I have a big, fat, giant post to make up for my lack of posts this weekend. I’ve been really busy lately with class, assignment planning, eating amazing food, and editing photos. So far, I’ve taken 961 photos – that’s a lot of editing. Luckily, the sun rises at 5:30 AM every day and it doesn’t get completely dark until 11:00, so I have many hours of the day to work with.
I had a really great time this weekend. The advanced photo class (my class) and the beginner photo class combined, along with our teacher Jan and our other teacher Miro. We drove 2.5 hours to Brno, where we walked to to an artist’s house. There, we were joined by another young photographer. They both showed us their work and answered any questions that we had.
From there, we continued to Lednice. Lednice is a beautiful town just north of the border of Austria and the Czech Republic. It has two beautiful castles, a minaret, and a very natural lake area with bike paths and giant trees. We got there around 7 PM, and listened to two artists lecture about their work. I was very impressed with the first artist, Jindřich Štreit. He’s had over 800 exhibitions, 23 books published, and countless catalogs. He’s one of the Czech Republic’s leading documentary photographers, and his work is truly amazing. As he told us, he didn’t even own a digital camera until a few years ago when he visited Brazil. You can see some of his work here.
The next day, we all had breakfast together and then parted ways to go to the castles or just wander around and take pictures. The first place I went was the greenhouse at the palace. It was so beautiful; I got a lot of really great shots here. The early afternoon light was a bit harsh, but filtered through the glass of the greenhouse, it made for some really great shots. It made me wish I had a macro lens, especially for the orchids.
I can’t decide if I like the black and white versions, or the color versions of some photos. Feel free to leave input.
After the greenhouse, we wandered around the lake and visited the minaret. I actually didn’t take any pictures of it because there were tons of tourists there. I got a lot of really great pictures at and around the lake, which you can see in this post.
After that, we had lunch and then visited a wine cellar next to our hotel. I bought two bottles of white from a vineyard owner himself. I don’t usually like white wine, but we had been eating this with lunch and I really, really liked it. I think that vineyard owner must have sold 20 bottles of his wine that day.
After we bought all our wine, we went back to our bus and wandered the countryside and stopped in different scenic places to take photos. The vineyards everywhere were gorgeous, and the views were unlike anything I had ever seen. Pictures don’t do it justice at all. You can see the gallery for those photos here.
After that, we headed back home.
