Nor­mally there are always cars parked in front of the old Maynooth Castle ruins, but on St. Steven’s Day (Dec 25^th) the town was as empty as I’ve ever seen it, and no cars spoiled a shot that I wanted to take since a long time. Apart from mess­ing with the col­ours, there are two inter­est­ing things about this photo.

On the one hand it was taken with my new cam­era (finally I’m also in pos­ses­sion of a full frame cam­era, that is a cam­era whose sensor is the size of a 35mm film neg­at­ive) and as well as my new wide-​angle lens.

On the other, I used the lens dis­tor­tion tool in Pho­toshop to cor­rect the per­spect­ive dis­tor­tion that comes with shoot­ing at an angle. By per­spect­ive dis­tor­tion I mean the effect where ver­tical lines (that ought to be par­al­lel) con­verge toward the van­ish­ing point, and build­ings appear to be fall­ing back­wards, if left uncor­rec­ted. There’s basic­ally three things you can do to avoid this effect. (1) Buy a (tilt/)shift-lens, (2) shoot hori­zont­ally at a wide enough angle to cap­ture what you want to cap­ture, but crop after­wards, like so or (3) cor­rect for the per­spect­ive after­wards in post-​processing, e.g. with the Lens Cor­rec­tion Tool in Pho­toshop. The best tech­nique would be (1) to use the spe­cial­ised lens as it allows you to use the full res­ol­u­tion of your sensor, but those are expens­ive and not avail­able for all cam­era sys­tems (e.g. mine). As for (2), you throw away res­ol­u­tion after­wards as you’ll be crop­ping large parts of the image, and you have to think of this tech­nique on the spot already, while you’re tak­ing the photo. The last method is kind of in between, you don’t loose too much inform­a­tion, but it is a destruct­ive trans­form­a­tion to your images (at least for the time being, fin­gers crossed it’ll be included in Light­Room soon).

In this present photo I chose tech­nique (3) as I don’t have a tilt/​shift-​lens, and 17mm was not wide enough to do trick (2). Any­way, I hope you’ve now learned a little bit about how you can avoid per­spect­ive dis­tor­tion, provided you have the right gear /​soft­ware at hand.

Happy New Year every­one, sorry this new post took so long. This one was taken on the famed “Bam­boo Train”. It’s a Cam­bod­ian inven­tion (one of the kids told me proudly) and con­sists basic­ally of three parts: A motor, a very light bam­boo flat bed, and a pair of axles. This mod­u­lar built allows it to be assembled and taken apart again in a mat­ter of seconds, even by a bunch of kids. Those trains used to run between the offi­cial train ser­vice on the national rail­way net­work, and there is only one simple (and obvi­ous) rule: The lighter train gets out of the way (off the tracks) first…

I love this pic­ture with those cool kids enjoy­ing the free­dom of speed­ing down the twis­ted rails while mak­ing a few bucks off ran­dom tour­ists that made it out there. Pho­to­graphy­wise it was shot with a polar­ising fil­ter for increased sat­ur­a­tion and col­ours, with an elev­ated shut­ter speed as it was shak­ing quite a bit. I chose a rather wide angle of view in order to cap­ture those con­ver­ging lines from the bam­boo plat­form as well, which kind of intens­i­fies the whole pic­ture.

PS: Here’s a short video over on You­Tube where at about 2:00 the guy talks about this crazy form of train.