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).

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!

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).

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.

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/​5^th 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.

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!