Ok, there’s not too much depth to this. I guess, only the Ger­man speak­ing read­ers will get this ;-)

Steffi and I are going on our “big hol­i­days” for this year, this time it’s Viet­nam, Laos and Cam­bodia. If everything goes well, we should be back mid-​November.

In the mean­time, enjoy yourselves and be good,

Florian

Even though the last few days it was abso­lutely p***ing down, this morn­ing we were blessed with just pure sun­shine. For­tu­nately I still had my cam­era in my back­pack so I just spent 20 minutes out­side the office tak­ing autumn pictures.

The col­ours of the trees and leafs are even more extreme than last week, and together with the blue sky (as I said, a rar­ity around here) and my friend the polar­ising fil­ter I just went mad on the hunt for inter­est­ing angles with explod­ing col­ours and con­trasts.

I’ll hope­fully get around post­ing some of the other pic­tures I took this morn­ing on my flickr account. I’ll let you know. Now back to work.

Update: More autumn-​y pho­tos now here.

Same lens, com­pletely dif­fer­ent situation.

This time, it’s all about event pho­to­graphy. Last year the Gos­pel Choir (which I’m part of) had a gig with two imper­son­at­ors (Elvis, and Tina Turner). Dur­ing the bits where we sang with them (pho­tos here) I got the chance to take some pho­tos myself of those two pro­fes­sion­als doing their job — great singing, and dan­cing, and look­ing like the ori­ginal.

Being part of the “crew” I could pretty much go any­where I wanted dur­ing the show, which also means back­stage. That’s how I got this nice angle. Obvi­ously I had to shoot wide open with a fairly high ISO to avoid too much motion blur in those light­ing con­di­tions. Again, the burst trick really helped to get some crisp shots. Another bene­fit of this tech­nique is that you usu­ally get a lot of funny faces when someone is singing (or talk­ing for that mat­ter), so get­ting sev­eral shots in a row allows you to select the nicer ones ;-)

Just as a big Cali­for­nian com­pany is releas­ing new products as we speak, let’s go back again to a purely “pho­to­graphic” entry.

This shot was a bit of an exper­i­ment… Inspired by this post in the amaz­ing Digital Pho­to­graphy School blog, I wanted to take a photo involving water drops. For the set-​up of the shot, check out this “mak­ing of” photo.

The apple was placed on a glass in a sink where I “fine tuned” the tap so that only a small vol­leys of drops would come out every now and then. If you look at the aper­ture and the expos­ure time, you’ll see that the ambi­ent light couldn’t pos­sibly influ­ence the shot. That’s why the back­ground appears com­pletely black. The reason for these extreme set­tings was to achieve exactly that, to freeze the motion as good as pos­sible and to have a large enough depth of field in this rather macro-​y situ­ation.

Light­ing. As you can see in this shot, the only light here was com­ing from an external flash (triggered wire­lessly), a mir­ror (to bounce some of the light back) as well as two impro­vised reflect­ors. After fid­dling with the expos­ure para­met­ers and arran­ging the reflect­ors, I took about 20 shots try­ing to get the tim­ing right with the drops ran­domly com­ing out of the tap (which is harder than you’d think). In the end, I was really happy with the out­come, I got pretty much exactly what I wanted.

PS: Thanks to Kfir (my office-​mate) for bor­row­ing me an apple — I’m aller­gic to them, so I returned it after the shot :-)

Last night, someone privately poin­ted out to me that it seems that the stuff I’m post­ing here I just make up as I go along.

That is cor­rect.

And that some things I say are hardly rel­ev­ant to the photo presen­ted.

That is cor­rect too.

Any­ways, this photo is another “fresh” one, I took it last Sunday when we (NUIM Vol­ley­ball Club) had our first two games here in Maynooth, as part of the Men’s National League 2^nd Divi­sion.

We got our arses beaten all over the place (here’s an account of our hero­ism), los­ing both games. How­ever, it was great fun nev­er­the­less, and we’re just in there for the craic and the train­ing effect (we don’t have a coach, and are just barely enough play­ers to form a team!). No one had any ambi­tions of win­ning any­thing, so there were no tears shed.

Also, no one got hurt, which is sur­pris­ing, because one of the teams was made up entirely of “killing machines”. Take this guy in the photo, who reg­u­larly spiked super-​sonic balls over people try­ing to block him (he was a giant). Dur­ing those balls he reg­u­larly deformed the space-​time-​continuum, as can be wit­nessed in the shot… More pho­tos from the event here.

Last semester, when I still lived on cam­pus, one of my lovely flat­mates (Nancy from Aus­tria) often had another friend of hers /​mine over, Vazul (Aus­trian too). Just day I had read about ”Jowl­ers”, check out the link, so I asked Vazul if he’d be in for try­ing it out.

Unfor­tu­nately, in the end it didn’t work out as desired (at least the shots didn’t really look cool). How­ever, in the pro­cess of set­ting up /​con­fig­ur­ing the gear I got this inter­est­ing shot :-)

To get this look (which pretty much invited itself by the chem­ical green paint of our creepy kit­chen, as well as Vazul’s tough-​boy expres­sion), I desat­ur­ated the reds and the yel­lows (while boost­ing the oranges a bit) and drastic­ally reduced the bright­ness val­ues of these col­ours, all in Light­Room. This is how you can get some nice, strong, rough tex­ture out of the skin (do the oppos­ite if you want to make it look more smooth). To increase the effect, I applied some hard core sharpen­ing to the final image.

Some say, Vazul never looked so “manly”… all I know is that I just love this shot. So Kudos and thanks to Vazul (wherever you are now)!