Before head­ing off to Ger­many for a week (I’m going to Elgers­burg, near Ilmenau), let me post an image that I took last year, also in Ger­many.

A bunch of friends from uni got together and we went on a small canoe tour on the river Havel, pho­tos here. While ready­ing our canoe on the pon­toon where we left, I notice this super old ship just rust­ing and pretty much dying away, a great photo oppor­tun­ity.

The shot presen­ted here is a detail in the ship’s hull plank­ing. Hav­ing cropped it a bit, I gave Matt Kloskowski’s cross-​processing Light­Room pre­set a got, and I think it works great. This was inspired by an epis­ode of the lovely Pho­towalk­through pod­cast, in which John Arnold showed a cross pro­cessing tech­nique for Pho­toshop, apply­ing it to a sim­ilar “naut­ical detail”.

Fun­nily enough, the hose com­ing out of the hole now almost looks like a tongue stuck out of it, hence the title ;-)

Let me tell you a little story: The story behind my latest pho­to­graphic “creation”.

I was pon­der­ing for two weeks about another photo-​assignment, this time on the topic hart (as in, the Ger­man word for “hard”). After a while I came up with Hässlich Aber Richtig Teuer, which means “ugly, but really expens­ive”. I was thus look­ing for an object (or sub­ject even…) that would fit this descrip­tion, like an u.b.r.e. piece of jew­ellery, an u.b.r.e. car, or what­not — but unfor­tu­nately I didn’t come across any­thing fit­ting this tagline, and the assignment’s dead­line was approach­ing fast.

At some stage I remembered this Boing Boing post, more spe­cific­ally it’s title: “Man in ‘I [Heart] My Mar­riage’ t-​shirt arres­ted for domestic bat­tery”. Bingo. “Heart” is a beau­ti­ful hom­onym of “hart”, so there we go.

Next up: How to render “heart” in a photo. Well, many people (includ­ing myself) some­times end up express­ing their affec­tion towards someone using “I ♥ You”, so that’s it. Finally. Here’s my image.

Tues­day then I set up my cam­era with a long cable release (that I oper­ated with my toe), some flashes and a black back­ground and went ahead for a series of silly self-​portraits, the end res­ult of which you see above.

I think this is another nice example how pho­to­graphic assign­ments can really fuel your cre­ativ­ity (or weird associations).

Today’s photo has been taken at a Poetry Slam in Stut­tgart, just over a year ago. I was vis­it­ing Steffi (who was doing her intern­ship at the time) and we had decided to go to one of the slams in the Rosenau which that hosts them reg­u­larly. I took a few pic­tures at the event, all excited to test my Min­olta 100mm ƒ/2.8 macro as well as the Kon­ic­aMin­olta 28 – 75mm ƒ/2.8, both of which I had just bought on eBay and got­ten them delivered to Steffi to save on the ship­ping.

When I got back, I pro­cessed the pic­tures and pos­ted them, as usual, on my flickr account. I also sent the artists (that had per­formed on the night) links to their pic­tures — to make them aware of the fact that I pos­ted them (in case they mind), and maybe to sell them. In the end, I didn’t sell any, but offered them for free to the pro­ject, as it turned out to be non-​profit (which I didn’t know at first). They were glad to be able to use some of the pho­tos for their web­sites and other pro­mo­tions. As a small thank you, I got a few free tick­ets.

How­ever, the best bit was that one of the more “stock” like pic­tures was used in a num­ber of print pub­lic­a­tions for RUHR.2010 European Cap­ital of Cul­ture events as well as on their web­site. This was the first time one of my pho­tos was pub­lished — and I was all to happy to “license” the pic­ture to this non-​profit organ­isa­tion. I would never have thought it when I first took the pic­ture, so watch out, maybe one day you’ll get an email with people kindly ask­ing per­mis­sion to use one of your snaps…

Last Sunday a bunch of col­leagues and Steff&I went on a little hike to the ”Great Sugar Loaf”. It is (by orders of mag­nitude) less impress­ive than the real deal, but it makes for a very nice hike (provided it’s a nice day ;-)).

