the end of May and physically can't do everything; I already missed 3 of my university exams and about 4 German lectures. It's nearly impossible to make me angry, but I think they're getting to it.

2) Once in a while we have what we call "coffee talks", where employees are updated on the economic situation in the world as well as financial results and changes within HP. The last one was on May 28th, but this time it was special as it was dedicated to the 40 year anniversary of HP Russia (and good 70 years since 'garage experiments' of Bill and Dave turned into the Hewlett-Packard Company). Five of our 'old-timers' shared stories of their first day at HP, their goals and motivations (both past and present) etc.

One of them was Justin Lifflander, an American by birth who now lives in Russia and holds double citizenship. Initially he wanted to be a spy and worked for the CIA. He chose Russia "because of food and women", but soon realized that espionage wasn't what he wanted and started looking for a new job, thus ending up in HP Russia. He later married and when asked by the host if his wife was Russian said "I'm not a fool. Of course she's Russian!"

Another gentleman whose stories are worth mentioning is HP Russia's managing director Mr. Owen Kemp, a rare example of a leader by birth, whom I hold in the highest regard for immense optimism, tremendous sense of humor and his ability to make an interesting topic out of anything, even financial results.
He was 19 when he started working at HP. Motivation was very similar to mine, that is, of materialistic nature. His first and only interview was for a job in a medical department. "I didn't even know HP had a medical department, but I thought 'My grandfather was a veterinary surgeon, maybe it can help'". He showed up at the Austrian office in Vienna and found out that the only person who worked in a medical department was on a business trip, but left a note at a reception desk that said something like "Here are the keys, take the car from the parking lot, drive to this customer and demonstrate our ultrasound equipment, the manual is right next to it on the table in my office". Each time he stopped at a red traffic light he read a few pages of the manual, and when he finally reached his destination he was invited into a room, "there was a woman who was about to give birth and I was asked to demonstrate the ultrasound equipment I'd brought. I was 19 and was blushing like hell."
In the evening he called his girlfriend and said "Hey! I have a car and I have a baby!"

His second story was connected to Russia. He first came here on the condition that his salary would be raised, but time passed by and nothing happened. When he grew tired of it he wrote an e-mail to his manager, but accidentally sent it not only to him, but also to the whole PDL Austria. Soon he started getting these deeply sympathetic messages from Austrian employees saying "Yeah! I think so too! Man, you deserve it!".

I want to wrap up the blog entry with a picture of this wonderful man that "deserves it".

Oh gosh, can't believe I haven't written anything for 5 months! Work is immensely time-consuming, plus I finally started learning German (slightly more than a month ago). I put off learning the second language for too long, especially considering the fact that I want to pick up another two - Dutch (most people would say that it sounds even more disgusting than German, but it's one of my favorite languages) and French. French and German are musts, because (it's a little known fact) a very distant relative on my father's side to whom I and all his other direct descendants owe our surname was a Frenchman of German descent, and quite a long time ago I made a promise to myself that I'd learn both languages. Two months ago, when I was googling for good language courses, I had a choice between these two, but eventually decided on German, as I like it more, and my boss as well as most of my team is German-speaking.
( English/German comparison )

More about work, management and other great things in the next entry.

Yesterday was my younger brother's 5th birthday!

And here he is, photographed with my new 100mm f/2.8 macro lens...



ISO 800, f/2.8, 1/50 (but it was approximately 1/4 step overexposed with these settings)

I'm very surprised it turned out that good: there was no planning, my brother was clowning around as usual and I spent 1 minute in total on making the picture. Besides, I didn't expect that the white curtain in front and to the right of the camera could be any good as a filler (it's 50% transparent). Not to mention that the lens isn't meant to be used in low-light conditions.

For you photo geeks out there: a detailed review of the lens.
I can't wait to test it outdoors.

BTW, I owe Roy Cox a thank you for this one and for saving me a thousand bucks :) (I was aiming at one of those fancy L lenses).

P.S. I color corrected my monitor a couple of days ago and I'm still getting used to new color temperature and gamma. Please let me know if any of my photos look strange to you (too warm or too cool or whatever).

... Mr. Owen Kemp, Managing Director of HP Russia and Vice President of HP

Photographed with me. "То enhance value." ©
It was after 8 hour talk about financial crisis, achievements, plans, the frame giveaway ceremony etc. That's why I look so wasted :)

(and don't pay attention to the quality)