And again more than a hand­ful of days between posts ;-) But: There’s 2 excuses for it (see PS below). Any­way, I should get back to post­ing more reg­u­larly now (I hope). So last week-​end, Steffi sur­prised me by tak­ing me on a small trip to Bar­celona (prob­ably as “revenge” for the Aran-​Islands-​Trip…). It’s amaz­ing what a few days of sun, warm tem­per­at­ures and shorts can do :-)

The first of the three days of our visit we spent pretty much just walk­ing around the city and “soak­ing” it all in. What a beau­ti­ful place, with the old city quarter (Barri Gòtic — Gothic Quarter) and all. The above photo was shot in the small court­yard of the Casa de l’Ardiaca, and there are two things that I’d like to talk about.

First of all: The per­spect­ive. Look­ing straight up can give you new angles. So whenever you walk around and don’t really see any­thing inspir­ing, try look­ing straight up and check if there’s any­thing inter­est­ing to find.

Second: Lens flare. To get those nice, star-​shaped flares you need con­trol over the aper­ture. For some phys­ical reason (couldn’t find a good link quickly) the more you close the aper­ture (i.e. increase the F-​number), the more star-​like they appear — typ­ic­ally, any­thing above ƒ/​16 works pretty well. Only prob­lem then: You’ll see all the dirt on your lens and sensor, so some spot removal might be required ;-)

For a best-​of of the Bar­celona trip, check out this album; altern­at­ively, here’s the com­plete album.

PS: 1) I was in Bar­celona, 2) I rebuilt my web­site. This took a good while but is fin­ished now (I basic­ally migrated the con­tents of my hand-​written web­site to Word­press, and reworked the theme to accom­mod­ate for static pages and the guest­book).

Here’s another photo from our South-​East-​Asia trip. The gist of today’s post: Ask first before you take a photo.

While some­times it is not pos­sible — or desir­able — to ask a per­son for per­mis­sion before tak­ing their photo (e.g. when the per­son is too far away, or when you’re going for can­dids, mean­ing you want to cap­ture the “nat­ural” situ­ation, without the aware­ness that a photo is being taken), it should be done as often as pos­sible. This could be as little as mak­ing eye con­tact, smil­ing, point­ing at your cam­era and put­ting a big ques­tion mark on your face, or as much as intro­du­cing your­self, get­ting to know the per­son and explain­ing why you would like to take a photo.

That way you’re not only being polite, but you also pay respect to the person’s private sphere and their feel­ings. Do take “no” for an answer. But more than often — you’ll be sur­prised — people will be flattered that you want take a pho­to­graph of them! Ask them politely, and be hon­est why exactly you would like to make them the main sub­ject in your pic­ture. For instance, let them know that they look great, inter­est­ing, funny, or that you are amazed by what they are doing, etc. It does take some amount of “cour­age”, but do give it a shot! And make the world a bet­ter place in the pro­cess ;-)

Com­ing back to the photo, it shows a gold smith in Vien­tiane (the cap­ital of Laos); I just thought he looked really cool with his sunglasses and just the gen­eral express­ing in face, doing his crafty job in the smoul­der­ing sum­mer heat. And — he didn’t mind.

Last bank hol­i­day week­end, Steffi and I went to Stock­holm, for a change. With the cheap RyanAir flights nowadays a quick week­end away to some ran­dom European city is eas­ily done, and a great way to get a small time-​out from the every­day life of Maynooth.

What a won­der­ful city. We really, really enjoyed our time there — which was also helped by the fact that we had bril­liant weather, and every­body was out and about because of that. We were sur­prised by how clean everything was, mak­ing it pos­sibly the clean­est city we’ve seen so far. Also, the prices aren’t as bad as people say, at least if your pain bar­rier has been lowered over the years by life in Ire­land.

Apart from the usual tour­ist stuff you should see (like the nar­row­est alley­way in the city), we espe­cially liked the Rådhu­set (“city hall”). It con­tains a num­ber of very inter­est­ing halls and cham­bers, such as the fam­ous “Blue Hall” (which isn’t blue; this is where the Nobel Price ban­quets are held every year), the “Coun­cil Cham­ber” with its amaz­ing ceil­ing and col­ours, as well as the “Golden Hall” com­pletely covered with a gigantic mosaic. There’s actu­ally a funny story about that mosaic: Appar­ently, the artist had to do it in such a hurry — and some plans had been changed dur­ing his work on the mosaic — that in the end one of the most import­ant fig­ures in the mosaic got “decap­it­ated” by the ceil­ing…

As you can see, a fun place to visit. Hon­our­able men­tions also go to the Royal Palace (try to be there for the change of guards), the Vasa Museet, Gamla Stan (the old city), the amaz­ing Nor­d­iska Museum as well as this warn­ing sign next to an elev­ator about how not to kill your­self.

For a full pictorial run-​down of our trip, see this flickr set.

