
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 ;-)
| Focal length: | 55 mm (≈82 mm) |
| Aperture: | ƒ/4.5 |
| Exposure: | 1/100 s |
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Posted at 18:13

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).
| Focal length: | 50 mm |
| Aperture: | ƒ/10.0 |
| Exposure: | 1/250 s |
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Posted at 11:39

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…
| Focal length: | 75 mm (≈112 mm) |
| Aperture: | ƒ/2.8 |
| Exposure: | 1/60 s |
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Posted at 22:24

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.
| Focal length: | 24 mm |
| Aperture: | ƒ/5.6 |
| Exposure: | 1/100 s |
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Posted at 17:52

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.
| Focal length: | 50 mm (≈75 mm) |
| Aperture: | ƒ/1.4 |
| Exposure: | 1/40 s |
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Posted at 19:57

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 ;-)
| Focal length: | 8 mm (≈12 mm) |
| Aperture: | ƒ/8.0 |
| Exposure: | 1/50 s |
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Posted at 18:32
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