Andrea, a col­league of mine from work, needed some pho­tos for her vita. Since I just got my brand new Elin­chrom D-​Lite 2 To Go kit, this was a great oppor­tun­ity to give “stu­dio pho­to­graphy” a shot.

The D-​Lite kit is a set of stu­dio flashes with some use­ful accessor­ies aimed at ama­teurs that would like to get their feet wet in the world of stu­dio pho­to­graphy. Well, I’m not going to start a photo stu­dio, but I always wanted to try out that “whole dif­fer­ent world”. More on that at some later point.

The actual photo shoot was done at work in the even­ing, after the place settled down a bit. For the first set of shots I had Andrea “pose” in front of a white board. I wanted to get a shal­low depth of field as not to get too many dis­tract­ing details in the shot. As — con­trary to pop­u­lar belief — the prob­lem with stu­dio flashes is that they are rather too power­ful than too weak, I couldn’t use dir­ectly, even dialed down to the low­est set­ting. Instead, I just stuck with their mod­el­ling lights.

The second series of pho­tos then was taken in front of a white wall, to get a more neut­ral, clean passport-​photo type of shot to put on the applic­a­tion let­ter. The look I tried to cre­ate here was to show self-​assurance, con­fid­ence and pre­pared­ness, but still with a friendly, human touch ;-)

On a tech­nical side, one thing that com­pletely blew me away (apart from the nat­ural col­ours pro­duced by the stu­dio flashes) was how amaz­ing 25 Mega­pixels can look. Check out the 100% view!

Are you ready for a change? Yes, we can! Ok, leav­ing shapes now.

This was a photo out of a series that I shot last year for the front cover of the “Spoke”, the stu­dent magazine here. And, guess what, one photo actu­ally made it :-) This one here, how­ever, was obvi­ously not meant for that series (front cover pho­tos are usu­ally in por­trait format…); rather, I took it for the fun of using my fisheye lens, that I had just got­ten a few days earlier.

Although it is a manual focus lens built like a World War II tank (it’s made in Minsk, in a plant that also man­u­fac­tures stuff for the Rus­sian space pro­gram (!) and the Mil­it­ary), it deliv­ers pretty stun­ning res­ults — con­sid­er­ing it only costs 4x as little as the “offi­cial” Min­olta /​Sony Lens.

In terms of shoot­ing this, I got really close to the daf­fodils (20cm close!) and just shot a burst of pho­tos — it was quite windy that day and the flowers were mov­ing back and forth, in and out of focus. Also, I had put a large white reflector on the ground as close as pos­sible to the flowers to bounce back some light from below and reduce the harsh shad­ows a bit (think “fill light”). Steffi loves this shot, and so do I :-)

Next one up. This time, it’s the win­dow shades of our guest room.

Oh boy, what did I do with this image? Well, first of all I cranked up most of the sliders I could find in Light­Room, I boos­ted the sat­ur­a­tion and sharpened the hell out of things. That’s how I got this very strong chroma noise. It’s the noise that is pro­duced by the sensor (the pic­ture was shot in pretty dark con­di­tions at ISO 3200, and Sony cam­eras are still any­t­th­ing but fam­ous for their noise per­form­ance).

Apart from that I really messed around with the col­our sliders as well, sat­ur­at­ing this, desat­ur­at­ing that…

Some­thing that’s quite inter­est­ing is the fact that, as I said, it was rather dark when I took the photo. But with ISO 3200 + wide open ƒ/1.8 + 1/​15 s expos­ure I even­tu­ally got the bright­ness I wanted. I didn’t use a tri­pod (too lazy), but instead relied on the in-​body sta­bil­isa­tion of my cam­era (some­thing very use­ful to have — and unique to the Sony D-​SLRs, at least when it comes to full frame sensors). As you can see it worked very well — this is the only shot I took (no burst-​trick this time).

Please don’t try to find any pat­tern in my post­ing. After that rather ser­i­ous post yes­ter­day here’s some­thing more pho­to­graphic, or shall I say “abstract”.

If you haven’t peeked yet, what do you think it is …? Exactly, it’s a lamp just out­side our apart­ment (there is a few of those light­ing the path). Today I thought: Florian, you need to take more pho­tos. So, I ran­domly decided to focus on shapes for the next couple of days to come. I poped my 135mm prime on my cam­era to make things a bit easier, as the long focal length helps to focus on one thing at a time).

