Michael Bartikyan //Photography

Dec 13

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Autumn of my Homeland – Armenia in 4K

Filmed during the most beautiful time of the year in Armenia. Autumn is probably the best season for visiting Armenia. Lakes and forests, mountains and historical monuments, painted with astonishing colors of nature ! Shooting locations include Parz Lake in Dilijan, Lastiver waterfalls and forests of Ijevan, Noravank monastery in Yeghegnadzor, Makaravank church complex in Tavush Region, Akhtala monastery in Lori, Khor Virap in Ararat Region. Filmed using: DJI Phantom 2 with Zenmuse H3-3D GoPro 4 Black, with modified 5.4mm lens and ND4 Filter. Timelapses shot using Nikon D700 and Nikon D5300 Lenses: Nikon 24-70 2.8, Sigma 12-24 Edited with Adobe Premiere Pro CC in 4K resolution

Jun 06

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South Africa, Lion Park

It has started 2 years ago, when I had my first encounter with real wildlife, America’s Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks present you a great variety of beasts. Since then, my mind was boggled with the idea of taking this to another level. And Africa was the main destination that I had in mind. As one wise man once said, all good things come to those who wait, I got a chance to travel to South Africa for a business trip. Now, the city of Johannesburg is where I am going to spend next 3 months of my life. So here we are, and given the opportunity of being away from work during weekends I’m going to use my time for sightseeing and of course safaris ! Packed with 10 kilos of photo equipment it’s time see what options we have. You can visit some sanctuaries where the animals are more or less in captivity or you have the option of visiting Kruger National Park which is a vast territory of total wilderness spread on almost 20 000 square kilometers. But for warm up I decided to go for something smaller than that, and by doing some research I […]

Jun 05

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Prague Floods, June 2013

I woke up earlier than usual, though it was late May I found some winter clothes and put them on, got out on time, changed two buses and three trams to get to work and was late for an hour but still not fired? That’s flood. It has been raining cats and dogs for the last three weeks. Nasty weather, bad mood for everyone. I do not remember things to be so severe since I moved to Czech Republic seven years ago. Vltava River – a repeatedly flooding river, which caused huge troubles ten years ago covering the whole Old Town of Prague, Prague Zoo and villages with water. All the people living there had to leave their homes, shops and offices for several months and come back finding everything damaged and out of order. This year Prague has been more ready for the flood, though again the subway, some streets, bridges have been closed, and people have been relocated again. Today, the water levels have begun to drop, but still the overall situation in country remains critical. Closure of metro and several streets in the city caused colossal traffic jams in the city center. Kampa Museum under water: Czech […]

May 28

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Nikon 70-200 2.8 VR II – Review

It’s been years since I gave up my Canon gear and switched to Nikon and my Canon EF 70-300 IS was long gone. So the longest focusing lens I owned so far was Nikon 24-70 2.8 which is pretty amazing in terms of sharpness and picture quality but it’s still not a telephoto lens.I was still missing this longer focusing range especially during my trip to US while shooting wildlife , although I took Nikon 80-400 VR for rent I was not impressed with the sharpness and overall picture quality of it. Till I finally got a hold of Nikon’s most brilliant zoom lens 70-200 2.8 VR II. First thing you won’t miss is weight !!! 1.5kgs of it ! Mount it on D700 with battery grip and you end up with almost 3kgs in your hands. Heavy but when you loose with comfort of carrying it around you gain on stability while shooting. And when the Vibration Reduction kicks in well what else would you need ? right, some objects to shoot… So I moved to the most crowded place in Prague the Charles Bridge to hunt down some people from a long distance and possibly some gulls to […]

Nov 18

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Tigran Hamasyan at Monterey Jazz Festival

First time I heard about Tigran Hamasyan was from my mother. She told me story of a boy who had amazed the audience and members of examination board when he was passing his final exam at music school where my mother used to teach solfege. There was some program of classical music that he had to perform but everybody in the room knew about Tigran’s talent and passion of jazz music. After official part was over he was asked to perform few jazz compositions and the public was speechless after his performance. Everybody knew that one day this boy’s name will be heard from the greatest stages of the world, and this is exactly what happened. Quite shortly he performs and wins at many prestigious jazz festivals abroad as well as in Armenia and becomes true revelation for jazz music. I had few of his earlier records and I was always fond of his music. Recently he released a new album called A Fable. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw this album on a playlist of Air France jet on my way from Paris to San Francisco. But I kept the pleasure of listening to it till Monterey Jazz […]

