
Having gotten to some beautiful location, do you also sometimes wish that — especially when travelling — you were the only person there? How many times do we try to take photos with as little other people on it as possible? Maybe what is happening is that (subconsciously) we believe that the picture will be more special without other tourists in it, as in we were the only person capturing this wonderful moment /place.
While of course there are many situations where it is much more aesthetic to have no persons in the picture (also, from a compositional point of view, people usually draw a lot of attention to them, away from other potential subjects in the picture), fellow humans can also give a bit of life and fun to a picture, or a situation.
Take the picture above. I had just set up to take the shot of the Cathedral of Brasilia when a horde of tourist poured out of a bus and jumped into the picture to take their group photo. I almost got annoyed by what I felt to be a rather rude thing to do, but then I saw that those crazy young people actually give so much more liveliness to the shot (compare it to this shot someone else posted on flickr). In a moment of adventure, I asked if they all could cheer and wave and scream — and spontaneously they did!
So here’s something to think about: Tourists may also be your friend in pictures! Also, intentionally including people helps to give scale and perspective to some shots. Here are some more examples (1, 2, 3).
| Focal length: | 18 mm (≈27 mm) |
| Aperture: | ƒ/4.5 |
| Exposure: | 1/250 s |
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Posted at 18:11

It’s time again, I need a new passport and thus some up-to-date photos of myself. Possessing all that photographic gear, why not try to make them myself? Last time I paid 11 EUR for them and the main street photographer just used a trusty old Canon 350D with a cheapish Sigma 18-200mm lens (from what I remember, set to around 60mm i.e. 96mm considering the 1.6x crop factor), plus some minor studio equipment: In short, nothing a mere mortal couldn’t reproduce.
I then had a read up on the official specs of the Bundesdruckerei (the German Federal Printing Office) and decided that the conditions there aren’t too hard to meet either.
So I sat my to studio flashes with their softboxes up in our living room, tethered the camera to LightRoom, grabbed a remote release, and off I shot. Here’s a small making-off shot. After about 10 shots of adjusting my head, I finally go the image right (as far as I can see).
Finally some pimple-removing (this photo will be on my passport for 10 years, so a bit of vanity is o.k.) and more importantly: careful cropping according to the specifications (35x45mm, with nose, eyes, chin etc. in appropriate locations), and I was done. To get prints, I reproduced the picture eight times on a 6×4 canvas and dropped the file off at the chemist.
While I don’t know if the embassy will take it, I don’t know why they shouldn’t. I’ll let you know if it worked!
| Focal length: | 85 mm |
| Aperture: | ƒ/8.0 |
| Exposure: | 1/250 s + 2x D-lite 2 |
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Posted at 17:28

My attempt at using my camera to be funny…
When I was coming back from Germany two weeks ago I had to spend a few hours in Frankfurt to catch my flight back to Dublin. When I opened my notebook, first thing I did was to turn off the WiFi (called “AirPort” on a Mac) in order to safe some battery power. Well, there you go. You’re in an airport and you click something on your laptop to turn the AirPort off.
Ok, even if the photo is of limited humouristic value, technically it was somewhat tricky to realise. As this is almost a macro shot, the biggest problem here is depth of field. As you can see, I dialled in a fairly high aperture of ƒ/13 so that the background didn’t get too blurred. I would have loved to go higher, but I didn’t want to increase the ISO any further (and the shot was done hand-held, with the laptop, well, on the top of my lap).
| Focal length: | 60 mm |
| Aperture: | ƒ/13.0 |
| Exposure: | 1/15 s |
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Posted at 20:14

I made this shot pretty much exactly a year ago, coming back from church where they had the place decorated with these lovely colourful egg-candles. At the end of the day, there were a few left for the taking, so I took these two in order to re-create the flickr logo with those egg shaped candles ;-)
The set-up was very simple — I just placed the candles on a few A3 sheets of white paper and put an external flash on a tripod, together with an improvised snoot made from the carton of a roll of tin-foil. As the flash was just outside the field of view of the lens I got this nice smooth lens flare. The dreaminess was achieved by overlaying a semi-transparent, blurred version of the picture.
In any case, Happy Easter to you all, enjoy the days off, go for a walk, take some photos or just chill out.
| Focal length: | 80 mm (≈120 mm) |
| Aperture: | ƒ/4.5 |
| Exposure: | 1/50 s |
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Posted at 18:24

Another submission for the photo competition. This one was for the category “The Epitome of Maynooth”.
Last year, the Tradition Music Society played every other Wednesday evening in the “Brady’s”, one of the nicer and probably the most “original” pubs of Maynooth (maybe “authentic” is a better word). Unfortunately, these gigs have gotten fewer and fewer, so I hope the Trad Soc will get a bit more organised again to put those wonderful sessions of traditional Irish music on again!
Blurred in the background is Joey working away on the guitar, the Uilleann pipes in the forground were played by Yoann (this is a tradition Irish instrument, somewhat similar but still quite different to the Scottish bagpipes you’re all familiar with.)
To get some of the nice old-folks’-pub atmosphere into the picture I processed it with to a sepia tone (something I’m not too fond of, usually). This photo is again one out of a great many, shot in 5 pictures per second burst mode to be able to pick the one with the least camera shake (1/5th of a second is rather long for hand-holding a lens at 75mm equivalent) but best motion blur on the fingers flying across the pipes.
| Focal length: | 50 mm (≈75 mm) |
| Aperture: | ƒ/2.8 |
| Exposure: | 1/5 s |
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Posted at 17:54

As promised, here is one of my other submissions for the photo competition.
This was put in for the “Dublin/Ireland” category. It shows the river Sneem down in County Kerry and I shot it last year on my second trip around the Ring of Kerry.
Apart from the heavy cross-processing effect and the strong vignette (both to juice the picutre up a bit, it was a fairly overcast, grey day), the particularity of this shot was its exposure — 1.3 seconds is rather long for a daylight scene and the ISO /aperture values used.
I wanted to expose longer than usual so that the water is rendered dream-like and smooth, almost kitschy. This was achieved using a neutral density filter (ND 1.8 in this case). Such a filter basically just reduces the brightness of whatever you photography, (ideally) without affecting the colours. The filter I used takes 6 ƒ-stops of light away, so that I could expose 26 = 64 times longer than without the filter.
Hope you like it! I’ll be away for a few days again over Easter, so all the best to you and see you back soon!
| Focal length: | 18 mm (≈27 mm) |
| Aperture: | ƒ/8.0 |
| Exposure: | 1.3 s (with ND 1.8) |
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Posted at 14:32
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