… but the pho­to­grapher, that makes the pho­tos. Many people think you need great gear to take great pho­tos. Or shall I say, they equate a “big” (and hence auto­mat­ic­ally “good”) cam­era with shoot­ing only “good” pho­tos. While there is some truth in this, there are also a few misconceptions.

First of all, think of a cook and his pots. A ★★★★★ star cook can cook a great meal pretty much any­where, even in your shitty stu­dent acco­mod­a­tion kit­chen with the most pathetic, 25 year old pots. But in turn, buy­ing some ridicu­lously expens­ive, extra spe­cial coated cast iron cook­ing gear alone prob­ably won’t make you a good cook…

It’s the same with cam­eras. Of course, hav­ing bet­ter pots and pans helps a good cook to pre­pare his meals more eas­ily, and spe­cial equip­ment is needed for some spe­cial treats (say a small blow torch for a decent crème brûlée). In pho­to­graphy, some­times there’s no way around a decent tele lens with a wide aper­ture, or a super wide angle, or a flash gun. But given a few ingredi­ents, its a cook’s exper­i­ence, taste or shall I say his “art” that allows him to pre­pare a good meal. The same holds for a pho­to­grapher: see­ing inter­est­ing sub­jects, lines, col­ours, light situ­ations, then cre­at­ing strong com­pos­i­tions, not to men­tion care­ful post-​processing — that’s actu­ally all inde­pend­ent of what cam­era you’re using!

Any­way, I just want to rant about all the people that tell me “oh, that’s a great cam­era, you must be a great pho­to­grapher”. No, first of all you prob­ably have no clue about the cam­era, what is cap­able of (and what not). Second, just hav­ing the means and the guts to spend ridicu­lous amounts of money on photo equip­ment just doesn’t make you good pho­to­grapher — that just means you’re either rich, or you’ve lost your senses.

It’s what comes out at the very end of the pro­cess, what’s left after you have made all those mil­lions of decisions involved in tak­ing and pro­cessing a pic­ture — this is what may or may not make you a “good” photographer.

Remin­is­cent of the other post of a cross-​processed “naut­ical detail”, here’s another one.

I took it just last Fri­day when we had a friend of Steffi’s vis­it­ing us (Lenko), who’s cur­rently on a Europe-​Africa-​Tour (he oth­er­wise lives in Canada). We did a little day tour around County Wick­low, which is just south of Dub­lin. That included hik­ing in fairly touristy Glend­alough (Irish for “val­ley of two lakes”) — but which is also quite pop­u­lar among loc­als — and then back up the east coast to Dub­lin.

The photo above was taken in the har­bour of Ark­low, a little coastal town. There were loads of boats rust­ing away in the sun, next to some big signs com­plain­ing about how the EU ruined the lives of Irish fish­er­men. While there is some truth to it, some of them were also rather pop­u­list in nature. But any­way, I tried to make this shot as simple and organ­ised as pos­sible. Keep the fairly geo­met­ric shapes as neatly organ­ised, with not too many in the frame, but still enough to make it inter­est­ing.

Here are the rest of the pho­tos from the day.

Planned months in ahead to ensure that every­body would be there, today was the day for the group pic­ture of my col­leagues from the Sys­tems Bio­logy group here at the Hamilton. Of course, not every­one was there, but that miss­ing per­son will be edited into the pic­ture (if all goes well) at the top right.

As the weather report prom­ised, the weather wasn’t going to play along nicely; in typ­ical Irish fash­ion it was, in fact, buck­et­ing down. Hence, the pic­ture had to be taken inside. But that was a won­der­ful oppor­tun­ity to get a slightly more inter­est­ing shot as com­pared to the stand­ard, bor­ing group pho­tos out­side in front of the institute’s logo.

So I got every­one to come into the sem­inar room where I had put up a chair on a table so that I could be high up above every­one. After arran­ging them accord­ing to their height, I asked every­one to bunch in as much as pos­sible (the num­ber one tip for group shots!) and shot with a wide angle focal length down on them, boun­cing the flash off the ceil­ing. The pic­ture turned out exactly how I had pre-​visualised it this morn­ing, brush­ing my teeth.

