Here’s a some­what “street pho­to­graphy” style shot. I took it about two months ago, when I was spend­ing the bet­ter part of the day with Steffi and Sophie at Holles Street Mater­nity hos­pital in Dub­lin. One after­noon I went for a short walk to catch some fresh air, and thank­fully took my cam­era with me. That’s when I spot­ted this lady sit­ting there, on the phone.

I politely asked her if it was ok to take a photo and she said “yeah, why not”. So I had a quick think about how I wanted to take the photo and how to best cap­ture whatever it was that made me want to take the photo in the first place. My sub­sequent con­sid­er­a­tions included small aper­ture to get those sun “rays”; cen­ter weighted meter­ing on the fore­ground as to expose for the lady, not the (much brighter) sky behind her; manual mode so not to take any chances with the camera’s own auto­matic meter­ing; low cam­era pos­i­tion to get the shadow of the fence more prom­in­ent into the frame; one shot only as I didn’t want to bother her too much; etc.

So walk­ing over to where I wanted to shot from I did a quick test shot from the hip to double check proper set­ting of the expos­ure (insec­ure me) and then kneeled down to take the actual pic­ture. It was only then that her con­ver­sa­tion had turned into shout­ing — and from what I could her she was just dump­ing her boy friend …

How many sub­jects can you have in a photo? Well, it depends on how you group them, I sup­pose. Here you could say: “The two cats are the sub­ject”, or you could say: “The cats are the two subjects” …

Well, whichever way you look at it, pla­cing two sub­jects diag­on­ally oppos­ite in a frame cre­ates a good deal of con­fu­sion for your eyes — espe­cially if the sub­jects look very sim­ilar. You will have a hard time set­tling for one of them, and thus move back and forth between the two points of attrac­tion.

The cats above were two street cats just chilling out in the sun­shine at Wat Luang, a Buddhist temple in Pakxé, South­ern Laos.

Who’d have thought it. Back in Feb­ru­ary this year I jumped at the oppor­tun­ity to take a few pic­tures of the beau­ti­ful NUIM South Cam­pus clad in white.

You see, it doesn’t snow a lot in Ire­land, and the snow usu­ally just stays for a couple of hours, so I had to move fast. I grabbed my cam­era, bat­ter­ies, a bunch of lenses, gloves, and off I went to take some pho­tos around the uni­ver­sity.

And then, about a month ago, the university’s PR office asked me if I had any nice winter pic­tures of the uni­ver­sity, for use on this year’s offi­cial NUIM Christ­mas Card. Well, out I pulled this one and guess what — it made it! You can buy the cards around cam­pus now and see me walk around with a big smile :-)

Well FINALLY. Let me repeat this. Well FINALLY. Adobe got their heads out of their butts and FINALLY revised their RAW con­ver­sion engine from the ground up to FINALLY provide some decent raw con­ver­sion res­ults, espe­cially for images taken with Sony D-​SLRs.

What’s a RAW? Just quickly, it’s basic­ally just the very raw, unaltered data cap­tured by the camera’s sensor, more or less dir­ectly dumped into a file with (hope­fully) zero pro­cessing done in-​camera. This means that it’s actu­ally not an image, but really just pure data. Just num­bers. These num­bers need to be con­ver­ted later, on the com­puter, into an actual image before you can actu­ally see any­thing. Thus the qual­ity of the final image depends to a large part on the soft­ware used (and less so — to some extend — on the cam­era and its pro­cessing cap­ab­il­it­ies).

Since I shoot 100% of my pic­tures in RAW, it is cru­cial for me to have a soft­ware that does a good job at con­vert­ing them. Unfor­tu­nately, so far Adobe’s Cam­era Raw, which does this job in Light­Room (a beau­ti­ful piece of soft­ware in itself), has done it very badly for Sony RAW files (for a num­ber of reason I won’t get into). In any case, this has rad­ic­ally changed with the Light­Room 3 (beta) that was released a couple of weeks back.

Here’s an excerpt of an image that I had to take at ISO 6400 to get short shut­ter speeds so I could cap­ture the tor­ren­tial rain. Left: Light­Room 2, Right: Light­Room 3 (beta). Check out the dif­fer­ence in how the col­our noise is removed beau­ti­fully, to actu­ally reveal that it was indeed rain­ing quite heav­ily. Also, there’s gen­er­ally much more detail in the image on the right. So I can’t wait for the full ver­sion to come out.

Ireland’s a gen­er­ally rainy place, we all know this. But every now and then — even in autumn — you get a few hours of sun­shine (if you’re lucky).

And so, yes­ter­day, we went for a stroll (the three of us now) around Maynooth to profit from this short win­dow of good weather (which, in the end, only las­ted about 4 hours). Of course we went through the beau­ti­ful Sound Cam­pus of the uni­ver­sity, just because it’s so pretty in sun­shine. This took us past this mag­ni­fi­cent, incred­ibly strongly col­our tree right out­side St. Patrick’s House.

See­ing the blue sky, I also grabbed a polar­ising fil­ter when we left, which then allowed me to really bring out those col­ours. They turned out so intense, that the pic­ture as seen here in a browser (due to the rel­at­ively small gamut of the sRGB col­our space) can­not render the actual sat­ur­a­tion of the colours!

Whoooh… this one’s to toy­ing around and experimentation.…

It’s been a while since I played around with the idea of build­ing a pin­hole cam­era. The cheapest way to do this (if you hap­pen to have a D-​SLR) is to just buy a cheapo body cap for the cam­era (that’s a plastic cap that you can cover the front of the cam­era with if you have no lens attached) and drill a hole into that.

Now with pin­hole pho­to­graphy, you need a very small hole to make the whole thing work. And the best way of achiev­ing this is to actu­ally put a lar­ger hole into the cap (say 3mm dia­meter), and then stick some alu­minium foil over the hole. Then you pierce the actual, tiny hole with a needle into the tin­foil. The cleaner, rounder, per­fect the hole, the bet­ter the sharper image you get out of it. I’ll post a photo of my cam­era with the mod­i­fied cap later on.

The funny thing with pin­hole pho­to­graphy is that you have super small aper­tures (in the hun­dreds or two-​hundreds!), which means two things: 1) pretty much infin­ite depth-​of-​field, i.e. everything is in focus, from right in front of the cam­era all the way to infin­ity, 2) very long shut­ter times (because of the small aper­ture).

The photo above was just some toy­ing around in the liv­ing room, fir­ing my flash­gun into my face in a few dif­fer­ent spots while expos­ing for about 20 s. It’s quite blurry, but I’ll have a few more attempts at pier­cing a bet­ter hole (some people actu­ally use lasers for that!).