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.