Ever been stuck along the lines of “Oh, I’ve taken all the pho­tos I can think of, what else can I do?! There’s noth­ing left to pho­to­graph!” ? Well, a good way out of that misery — and gen­er­ally a great way to fuel your cre­ativ­ity — is to par­ti­cip­ate in pho­to­graphy assign­ments /​con­test. Pretty much every pho­to­graphy com­munity, forum, pod­cast, etc. gives out assign­ments, sooner or later. This basic­ally just means you’re given a theme to illus­trate and time frame to do that in. The top­ics are usu­ally pretty abstract things, but some­times it can get pretty con­crete as well.

I shot the photo above for an assign­ment given out by Happy Shoot­ing, a very nice pho­to­graphy pod­cast (in Ger­man). The topic was “blitzges­cheit”, which is a bit hard to trans­late into Eng­lish. It lit­er­ally means “smart as a tack”, but it can also be seen as a play on words, as it com­bines “Blitz” – flash and “ges­cheit” – clever. I had spent about a week pon­der­ing about the topic, when I finally came up with an idea, inspired by cam­era toss­ing (a rather risky branch of pho­to­graphy, where you throw your cam­era in the air and see what comes out): Flash Toss­ing! I put my cam­era on a tri­pod in my room (at night, with the lights turned off), set it to a long expos­ure, released and threw my flash gun across the frame, after push­ing its TEST but­ton which makes it fire a burst of flashes.

After about 20 throws, I got the pic­ture above. It had the nicest move­ment through the air, and fit nicely in the frame. Oh, and of note: I threw the flash over my bed, so it had a soft land­ing. How­ever, on second though, I wouldn’t do it again, as the fil­a­ment in the flash bulb might just as well have ripped, even with a soft land­ing… Not sure how robust they are.

Last night was the Christ­mas Party of the place I work, the Hamilton Insti­tute. We all took the train into town, went to the Port­er­house, and pretty much just got p***ed.

As it was a fore­see­able time of hap­pi­ness and mer­ri­ness, I decided to bring my cam­era and snap some shots of the people I work with, but in a more relaxed and cosy set­ting. The prob­lem with most pubs is that although they are beau­ti­fully lit they are usu­ally very dark places, so the only choice was to mount my pre­cious little 50mm ƒ/1.4 prime lens — the clas­sic, stand­ard lens in pretty much any cam­era sys­tem. Mine is over 20 years old! It has two main advant­ages: its focal length is very close to the human eye’s focal length (i.e. the pic­tures look and feel like seen in real­ity), and it is a very “bright” lens mean­ing that it allows more light than usual to enter the cam­era. This allows you, together with a high ISO, to work with the avail­able light, so that no flash has to des­troy the atmo­sphere. Also, at ƒ/1.4 you have a very lim­ited depth of field, which isol­ates your sub­jects from any dis­tract­ing back­ground.

The rest of the of the pho­tos from the even­ing can be seen here.

Steffi and I were doing a three day boat tour in the famous Halong Bay and, when you’re at at see, one of the best things are the sun­rises (and sun­sets). We had missed the sun­set the pre­vi­ous day so I def­in­itely wanted to see the sun­rise…

Since for the most parts of our trip we /​I usu­ally got up about 5:30 am (that’s when the roost­ers [ok, not out on the sea] politely ask you in their lan­guage to stop sleep­ing), this was no prob­lem.

So up I went on deck, took a few wide-​angle shots, but then got out the tele just in time to take this shot. I couldn’t have got­ten a bet­ter view. The little fish­ing boat — as if someone had arranged for it to be there!

There rest then was just a no-​brainer. The good old Rule of Thirds for the com­pos­i­tion, and some (neg­at­ive) expos­ure com­pens­a­tion to pre­serve the high­light details in the reflec­tion on the water (oth­er­wise it would have blown out). This is def­in­itely one of my favour­ites from the whole trip.

Alright, alright, it’s taken a long time, I know. And I’m sorry! Really! The reason why I took so long to update this blog is that I had so much other stuff to do (ser­i­ously) that I only man­aged to fin­ish post-​processing the pho­tos from our big trip today, almost 3 weeks after we got back!

Any­way, without fur­ther ado, let’s get back to busi­ness. This photo I took secretly in/​on a “sawngthaew” (lit­er­ally “two rows”), one of the main forms of trans­port­a­tion in Laos. These are basic­ally just a pick-​up truck with two benches on the back and a roof over them, like so.

The funny thing about them is that they trans­port any­thing. Any­thing. [Note for example the duck on the floor]. And you wouldn’t believe how much quant­ity of any­thing. If you think it’s full, it’s not. How­ever, even if it’s cramped, it’s a cheap way to get around and has a cer­tain adven­tur­ous fla­vour to it.

Pho­to­graph­ic­ally, I used my wide angle for this shot to cap­ture as much as pos­sible of the con­fined space. Since I took the photo secretly, and it was a rather chal­len­ging light­ing situ­ation, I had set the cam­era to auto­matic brack­et­ing, mak­ing it take 5 pic­tures in quick suc­ces­sion at dif­fer­ent expos­ures, so that I could then choose the best exposed one.