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Posts Tagged ‘Malta’

They call it the Grand Prix of the Sea. Malta sees these powerboats once a year for 3 days of  intense. One thing’s for sure, there’s nothing like that much engine power pushing you forward through the waves. More info on the race can be found here.

All of these images were shot with the 70-200/2.8, at roughly f9-f11 to get as much depth of field as I could for the required shutter speed. ISO was set to 200. To get more awesome out of these images, I got as low as possible above the water on the cliff I shot them from. This is a much better angle to shoot from and it makes all the jumps just that  much higher.

Images from the qualifier round:

Images from race day 1:

My recent trip to Malta taught me one thing: 4 days just isn’t enough time to do everything I wanted to do. Every time I go back there I see things in a totally different light, from totally different angles and produce totally different images. In spite of its miniscule size there’s a lot to be seen in Malta. Most of the buildings there are made out of limestone which has a pretty unique texture and turns a bright orangey yellow when the sun’s coming in low over the horizon. When the sun sets you can actually see a big round fiery ball over the sea which is something you don’t see in Scandinavia. The sky has a completely different color really, it’s hued a lot more towards orange and yellow as opposed to the blues, pinks and purples of northern Europe.

Valletta is a city meant for street photography. The long straight streets, the multitude of people and again the texture of fortified walls surrounding it lend themselves to a whole lot of great images. Old stuff just has so much character that adds a soul to an image and Valletta is just that… old. There is also the cultural factor, considering cultural sites of interest per square kilometer the Valletta harbor area is probably one of the richest sites in the world.

The rest of the island is interesting too. The cliffs to the south-west, the hills and valleys to the north and the numerous fortifications sprinkled over the entire island just beg to end up on a wall as a large canvas print. All this said Malta is a large piece of limestone. There are pretty much no wild animals there, well maybe aside from a few rabbits, lizards and a host of migratory birds on their way to or from whatever warm place they fly to in winter. Malta would probably be paradise to  underwater photographers, but for us who prefer dry land under our feet wildlife photography is out of the question.

One thing I didn’t really think about  was how dark nights get there in summer. This is mostly because you can still pull a lot of detail from a handheld iso 200 shot at night here in Sweden, summer nights up here in the north are all but dark. In Malta, a tripod at night is pretty much a necessity if you’re looking for even a little sharpness. This is where my Gorillapod came in handy.

I flew Ryanair and expected a lot of fuss for carrying a large camera given that their TOS explicitly says that one piece of hand luggage means just that. Cargo pants were the solution here although I got some weird looks at the security checkpoint for taking 15 minutes to empty my pockets.

Here are some more images I shot in Malta: