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).