Again, for group pho­tos you 1) want to get people as close as pos­sible together (almost uncom­fort­ably close in real life, but it won’t look like it on the photo!). This not only makes the group look more like a group rather than loosely assemble indi­vidu­als, but also adds a small bit of fun to the whole action. 2) you want to tell people clearly and expli­citly to look dir­ectly into the cam­era, and nowhere else. If there are other people around you, send them away, or people will inev­it­ably get dis­trac­ted and not look into the cam­era. 3) take at least (!) three pho­tos or more, because you will always have someone with eyes closed at the exact moment you release the shut­ter. Hav­ing sev­eral pho­tos allows you then to clone some pairs of eyes between pho­tos so that every­one can have theirs open in the final image :-)

On a recent trip back home I’ve spent a few hours dig­ging through my boxes in the cel­lar, which hold loads of old stuff, memor­ies, dust-​catchers, etc. One of the things I brought back was a few DVDs with some older pho­tos (i.e. pre-​2007), so that I could put them on my photo hard-​disk (as well as backup) so I can access them more dir­ectly. Et voilà, here’s one from my trip to Ice­land back in 2005.

It was taken next to the Per­lan, on a little hill in Reykjavík, just after sun­set. And the les­son of the day is: Look for sil­hou­ettes! When your back­ground has won­der­ful, intense col­ours, or it is simply much brighter than your fore­ground, expose for the back­ground and dial up the blacks in the pic­ture to remove as much defin­i­tion from the fore­ground as pos­sible.

As shown here, this works par­tic­u­larly well for sun­sets.

For the curi­ous, here are some more pho­tos and back­ground inform­a­tion on that trip to Ice­land.

So you’ve got all those pretty pic­tures from your past vaca­tions, your last hike, that pic­nic with your beloved one in a park or that snap of some dark, dirty, gritty side street of Dub­lin. What do you do with it? Well, you leave it to catch digital dust on your hard drive. Or, if you’re really nice, you’ve made some small 6×4 prints at the chem­ist and sent them to your dad.

But what then? Every time I hold a print of one of my pic­tures in my hands, I think: Gosh, it’s so much dif­fer­ent com­pared to the screen… so much bet­ter! I guess there are a num­ber of obvi­ous reas­ons for that, but I’m sure you’ve also made the exper­i­ence that a “phys­ical” copy of a photo just adds so much more to it, com­pared to see­ing it dis­played on your screen (even if it’s a 24″ mon­ster).

I’ve just spent an hour hanging 10 of my favour­ite pic­tures up at our place, which I’ve moun­ted on some reas­on­ably priced A3 passe-​partouts from eBay. And guess what: All the money and effort get­ting the high qual­ity prints, the tinker­ing with the card board and last but not least the tedi­ous hanging (get­ting them straight, equally spaced, at equal heights) was def­in­itely worth it.

So go ahead, make prints of your best pho­tos, mount them and com­pletely redis­cover them in their new incarn­a­tion!

PS: Here’s the seller’s shop list­ing where I bought the mount­ing equip­ment: You’ll need pic­ture mounts, mount­ing boards and ideally some acid-​free tape to mount the pic­tures prop­erly and them frame them. If you don’t want to frame, you can just glue the stuff together, like I did.

Here’s the last photo (in this series at least) from our recent Bar­celona trip. I took it under one of the via­ducts in the Park Güell. This park has also been designed by Ant­oni Gaudí (the mas­ter­minds behind the Sagrada Familia) and it fea­tures the fam­ous, col­our­ful ser­pent­ine benches you may have seen in L’Auberge Espagnole.

Although the weather’s not been the best when were there (a bit of the shame, as the place is is covered with col­our­ful mosa­ics which obvi­ously work best in dir­ect sun­shine) we did spent a good amount of time there just wan­der­ing around and admir­ing the crazy /​organic fea­tures and shapes all around.

The photo above shows one of the via­ducts; a great place to hang out when it’s rain­ing ;-) There was not much point in leav­ing it in col­our, as shapes and the inter­play of light and shadow are much more prom­in­ent in mono­chrome. Motiv­ated by Jeff Curto’s won­der­ful Cam­era Pos­i­tion pod­cast (and, for instance, this or this epis­ode), I paid par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to the pre­cise pos­i­tion from where I took the cam­era.

At the time, I was con­sciously try­ing to achieve to things: (roughly) bal­ance lights and darks, as well as nicely guide the eye through the pic­ture. As we’re nat­ur­ally attrac­ted to the bright parts, here our eye will start in the top left (gen­er­ally a pop­u­lar point to start read­ing a pic­ture any­way, at least in West­ern cul­tures). It should the con­tinue down along the stairs anti­clock­wise to come under­neath the via­duct and fol­low along the walk­ing dir­ec­tion of the people towards those beau­ti­ful arches. Note also the dark ele­ments at the corners of the frame which help to keep the eyes inside the pic­ture. Also, some amount of patience was required for this shot, as the other people walk­ing around were not always where I would have loved them to be …

But over­all, I really like this pic­ture, and it’s def­in­itely going to be hung up next time I get some pic­tures printed.