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)!

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.

I don’t really know what you’re inter­ested in, beloved reader, but I assume you would also like to see the odd “fresh” pic­ture, not from my “back catalogue”.

Well, here’s one I took just this morn­ing. At the break­fast table I let my mind wander. Even­tu­ally, it wandered by the fact that I hadn’t used my macro lens in a good while. So I decided to throw it onto the cam­era leave it on for the rest of the day.

Some people like Autumn (oth­ers don’t, and yet oth­ers have no other choice but to like it, since they live in it 365 days a year). Any­way, I shot a bunch of pho­tos today, involving sun­lit spider webs, the cucum­ber a col­league of mine had for lunch, and a dead tree trunk. But in the end, this lovely col­oured leaf made it up here, with its beau­ti­ful, well, leaf tex­ture, morn­ing dew, spider web leftovers and even some hair on it (???). Check out the lar­ger view of it.

This is the best (as in sharpest) shot of the 10 I took in burst mode, as I was shak­ing (it’s not too warm here at the moment) and, moreover, the leaf was dan­cing in the wind. So here’s another good (and old) tip: If your photo risks blur­ring (espe­cially due to cam­era shake), set your cam­era to burst mode and shoot a whole bunch of pic­tures, then there’s bound to be one which is sig­ni­fic­antly sharper then the oth­ers. This one you’ll keep ;-)