I took this shot only a few hours ago, com­ing home tonight after work. It’s main fea­ture relies on an old trick to make things more dynamic: Place things on one of the diag­on­als of the frame. Apart from that, there’s those lovely smooth curves.

Although it looks like I’ve messed with the col­ours, I haven’t at all this time. Just a delib­er­ately wrong white bal­ance (the cam­era was still set to incan­des­cent light; when I impor­ted the pic­ture into Light­Room I decided to just leave it as it was as it looked kind of inter­est­ing ). The slight vign­ette came nat­ur­ally from the lens (shot wide open on a full frame cam­era…), so I didn’t do that either. A very raw RAW so to speak ;-)

Ok, what else is there to say? Well, the extremely shal­low focal plane (math­em­at­ic­ally, it amoun­ted to 2mm depth of field!) was placed off-​centre as to get the point of interest away from the middle and thus make things more inter­est­ing to look at.

This is one of the tougher pic­tures to digest from our recent South-​East-​Asia trip. Nor­mally I ask people before I take a pho­to­graph of them. That can be by actu­ally talk­ing to them if pos­sible, or just by ges­tic­u­la­tion, point­ing at the cam­era and smil­ing with a ques­tion mark in my face.

In this situ­ation here thought — Steffi and I were wait­ing for a bus in one of the busier areas of the Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh, Ho Chi Minh City or just Sai­gon — I didn’t work up the cour­age to ask the man. And I still feel ashamed for not hav­ing done that. Sure, I shouldn’t be show­ing this pic­utre, but I have other motives for doing that.

I would like to share my dis­gust for the atro­cit­ies of war. Although I don’t know the story behind this sorry soul, I’m cer­tain it is one of utmost pain, be it phys­ical, emo­tional or social. The prob­lem with war and try­ing to achieve usu­ally unachiev­able object­ives (when people shouldn’t have got­ten involved in the first place) is that the war is not over when it’s over. Deep rifts in the pop­u­la­tion remain, the cata­strophic psy­cho­lo­gical dam­age car­ries over and affects many gen­er­a­tions, and apart from unex­ploded ordin­ance or mines that bear lethal sur­prises for many years to come, there was Agent Orange…

There, in that street, sit­ting on the steps of a travel agent, wait­ing for the bus, was just one of those moments (and there were sev­eral on that trip) where you just froze and where a ter­rible, bot­tom­less sad­ness hit you. Add a good dose of anger to that, and hope that you’ll never meet the people respons­ible for all those count­less tragedies.

Here in Ire­land so-​called ”Pan­to­mimes” seem to be a bit of a Christ­mas tra­di­tion. In any case, the Drama and Musical Soci­ety of the small little town next to Maynooth appears to be quite fam­ous in the coun­try, hav­ing won sev­eral prices for their stage pro­duc­tions. And right­fully so, I must say — I was blown away when I went there on Sat­urday to take some pho­tos.

The story was an adapt­a­tion of “Robin Hood”, with a some­what dif­fer­ent storyline, tons of great little jokes and gags, but still very well staged so that small chil­dren would also be able to under­stand what’s going on, as a panto is meant to be for the whole fam­ily. The music was bril­liant and the band was amaz­ing too. My good friend Eimear did a great job there, as musical dir­ector of the pro­duc­tion. (How­ever, I still don’t quite under­stand what makes pan­to­mimes so much dif­fer­ent from music­als.)

With regards to pho­to­graph­ing the show, three things were most import­ant: Bright lenses, tons of memory, and a tri­pod. Clearly, bright lenses were needed to achieve fast shut­ter speeds (dan­cing people never hold still ;-)) at not too high ISOs, memory cards as you want to be zap­ping frames like a mad­man (again to cap­ture the best moment when people are dan­cing and act­ing, plus you want to be shoot­ing RAW in those dif­fi­cult light­ing situ­ations), and a tri­pot so you don’t get tired (my 70−200÷2.8 lens + cam­era + bat­tery weighs in at about 2.5 kg, some­thing you do not want to be hold­ing for alomst 2 hours…).

My best shots from the even­ing can be found here.