After a bit of ran­dom walk­ing and not really find­ing where the track star­ted we finally were ready for the ascend. Up there, we were really sur­prised to find hordes of people going for the sum­mit, and quite a few of them rather not suit­ably dressed for the tast… But they were lucky and the weather played along nicely.

So on the way up I took this spon­tan­eous photo of Łukasz’s girl friend Christina. Apart from the strong flare in the bot­tom left (I still had my polar­iser on when I took this shot) a pretty nice photo, except that it was com­pletely over­ex­posed. I’ve recovered as much as I could from the RAW file, but large parts of the sky are still blown out. Also, as a res­ult, all the dark tones were way to bright and looked rather washed out. How­ever, pho­tos like that don’t have to be lost — just increase the black level until the dark tones are back dark again. You will then get a nice high-​key type of pic­ture with tons of con­trast and nobody will com­plain about blown out skies ;-)

PS: My pho­tos from the hike can be seen here.

Here’s one of my earlier pho­tos, after I had got­ten my first DSLR.

I shot this photo (secretly) in one of my favour­ite pubs in Dub­lin, the JJ Smyth’s. Its upstairs part is fairly fam­ous, being one of the main Jazz loc­a­tions in the city; there are small gigs almost every day, and every now an then someone fam­ous plays there too. On the street level, how­ever, it’s just “nor­mal”, pub — but a very nice and ori­ginal one at that (i.e. with pretty much no tour­ists). Usu­ally, you can see some pretty cool, funky old folks hanging out there, down­ing pints of dark stout at a rate I could never keep up with (or afford, for that mat­ter)…

In any case, it was a very dark situ­ation, so I had put on my bright­est lens, a 50mm ƒ/1.4 and set the camera’s ISO set­ting to the highest pos­sible value (1600) — this gave me a 1/​40s of a second (which is still “hand­hold­able”, thanks to the sta­bil­ised sensor). How­ever, at the time, Sony was with their Alpha 100 even worse when it came to noise at high ISO val­ues than they are today, so the pic­ture had some really bru­tal noise in it.

So here comes the cheap solu­tion: Try con­vert­ing your pic­ture to black and white. Depend­ing on your cam­era, the noise may then look rather nat­ural and pleas­ing — adding to the “flair” of the pictures.

The pre­vi­ous post inspired me to write about this pic­ture here. (Eggs => break­fast => “Your Morn­ing”, an assign­ment given pretty much exactly a year ago by the Digital Pho­to­graphy School Blog.)

It was shot, again, for an assig­ment. At the time I was still liv­ing in my dull stu­dent flat on cam­pus, and my morn­ings — thanks to an bor­ing elab­or­ate routine were rather identical. My break­fast con­sisted of toast, Nutella® and cheap orange marme­lade (thick cut!) plus a tea chosen at ran­dom from the set {pep­per­mint, rose hip, chamo­mile, fen­nel}.

To cap­ture my most excit­ing start-​of-​the-​day, I grabbed the Peleng 8mm fisheye, set the cam­era (my Alpha 700 at the time, with it’s APS-​C sized sensor) on a tri­pod and took a few timer-​delayed shots of me hold­ing the plate dir­ectly above it.

So I guess what makes this photo inter­est­ing (it actu­ally won the assign­ment!) is the com­bin­a­tion of unusual per­spect­ive (straight up) and the dis­tor­tion caused by the fisheye lens. Using a handy desat­ur­a­tion trick I made the col­ours a bit colder /​duller, with only a few col­our accents left (the trick con­sists of desat­ur­at­ing the pic­ture with the “Vibrancy” slider, not the “Sat­ur­a­tion” slider in the Cam­er­aRaw mod­ule /​Light­Room).

PS: I’m on a much health­ier diet now that I don’t live alone anymore ;-)