Photo Tips from Krist: Slovenia Continued

National Geographic photographer Bob Krist is on assignment in Slovenia, and sends us another peek through his viewfinder (you can find his first one here). Visit his blog for more tips, or get them in person at our upcoming Traveler Photo Seminar in Denver, Colorado on September 27.

My assignment has taken me from one end of Slovenia to the other, which isn’t really saying much considering the country’s small size, but it has afforded me some more great sights and photo ops.

For this high angle view of the coastal town of Piran, I climbed a church tower and shot down using a 16-85mm VR lens with a polarizing filter to make the most of the incredible colors. It was the last bit of the sun I’d see for a while. Whenever I hit a new town, I look for high places to shoot from to give my pictures a sense of place.

For a glimpse at underground Slovenia and some other cool snaps, hit the jump.

Coming through the beautiful Soca River Valley, part of which is in the Triglav National Park and served as the setting for a couple of scenes in the Chronicles of Narnia movie, we ran into overcast skies and heavy rain.

So to overcome the gray horizon, I looked for compositions of the river that didn’t include the featureless sky. The river’s incredible color really popped in the overcast light, and I used the 16-85mm zoom at the wide end, and the higher perspective a nearby bridge provided, to shoot down on the river and create a leading line.

The rain wasn’t a problem when we hit a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Skocjan Caves.This is a huge underground labyrinth of over six kilometers of caverns and passages, some, like the one in this photo that are over 100 meters high. The only way to show the size of something like this is to have a scale element in the photo, so I waited for some of my fellow spelunkers to stop on the bridge, and shot them with a wide angle lens and the camera mounted on a tripod.

I was indoors as well at the Lipica Stud Farm, the original home of the famous white Lipizzaner stallions. I made sure to time my visit to the farm to catch one of several shows put on every week by the Classical Riding School. During these demonstrations, some of the 400 horses display precision riding and carriage pulling. It’s all indoors, so you need to up your ISO to about 1600 (your little flash won’t do a thing in this big indoor facility), and use a long lens (mine was a 70-300mm VR zoom).

A few miles down the road from Lipica, we stopped for a wine and Karst prosciutto tasting at the picturesque Lisjak Winery in Dutovlge, where winemaker Boris Lisjak gave us a tour of his cellars and samples of some absolutely luscious cabernet and his homemade Karst prusciutto. I used a high ISO (800), a 16-85mm VR lens at the wide end, and some bounce flash to make this shot of the winemaker in his cellar. We couldn’t resist stuffing a couple of bottles of that Cab in with the tripod and other gear as we made our way north again, to the capital city Ljubljana.

All photos © Bob Krist