Let’s squeeze some pretty irrel­ev­ant news in here for a second: There’s a new kid on the block, or rather a new lens in my col­lec­tion :-)

The lawn mower is of no par­tic­u­lar import­ance, except it was one of the very first shots I took with the new lens.

It’s a bril­liant new tele­photo lens with a focal length range from 70 to 300 mm, at aper­tures of ƒ/4.5 – 5.6, so it’s a fairly com­pact. It’ll replace my lovely old beer­can (a clas­sic 70-​210mm ƒ/​4 Min­olta lens) which was nice in that it is an extremely com­pact lens for its focal length and con­stant aper­ture, but it suffered ter­rible lon­git­ud­inal chro­matic aber­ra­tions and was rather soft wide open, mean­ing I had to stop it down to at least ƒ/5.6 any­way.

The new lens in turn shows vir­tu­ally no chro­matic aber­ra­tions what­so­ever, and is fully usable wide open. Also, it has an ultra­sonic focus­sing mech­an­ism which makes its focus fast, accur­ate and per­fectly quiet. Also, the lens is not much lar­ger nor heav­ier than the beer­can, but has a lar­ger focal length range. I think that’s a fair trade :-)

PS: Here’s a com­par­ison shot of the lenses, show­ing the dif­fer­ence in image qual­ity. At ƒ/5.6, the Sony was wide open, whereas the beer­can was stopped down one stop.

Let’s stay in the “Shape” cat­egory. Here’s one of my all-​time favourites.

Brazília, the cap­ital of Brazil, is a unique city, with a unique (hi)story and unique archi­tec­ture. Some parts of it just look like taken straight from some 70s sience fic­tion movie (check out some more pho­tos here), cre­ated by the mas­ter archi­tect Oscar Niemeyer. For pho­to­graphy, per­fectly white, space age look­ing build­ings and deep blue sky (if you use a polar­iser) just work together.

This photo here was taken in the entrance of the Museu Nacional da República (National museum), which looks like a big huge white ball bur­ied in the ground with just the top bit stick­ing out. I was look­ing for an inter­est­ing angle, with few, clear lines and strong con­trast. I first com­posed the pic­ture so that I wouldn’t have the lamp in bit, but then decided that includ­ing the lamp would give it a tad more bal­ance and some­thing con­crete to look at, apart from the shape cre­ated by the wall.

How­ever, the more I look at it now I thing it might have been bet­ter to leave the lamp out… that would sim­plify, purify things even more. Ah well, too bad.

Let’s leave weird­ness behind and move on to shape. Here’s a photo that I took on my trip to Lon­don last year in the entrance of the Monu­ment of the Great Fire of Lon­don (bit of a lengthy name, that).

As with most stair cases, it’s fun to shoot straight up when you’re at the bot­tom of them. So out I took my bean-​bag, put the cam­era on it and shot straight up. This was actu­ally on top of the little booth where you pay the admis­sion, so the dude inside it gave me an annoyed look when he got up to see where the noise above his head came from ;-)

Luck­ily enough the first shot was good enough — well exposed and, by total chance, per­fectly aimed. So the rest was just a bit of crop­ping, B/​W con­ver­sion (with emphasis on the greens, giv­ing most con­trast in the pic­ture) and sharpening.

Here’s another one, prob­ably one of my weird­est pho­tos, mood-​wise. I took it on cam­pus, some winter morn­ing when there was that proper Irish Fog in the air.

Clearly, the photo is heav­ily post-​processed, but only in a global way — so no local manip­u­la­tions, just muck­ing around with bright­ness, con­trast and tone curve. I have to admit that I didn’t “see” the pic­ture like that when I pressed the shut­ter release. The ori­ginal image itself is fairly “bor­ing” due to all the fog and low con­trast, or let’s say “straight for­ward”. But it was really through play­ing with pretty much all the sliders in Light­Room 1.3 at the time that the pic­ture came out that way.

The big white disk (which many people think is the moon, but it is actu­ally the sun) came from con­trolled blow­ing out of the high­lights. In the ori­ginal image the blown out area is just a few dozen pixels wide, as I inten­tion­ally under­ex­posed the pic­ture when I took it, not to loose any inform­a­tion. But then pump­ing up those high­lights again made the sun trans­form almost into a super­nova which adds this extra bit of weird­ness to the image.

I might come back to that pic­ture one day and fiddle with it a bit more. Prob­ably remove those posts in the fore­ground, and maybe the lamp. I’d prob­ably brighten the pic­ture up a bit too, but I’ll leave it as it is for the time being :-)

PS: I pos­ted the Light­Room set­tings for this pic­ture here, if you’re interested.

Couldn’t find Xzibit any­where to com­ment on this one, so I have to do it myself ;-)

This April I went to Phoenix, Ari­zona, to give a (small) talk at the INFOCOM 2008 con­fer­ence. As the dol­lar still had a ter­rific value com­pared to the Euro, it was pretty much com­puls­ory to buy some stuff while over there. So one night I went on a small shop­ping tour, and it was at the car park of some big elec­tron­ics store that I saw this car. Out I took my cam­era and bean bag, and popped a polar­iz­ing fil­ter on the lens. Yes, this did make sense: The sun had just sat in a per­fect angle to my pos­i­tion, that’s how I got this mag­ni­fi­cent dark blue sky (I took another shot where it was much more prom­in­ent, but the was car less “pimpy”, so I chose this one to post here).

Although I was using a bean bag, I increased the ISO and shot wide open as I didn’t want to spend too much time crawl­ing in front of some car whose owner I didn’t want to meet… it’s still unbe­liev­able how much detail I got out of the shot, again con­sid­er­ing it was taken at the shortest end of the lens, with min­imum aper­ture. You just gotta admire the work Carl Zeiss and friends are doing!

Any­way, I was being a bit lazy in terms of post-​processing and just used an (abso­lutely amaz­ing!) Light­Room pre­set called Sur­real Edgy Look, cre­ated by Matt Kloskowski (thanks!). It just worked out-​of-​the-​box.

This is a very “fresh” photo, just out of Steffi’s cam­era (a trusty old Nikon Coolpix 5700, but it does shoot RAW). We went over to the Post Primary School again to help paint, clean, trans­form and pre­pare the old gym­nas­ium in it for use as a meet­ing place of the Maynooth Com­munity Church.

As it was a sunny day today (for a change) the sun was shin­ing beau­ti­fully through the win­dows in the roof, cre­at­ing those inter­est­ing shad­ows with the sup­port beams. So I grabbed a lad­der went to one side of the hall and took a photo from as high up as pos­sible to get this per­spect­ive shot, some­what com­press­ing the view with a tad of zoom.

Since the small cam­era has not the best optics, I cor­rec­ted some of its defects (rather strong bar­rel dis­tor­tion and chro­matic aber­ra­tions) in Pho­toshop, with the really use­ful Lens Cor­rec­tion tool (it’s hid­den in Fil­ters -> Dis­tort). A bit of mess­ing around with the tone curve as well as the sat­ur­a­tion of some of the col­ours plus the usual vign­ette (thanks John for addict­ing me to them through your won­der­ful Pho­toWalk­through pod­cast…) and I got this picture.