I still haven’t got­ten around post­ing any pho­tos from our recent week­end trip to Cork, a lovely city in the south west of Ireland.

On our sight­see­ing walk­about we also went past the cam­pus of the Uni­ver­sity Col­lege Cork (UCC). When we came past the stu­dent res­id­ences, I couldn’t believe what I saw: In the centre of a circle of build­ings was this “christ­mas tree” of no less than six CCTV cam­eras…! [By the way, CCTV stands for “Closed Cir­cuit Tele­Vi­sion”].

Well, let’s hope this much sur­veil­lance is really neces­sary, and helps pre­vent oh so many crimes…

In terms of pho­to­graphy, this was pretty straight­for­ward thing. Shot at an angle to cre­ate some more ten­sion, I pro­cessed it to sepia tones as it was a grey, unspec­tac­u­lar day. I under­ex­posed care­fully not to blow out the sky, and had the aper­ture closed down to ƒ/​10 to get a max­imum amount of detail and reduce lens flare in this back­light situ­ation. Finally a few select­ive dodge and burns here and there were needed to bring out the cam­eras a bit more.

PS: More pho­tos from the Cork trip here.

I’m… dream­ing of a whiiiiite… Christ­massss… Well, I was but no, not in Irland. Instead, we were finally blessed with a few cen­ti­metres of snow a couple of weeks back (but which only hung around for a few hours) — and I used this oppor­tun­ity to shoot a couple of pic­tures around the beau­ti­ful old cam­pus.

Unfor­tu­nately I can’t show these pic­tures just yet, as some of them will be used else­where and the pho­tos ought to be “fresh” for that ;-)

But any­way, here’s some tips for winter pho­to­graphy: First of all, when you go out in the cold, make sure you pack some warm clothes (obvi­ously) so you can devote all your atten­tion to the pic­ture, and not your shak­ing body. Also, gloves are handy. Keep all your bat­ter­ies as close to your body as pos­sible (i.e. in your pock­ets, not the cam­era bag), so that they are kept warm — this will make the last longer.

Next, make sure you use plenty of pos­it­ive expos­ure com­pens­a­tion (that’s the +/​– EV thingy on your cam­era you always wondered about), as pic­tures in the snow tend to be gen­er­ally brighter than your aver­age light­ing situ­ation, and without com­pens­at­ing for that fact your cam­era will prob­ably under­ex­pose, mak­ing white snow look grey and ugly.

Finally, when you come back inside with your cam­era (mine is almost 2kg of metal and glass), it’ll take a good while before it warms up. In the mean­time, this cold block of high-​tech will make a lot of water con­dense on it, so you may want to put it in an air­tight plastic bag before go back inside. That way it can warm up in there without get­ting all the humid­ity inside. You def­in­itely do not want mush­rooms or lichens grow inside your gear…

On Steffi’s 25^th birth­day I sur­prised her by tak­ing her not into the office (like every morn­ing), but rather to the Aran Islands. This is a won­der­ful place in the west of Ire­land that I had vis­ited about a year and a half ago and always wanted to come back to.

As we were out­side the tour­ist sea­son the island was pretty much in its ori­ginal, raw, bar­ren state — that is no trees, only bare rock and hun­dreds (if not thou­sands) of kilo­metres of stone-​walls to keep the wind from blow­ing the few inches of sand off this oth­er­wise bare rock. We were lucky that one of the bicycle hire shops was still oper­at­ing and lend us two bikes with which to explore the island.

Unfor­tu­nately the weather wasn’t too much on our side (ok, it could have rained more), so in terms of pho­to­graphy I decided to pretty much just stick with black & white: Punchy blacks and strong con­trast can make even the gray­est of days and places look wow. The best pho­tos from the trip can be seen here.

The above pic­ture, how­ever, had too much dynamic range (that is how far the darkest tones are apart from the bright­est), so I had to resort to a fairly new trick: expos­ure fusion. Basic­ally, first you take sev­eral pho­tos with dif­fer­ent expos­ures, and then you com­bine or “fuse” these into one picture.

Ooops, almost a month gone since my last post… So let’s catch up with some of the stuff that’s been going on /​com­ing through the lens of my camera.

Last month, the annual Social Sci­ences Fest­ival took place again in the Lib­rary. Since there were a bunch of import­ant people going to give a talk, I thought it might be a good idea to go over with my cam­era an take a few pho­tos. And a good idea it was.

I got some really nice “journ­al­istic” pho­tos of some import­ant fig­ures from the uni­ver­sity and bey­ond, like, for instance, Prof. John Hughes (the per­son on the right), the uni­ver­sity pres­id­ent. Shoot­ing report­age style means that you’re there to reflect the situ­ation, the moment. No funky col­our post-​processing or weird angles, but clean, neut­ral and inform­at­ive pic­tures.

For most of the shots I bounced my external flash off the ceil­ing (which was white, for­tu­nately), together with some light reflec­ted off the built-​in bounce card. Together with a high ISO and open aper­ture I tried to get a nice bal­ance between nat­ural light and flash light — unlike the uni­ver­sity pho­to­grapher who just killed all ambi­ence with his over-​powered flash (here’s his pic­ture of the same situ­ation that he took just after me ;-)).

Hav­ing pro­cessed the pic­tures the same even­ing, I offered them to the Lib­rary as well as the Com­mu­nic­a­tions /​PR Office of the uni­ver­sity, and they were very inter­ested. One photo is already used on the Lib­rary web­site (repla­cing a sim­ilar, but less pretty one from the offi­cial pho­to­grapher that they ini­tially used), and some more will appear in the next uni­ver­sity news­let­ter :-) Now how is that?