It started raining here, finally. I was really worried about the vegetation at this point because everything was dying, not to mention the increasing fire hazard, with wildfires breaking out sporadically, and it was only a matter of time when everything would go up in flames.

Last evening we went out to take pictures, and the silky texture of the sky was nice, but the colours were very poor, so we processed the pictures in b&w, for the most part.

It’s Sveta Nedilja, of course. Some time ago they finished the road from Dubovica to Sveta Nedilja, which means it’s now easily within reach, but unfortunately the road no longer feels like wilderness. It’s as if the humans extended their civilization to that part now by building the road, and the feeling of the place has fundamentally changed, and not for the better. We tried walking on the paved road but soon gave up.

As you can see, I’ve been doing lots of black&white photography lately. I’ve also been doing lots of strong colour photography lately, as well. Sometimes it’s a matter of mood, and sometimes colour doesn’t actually do anything constructive, so I remove it. Sometimes, like last night, colour actually detracts from the image; it would merely draw attention to the fact that the colours don’t look “clean”. The silvery gray tones, however, were lovely.

I took the 85mm lens with me, and it was probably too tight for some of the motives. However, the ones that did work ended up being very nice compositions. 50 or even 35mm would probably work as well, or better, but that’s the thing about using primes: they force you to think about what you can do with what you have, not allowing you to just change focal length instantly if it doesn’t seem to work. Also, when they don’t work, they make you remember why.

The Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG DN Art looks like a strange choice for this, since people think of it in terms of being a portrait lens, but to me, it’s mostly a lens that allows me to see in the dark while staying in the short telephoto range, and it also allows me to use depth of field to separate landscape into layers, rather than having everything sharp. In this case, however, I didn’t avail myself of this option, because the scene required everything to be sharp. I’m actually very satisfied with how the scene turned out, considering how unlucky we were with the colours. The bright part of the sunset throwing sparks turned out really well. Composing sun into a street lamp looks somewhat Instagramy, but I couldn’t resist. 🙂