Friday, August 31, 2012

Mihai's Eight Post

NIKKI IN ROMANIA (VIII)

In the Northwestern part of Romania, the area we call Maramures, I
went for accommodation to a nice B&B run by an artist, a very gifted
and sensitive one, with multidisciplinary skills and interests. The
name of the B&B is "The Potter's House" and one major area of interest
of its owner is of course pottery. I was amazed to see what this man
is producing. From time to time he is offering to his guests free
demonstrations and as well introductory lessons for those interested.
This group of pictures is from a such as demonstrative lesson... my
only regret is that I wasn't there at the beginning.

As a technical notice... Nikki was used mostly at f2 and f2.8... I am
surprised how well it performs at these apertures. I'm so thankful to
Ben for his generous offer to share with us this great piece of metal
and glass! Nikki really rulz!












Thursday, August 30, 2012

Mihai's Seventh Post

NIKKI IN ROMANIA (VII) - The Merry Cemetery from Sapanta

One village from Northern Romania, right on the border with Ukraine, its famous for its very unusual cemetery. This is known as "The Merry Cemetery" because all tombstones are painted in vivid colors, including images and naive poems written by the person who's buried underneath, describing what they considered important about their life. Its a funny place to visit and is the only cemetery I know where living people needs to pay a tax in order to enter (about $1) LOL In the other cemeteries from Romania the tax is paid for dead persons entering the cemetery... and I believe is much bigger LOL. You can see some images I took with Nikki at my recent visit in Sapanta's Merry Cemetery! Enjoy!










 Some visitors:





 An older cross... is not painted but carved...


 and a detail

  
An older grave that does not respect the rule.


Last but not the least... this grave belong to someone who was very proud of his love for the Communist Party... He speaks about that and he is painted handling the badge of that times, containing the sickle and the hammer... LOL





 

Mihai's Sixth Post

NIKKI IN ROMANIA (VI): PEOPLE

In my trip with Nikki I've met many interesting people. It was quite a
challenge to take their picture with a manual focus lens but I harvested
some nice characters to share with you. Most of the people are
villagers... and in order to increase the drama I decided to try a B&W
conversion. Enjoy!














Sunday, August 26, 2012

Mihai's Fifth Post

NIKKI IN ROMANIA (V)

This time I will show pictures with no any special connection... they
were recorded at different places and in different days. The only
common thing is that the lens used was Nikki.














Just a brief notice about the last picture... it was funny to observe
the size of this man's watch :-)



Friday, August 24, 2012

Mihai's Fourth Post

NIKKI IN ROMANIA (IV) - Black pottery at Marginea

One very interesting visit with Nikki was at Marginea, a village from
Bucovina where two families keeps alive the art of crafting a unique
kind of black pottery. We were allowed to see one of the men at work
who graciously let me take pictures from his shop. Very impressive
work there and lot of people were stopping by in order to purchase
from the shop. As you can see from the first picture the black pottery
is the landmark of this village.