I just noticed that until now I’ve pos­ted any­thing but por­traits. So let’s change that.

Today’s pic­ture is one I took in July this year, when Steffi and I spent a won­der­ful after­noon in Dub­lin. The weather was great, so we went for a stroll around the city and passed through St. Patrick’s Garden, which is right next to the St. Patrick’s Cathed­ral, the biggest church in Ire­land.

In the park, there was that old man just enjoy­ing him­self, his news­pa­per, the beau­ti­ful weather (rare enough), his grand­chil­dren speed­ing about the park, or prob­ably a mix of all that. He looked so happy and relaxed that I worked up the cour­age to go over and ask him politely if he’d mind if I pho­to­graphed him. He smiled, said he did not at all and wondered where /​how best to look. I told him “just as you did before, as if I wasn’t here”. And so he looked back at his grand­chil­dren …

The post-​processing of this pic­ture involved a lot of clean­ing up of the ground under­neath the bench (mostly using the clone-​stamp tool) and of course the b/​w con­ver­sion (giv­ing more weight to the red chan­nel, as it had most of the con­trast). Some care­ful sharpen­ing and a bit of black clip­ping (to fur­ther boost con­trast) gave the final image.