How often do you hear some­body talk­ing about “pho­toshop­ping” an image? It often seems that in this case, people either don’t really know what you can do with Pho­toshop, or what it is usu­ally used for.

Well, in any case, a fun way of using Pho­toshop (and GIMP and the other pro­grams) is col­our match­ing. This basic­ally means the fol­low­ing: Take your lame pic­ture, and also take an amaz­ing pic­ture of some fam­ous artist /​painter that really knows his stuff (about col­ours) and finally use least squares (or the likes) to match the col­ours of the kick-​ass image to your lame-​ass image.

About two years ago tried this tech­nique on the above photo, which in itself was pretty much grey-​in-​grey. The pic­ture I “stole” the col­ours off was the rather fam­ous and mind­bog­gling Wan­derer über dem Nebel­meer (“Wan­derer Above the Sea of Fog”) by Cas­par David Friedrich.

There you go, Ulf, another tech­nique to spice up washed out pictures ;-)

Let’s play some catch-​up. About a month or so ago, a friend of mine and Steffi’s (Nancy) came over from Aus­tria to visit us and Maynooth again (she was here on Erasmus last year).

We all agreed that we wanted to use the Easter days off to see the a bit more of Ire­land and since none of us had seen much of the (geo­graphic) north of the island it was quickly decided that we hire a car and fol­low the com­pass needle on a trip from Sligo along the coast of Donegal all the way up to Malin Head.

What mag­ni­fi­cent land­scape up there, I must say! We really enjoyed it! But I guess, the great weather also played part in that ;-)

Com­ing back from a little detour to see beau­ti­ful Mul­lagh­more Castle there was this strange light­ing situ­ation that hap­pens every now and then where the sun shines on the ground before you and mak­ing it look almost brighter than the sky in the back­ground. And as if someone had staged it, there was this bright white swan on the lake (a tad too far away though).

In post pro­cessing I just cranked up the blacks a good bit and desat­ur­ated the col­ours ever so slightly to com­pensate for the increase in sat­ur­a­tion (that occurs when you raise the black point). Done.

PS: A selec­tion of my best pho­tos from the trip can be found here; the bulk of them is up on flickr.

Sorry it took me so long to post some­thing new. But we’re all super busy these days, aren’t we?

I’m par­tic­u­larly excited about today’s photo; let me tell you why. When I was singing with the NUI Maynooth Gos­pel Choir(and a bunch of other choirs as well as Irish stars) was singing at a fun­drais­ing Gala Con­cert last week, I obvi­ously brought my cam­era along and shot a few pho­tos sur­round­ing the event. Unfor­tu­nately I didn’t pack my wide angle lens and was stuck with “only” 24mm (which is still quite wide, com­pared to the usual 30mm or even 35mm+ you get with com­pact cam­eras).

Being up in the choirs stalls we had this great view of the venue (the Helix in Dub­lin) and I des­per­ately wanted to cap­ture it. So I tried some­thing I haven’t done in a good while — a pan­or­ama shot. As I didn’t bring a tri­pod either, I had to do take it hand­held. So I set the cam­era to manual mode, adjus­ted the expos­ure and took 5 pho­tos (in por­trait ori­ent­a­tion in order to get as large a ver­tical field of view as pos­sible).

I then remapped the pho­tos in Hugin — a won­der­ful but slightly tech­nical open-​source, cross-​platform pan­or­ama stitch­ing soft­ware — and blen­ded them together in Pho­toshop. Basic­ally the remap­ping step “dis­torts” the images so that the over­lap­ping parts match on top of each other, and the blend­ing step, well, blends the pic­tures seam­lessly into each other.

When the whole pro­cess was done I was absol­ately amazed by the res­ult, con­sid­er­ing it was done hand held in a quite chal­len­ging light situ­ation, with people mov­ing and all. I’ve exper­i­mented with panaromas quite a while now. It star­ted on our New Zea­l­and trip five years ago, con­tin­ued in Ice­land and cul­min­ated in me buy­ing a pan­or­amic tri­pod head, which pro­duced (among oth­ers) these pan­or­a­mas (1, 2, 3). How­ever, I’ve taken less and less pan­or­a­mas lately because they are rather time con­sum­ing to make, and also hard to print.

But see­ing the con­stant pro­gress of the pan­or­ama mak­ing soft­ware and how well this latest one worked out, I’ll def­in­itely try to do more (par­tial) pan­or­a­mas in the future! Also, because of the very wide angle of view, this would hardly have been pos­sible with a tra­di­tional cam­era lens — and if so, the rec­ti­lin­ear pro­jec­tion hap­pen­ing in such lenses would have heav­ily dis­tor­ted people espe­cially in the corners of the frame, which is not the case here (thanks to the equir­ect­an­gu­lar pro­jec­tion used here). If you would like to find out more about these tech­nical term, start with this great over­view of the dif­fer­ent projections.