So here we go with the first photo in my re-​baptised (photo)blog, chosen for no par­tic­u­lar reason to be the first other than pure randomness.

I took it last year in Novem­ber in Cork when we went down there with the Inter­na­tional Stu­dents’ Soci­ety. The two kewl look­ing girls are actu­ally two French Erasmus stu­dents that came along, and they were just hav­ing a cigar­ette out­side the hostel when I was return­ing from a little pub crawl. See­ing this streetphotography-​ish scene, I asked them if they’d mind if I took a photo — which they did not — and so I pulled out my bean-​bag, put the cam­era on it without much fram­ing, set the aper­ture to ƒ/​4, upped the ISO a bit, enabled the self-​timer and kindly asked the girls to freeze for the half second long expos­ure (just like in the old, old times…).

The photo came out sur­pris­ingly good, well exposed, nicely focussed and sharp — the girls really did freeze well :-) Given the rushed nature of the shot (didn’t want to bother them too much) and the amount of alco­hol I had in my blood I really like the res­ult. Post-​processing basic­ally just involved the some­what aggress­ive B/​W con­ver­sion and the “chem­ical” split ton­ing (blueish high­lights, green­ish shad­ows) plus some vign­et­ting, all done in Light­room.

PS: When you click on the pic­ture you get to see a big­ger ver­sion of it!