Sep 26

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14hrs of New York

My plane has landed at JFK Airport at 6am, and next flight to Prague was at 8pm so I had 14hrs to see New York. It took me a while till I figured out how to get to Manhattan and the best way was to take subway. I have decided to start from Brooklyn Bridge and I took the line that was passing near the Bridge. It was a long way with plenty of stops, it took me like 50 min to get there from the airport. So here we are at High st, which is 5 min walking distance from the bridge. The weather was not the best that day, total overcast, nevertheless I was cheering up myself that it would get better eventually, but that never happened. So finally the Brooklyn Bridge It leads you straight to lower Manhattan, and here I am in the center of this enormously big city. Full people and cars, busy streets and lot of construction around. Especially close to New World Trade Center that is built in high rates. This is Tower One of the new World Trade Center, from the corner of Broadway and Ann street. The exterior of building is […]

Sep 24

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Bay Bridge

Bay Bridge is a 2 deck bridge opened in 1936 connecting San Francisco and Oakland, it was actually opened 6 moths before Golden Gate Bridge and initially the upper deck was dedicated for automobiles and the lower one for trucks and trains, then after some time the lower deck was converted to road traffic too. It has a total length of more than 7km with 5 traffic lanes each direction. Probably the best view of the bridge is from Treasure Island and from the top of the hills at Yerba Buena Island, although you can see only half of the bridge from those islands there is San Francisco downtown in the background that makes the view of even more spectacular !

Sep 23

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Golden Gate Bridge

lden Gate Bridge is one of the most recognized symbols of San Francisco and America in general. With it’s unique color and shape it can’t be mixed up with any other bridge. It was built in 1937 and it’s more than 2km in length. Originally painted with red lead primer it’s maintained by 38 painters to touch up corroded spots. During first 4 days of my stay in San Francisco it was shrouded with fog constantly, and it revealed it’s beauty on the 5-th day and we rushed there with my cousin on bikes. First stop at Fort Point. Then we crossed the bridge and stopped at Vista Point on the way to Sausalito. Then we cycled all the way to Sausalito which is a small and very beautiful place, I will post some photos of it in one of next articles. We took a ferry back to San Francisco and it was passing next to Alcatraz, I could see it from close distance but unfortunately I didn’t had enough time to take a tour there, maybe next time. On the right side you could see the Golden Gate again. Golden Gate is brilliant in any time of the day, […]

Sep 22

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Bodie – Ghost town.

America’s lands have been famous not only for their unique beauty but also for their deposits of gold. Gold mining in America has started from the beginning of 19-th century. And in each era it was mined it’s own way , and the infrastructure built around the mines were different from one generation to another. One of such gold mines was Bodie town, located in California , on a highly elevated (more than 2500m) area in Sierra Nevada mountain range. The history starts from a mining camp that discovered gold in 1859. Then several years later there was found a profitable deposit of gold and that was the time when Bodie became a boomtown. By 1879 it had a population of 5000-7000 people. Mining in Bodie lasted till 1913 , and by then most of the miners moved to other locations so the town was populated only with families that decided to stay in Bodie instead of moving to other mining towns. Eventually it became a ghost town , and now days it’s a historic park with it’s extraordinary shape and abandoned houses, rusty cars and petrol stations, carts and even sledges. Most of the houses were locked, but there […]

Sep 21

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Bonneville Salt Flats

If you are a speed fan or at least a car enthusiast you probably heard about Nurburgring or Monza or Silverstone, now those are race tracks in Europe and in Europe cars are mostly going in corners, but in America it’s a bit different, they go straight most of the time. Now that may sound boring but only not in Bonneville. Here at Bonneville Salt Flats people set world land speed records in their custom build rocket shaped super cars. But it’s not only streamliners that are racing here, there are many categories and classes including motorcycles and electric vehicles that are racing against each other maxing out their whole potential. There are few tracks here and the longest one is 7 miles and because it’s so long you can’t actually see the other end, because the track is following the curvature of the earth. There are mile markers on both sides of the track so you will know where the runway ends and when to hit the brakes. Before sowing up to Bonneville I checked the schedule of events and unfortunately there was nothing major happening that day I arrived, but luckily there was a private event and I […]