An another one from the con­trast department.

At the time I was on my way into town to meet someone, and didn’t plan on tak­ing my cam­era along, but then I thought, what the heck, take it any­way. I was still kind of new to Dub­lin, and being the anxious Ger­man I am I hoped off the bus about 3 stops too early. Since I had plenty of time (again being a good Ger­man…) /​to “pun­ish” myself /​to bet­ter get to know the city I decided to walk the rest of the way — and was promptly rewar­ded: For no appar­ent reason, there was a scream­ing yel­low bal­loon tied to a scream­ing blue door, which gave, thanks to the sun, a beau­ti­ful strong con­trast.

Apart from that there is not much to say I guess, except I was glad that I did take my cam­era. So here’s the les­son to be learnt: Always have your cam­era with you, and hop off the bus waaaaaay too early ;-)

PS: I got my first photo-​blog-​comment today, yaaay! Thanks Clara!

Ok, back to the “Arts”. Here’s a photo I took on my trip to Scot­land with Steffi, just this August. I saw this little girl in a bright white dress jump­ing around in the Har­bour of a little town called Port­ree on the Isle of Skye.

She already kind of “popped” out of the dark­ish murk left behind by the sea, but play­ing a bit with the grey scale con­ver­sion mod­ule in Light­Room I man­age to make her stand out even more. Even­tu­ally I decided this wasn’t enough, and went on a dodging and burn­ing ram­page, until it ended up as presen­ted here :-)

This is a photo for the darker souls among us. Muaaa-​ha-​ha-​ha-​ha-​ha …

Let’s squeeze some pretty irrel­ev­ant news in here for a second: There’s a new kid on the block, or rather a new lens in my col­lec­tion :-)

The lawn mower is of no par­tic­u­lar import­ance, except it was one of the very first shots I took with the new lens.

It’s a bril­liant new tele­photo lens with a focal length range from 70 to 300 mm, at aper­tures of ƒ/4.5 – 5.6, so it’s a fairly com­pact. It’ll replace my lovely old beer­can (a clas­sic 70-​210mm ƒ/​4 Min­olta lens) which was nice in that it is an extremely com­pact lens for its focal length and con­stant aper­ture, but it suffered ter­rible lon­git­ud­inal chro­matic aber­ra­tions and was rather soft wide open, mean­ing I had to stop it down to at least ƒ/5.6 any­way.

The new lens in turn shows vir­tu­ally no chro­matic aber­ra­tions what­so­ever, and is fully usable wide open. Also, it has an ultra­sonic focus­sing mech­an­ism which makes its focus fast, accur­ate and per­fectly quiet. Also, the lens is not much lar­ger nor heav­ier than the beer­can, but has a lar­ger focal length range. I think that’s a fair trade :-)

PS: Here’s a com­par­ison shot of the lenses, show­ing the dif­fer­ence in image qual­ity. At ƒ/5.6, the Sony was wide open, whereas the beer­can was stopped down one stop.

Let’s stay in the “Shape” cat­egory. Here’s one of my all-​time favourites.

Brazília, the cap­ital of Brazil, is a unique city, with a unique (hi)story and unique archi­tec­ture. Some parts of it just look like taken straight from some 70s sience fic­tion movie (check out some more pho­tos here), cre­ated by the mas­ter archi­tect Oscar Niemeyer. For pho­to­graphy, per­fectly white, space age look­ing build­ings and deep blue sky (if you use a polar­iser) just work together.

This photo here was taken in the entrance of the Museu Nacional da República (National museum), which looks like a big huge white ball bur­ied in the ground with just the top bit stick­ing out. I was look­ing for an inter­est­ing angle, with few, clear lines and strong con­trast. I first com­posed the pic­ture so that I wouldn’t have the lamp in bit, but then decided that includ­ing the lamp would give it a tad more bal­ance and some­thing con­crete to look at, apart from the shape cre­ated by the wall.

How­ever, the more I look at it now I thing it might have been bet­ter to leave the lamp out… that would sim­plify, purify things even more. Ah well, too bad.

Let’s leave weird­ness behind and move on to shape. Here’s a photo that I took on my trip to Lon­don last year in the entrance of the Monu­ment of the Great Fire of Lon­don (bit of a lengthy name, that).

As with most stair cases, it’s fun to shoot straight up when you’re at the bot­tom of them. So out I took my bean-​bag, put the cam­era on it and shot straight up. This was actu­ally on top of the little booth where you pay the admis­sion, so the dude inside it gave me an annoyed look when he got up to see where the noise above his head came from ;-)

Luck­ily enough the first shot was good enough — well exposed and, by total chance, per­fectly aimed. So the rest was just a bit of crop­ping, B/​W con­ver­sion (with emphasis on the greens, giv­ing most con­trast in the pic­ture) and sharpening.

Here’s another one, prob­ably one of my weird­est pho­tos, mood-​wise. I took it on cam­pus, some winter morn­ing when there was that proper Irish Fog in the air.

Clearly, the photo is heav­ily post-​processed, but only in a global way — so no local manip­u­la­tions, just muck­ing around with bright­ness, con­trast and tone curve. I have to admit that I didn’t “see” the pic­ture like that when I pressed the shut­ter release. The ori­ginal image itself is fairly “bor­ing” due to all the fog and low con­trast, or let’s say “straight for­ward”. But it was really through play­ing with pretty much all the sliders in Light­Room 1.3 at the time that the pic­ture came out that way.

The big white disk (which many people think is the moon, but it is actu­ally the sun) came from con­trolled blow­ing out of the high­lights. In the ori­ginal image the blown out area is just a few dozen pixels wide, as I inten­tion­ally under­ex­posed the pic­ture when I took it, not to loose any inform­a­tion. But then pump­ing up those high­lights again made the sun trans­form almost into a super­nova which adds this extra bit of weird­ness to the image.

I might come back to that pic­ture one day and fiddle with it a bit more. Prob­ably remove those posts in the fore­ground, and maybe the lamp. I’d prob­ably brighten the pic­ture up a bit too, but I’ll leave it as it is for the time being :-)

PS: I pos­ted the Light­Room set­tings for this pic­ture here, if you’re interested.