Kosice has a great “old town” area or main street with beautiful cobblestone streets and plenty of historic buildings to point your camera towards.

This is the State Theatre.

There are at least 3 or 4 old churches and cathedrals on the main strip, the biggest and oldest being the Cathedral of St Elizabeth. Built in the beautiful gothic style, it is a sight to behold. The cathedral itself took over 200 years to complete, and as such, has varying architectural elements that add to the character of this magnificent building. This angle actually has St Michael’s Chapel in the foreground.

I snuck a peak inside this church, which after taking a couple quick snaps was ushered away by a stern looking tour guide, obviously upset I didn’t take him up on his offer for a tour.

I am still going through photos from yesterday and today, and I will be putting together numerous posts on this beautiful city – but I will be in Kiev for the next 4 days and I am sure I will have plenty of things to fill my frame in that wonderful city.

So you decide. Here are two photos, relatively same subject… a gorgeous church in Kosice, Slovakia. I took these this morning out the window of my hotel room. (I need to see about getting up on the roof of this building!)

I shot one and edited it in my customary black and white style, with a square crop (I love that medium format feel) and the other I did in color. Bright hurt my eyes and make me want to go back to bed color. (Okay, maybe not hurt my eyes.)

Which do you prefer?

Ok, so maybe color isn’t that bad… but I am still concerned and somewhat amazed at this country’s deep affection (addiction) toward the color yellow. I have many more examples, but I am too tired and I have to be up early so look for installment two tomorrow.

PS I hate eating alone.

Zack Arias, the incredible music photographer from Atlanta, Georgia came and spoke to a group of us crazy photography addicts in preparation for PhotoCamp Utah. His remarks were very well received. Create a niche for yourself. If 80% of the room or the industry is moving in one direction, turn around and go the other way – do something different!

I can’t wait for his keynote remarks tomorrow. If you didn’t get a chance to get a ticket to PhotoCamp Utah, the event will be live streamed on Ustream at 3:30 MST. If you are at Photocamp, come by and say HI – I will be hosting the events upstairs in room 4 all afternoon.

Then at about 3:00 it started. And it snow all night long. Which means waking up early, to go out with the camera.

I think my dismay at the snow (I want to ride my bike!) is somewhat reflected in the (albeit rather gloomy) mood of the photos.

For those of you that didn’t, here you go.

Here is the setup: Obviously we have a trampoline in the middle. Then we have 2 Profoto D1’s (Donated by the wonderful people at the Draper Pictureline) and then to blow out the back wall we had two additional strobes that Harley Pebley let us use. We had a scaffold set up in front of the tramp, along with a ladder, to give people varying angles and heights to shoot from.

I had the opportunity to work the station with a brilliant young photographer, Sawyer Pangborn (@spangborn), one of those crazy smart guys that is way too talented. He is the one that took the above photos (I think – I am not sure, they were just on my camera…) and we had a whole range of models, from 2 beautiful and graceful fairies, to a young strapping rockstar, and even a business man in a suit. For the full range of photos head over to the Flickr group for Photowalking Utah… the pictures that came from this setup are amazing.

I am going back through some of the photos I took while in Japan back in 2007. My wife gave me my Christmas present early that year – a Nikon D40 – and I couldn’t put it down.

It is fun to see how far I have come in terms of my knowledge of overall photographic principles, aperture, shutter speed, ISO etc, composition etc.