And off I go again to Spain. Seems like I just left Bar­celona yesterday ;-)

This time I’m off to a con­fer­ence in Valèn­cia (POSTA ’09), and right after that Steffi and I will have a small “Ersatz”-honeymoon since our ori­ginal plans to go to Hawaii had to change… We’ll have a small roadtrip around the south of the Iberian pen­in­sula.

The photo here was taken on our last Spain trip to Bar­celona and it shows one of the nar­row streets in the old part of the city. I just loved the warm col­ours of the build­ings, and to intensify that I cranked up the white bal­ance to a fairly high value (must have been above 10’000 °K I think). That’s a very simple but neat trick to add some extra warmth to your pic­tures without much too much effort. Along the same lines, if you add in some more magenta, you can achieve a more of sunset-​y type of flair.

Another com­mon thing done here is the com­pres­sion of per­spect­ive by using a tele­photo lens and a fairly long focal length. This addi­tion­ally reduces the depth of field to high­light two little details in the pic­ture, the wind-​wheel-​flower and the street light.

Any­way, will be back in a couple of weeks time, hope­fully with some more pictures :-)

Most fil­ters (in front of lenses) that people try to sell you don’t make sense in digital pho­to­graphy. In par­tic­u­lar UV fil­ters, sky light fil­ters or pro­tect­ive fil­ters — the first two are irrel­ev­ant, and you usu­ally pro­tect your lens much bet­ter by using a lens hood. All that these “use­less” fil­ters do is degrade image qual­ity.

The only two fil­ters that make sense, I guess, are polar­isers and neut­ral dens­ity (or just “grey-​”) fil­ters. I might talk about the lat­ter at some other time, today’s topic is the polar­iser. If you don’t have one, get one. Unfor­tu­nately, the bet­ter ones (that’s the ones you want to buy, since they have decent coat­ings on them, are more col­our neut­ral and usu­ally live longer) can be quite pricey, espe­cially when you have large lens dia­met­ers.

Why? Well, the main effect of these fil­ters is one that you just can’t repro­duce prop­erly in post-​processing: They reduce reflec­tions. There are mainly two situ­ations where this is import­ant 1) in the sky and 2) on col­our­ful objects (well, actu­ally 3) on trans­lu­cent sur­faces). In the sky the fil­ter gives you much deeper blues as it removes some of the sun­light reflec­ted off the haze in the air (which leaves the deep blue rather “milky”). On objects, such as grass, leaves, build­ings, etc. it reduces the reflec­tion of the ambi­ent light to again just give you the actual sig­ni­fic­antly more sat­ur­ated col­our of the object. Third, it allows you to shoot through win­dows or water sur­faces to reveal what’s behind (again, by can­cel­ling out reflec­tions of the sur­round­ing).

Sounds great, doens’t it? Well, there’s a catch or two. On the one hand, you lose about 1 to 3 stops of bright­ness. On the other, in order to be able to can­cel reflec­tions, you need to get the angles right (this has to do with the phys­ics behind all this). Since the post is already long enough, I won’t go into explain­ing how exactly to use them — if you’re inter­ested you can have a look at this art­icle for instance, or this page.

As for the photo above — you guessed right, it’s been shot using a polar­ising fil­ter. No post-​processing really, just the filter’s magic :-)

Not that this is the greatest photo ever shot (of course I don’t mean the two ladies on it, but in gen­eral), there still must be some­thing about this shot that people want to use it… Now there’s two kinds of people: those that want to use it and pay for it, and those that just use it, without pay­ing for it (or even ask­ing per­mis­sion, for that matter).

Here’s the whole story. I was recently approached by an ad agency who wants to buy a hand­ful of pho­tos of me for use in a pro­spectus for the uni­ver­sity. When the deal was almost sealed, they sent me an email say­ing that they saw one of the pho­tos they were about to pur­chase (the one above) in a sim­ilar pro­spectus from another uni­ver­sity, and that they weren’t really happy about that (since they thought they are get­ting the pic­ture “exclus­ively”, which is the nor­mal thing to assume).

Turns out there are actu­ally two pro­specti (?) from Dundalk IT where some of my images are used in. The best bit: They never asked for my per­mis­sion to print the pic­tures! This is bad in a num­ber of ways. It’s bad form to start off with, it’s a viol­a­tion of the copy­right I own for the images, it does not hon­our the licence under which I pos­ted the images on flickr (which only allows for non-​commercial use with appro­pri­ate attri­bu­tion only, whereas the ad agency was obvi­ously paid for mak­ing the pro­spectus, and my name was nowhere in it), and last but not least: I don’t have a model-​release from the two Erasmus stu­dents on it — so if they were upset about their pic­ture being prin­ted in hun­dreds (or thou­sands) of leaf­lets, I’d be in trouble now!

Any­way, I sent an email to the agency about the issue, and they now for­war­ded me to someone in the uni­ver­sity that provided them with the pic­tures. That per­son is away until Septem­ber 1^st, so I’ll have to wait and see how they react. I’d be inter­est­ing to see what they have to say though…

Sorry there hasn’t been any post in such a long time, but I was busy get­ting mar­ied… (that, plus pre– and post-​paring it).

Any­way, let’s get back to dis­cuss­ing pho­tos. This one here I took a couple of weeks back when I was wan­der­ing around cam­pus to take some pic­tures for an assign­ment I got. I noticed this motiv a while back already but never got around actu­ally pho­to­graph­ing it. As you can see, it shows from under­neath a back lit stair­case inside a build­ing (that’s why I wasn’t in a par­tic­u­lar hurry to take it, it’s there every day).

What fas­cin­ated me was the play of light and shadow. In fact, the reg­u­lar shadow pat­terns pro­duced by stair­cases or lad­ders are a quite com­mon pho­to­graphic sub­ject, but this one I thought was par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing because of the shape of the steps and the res­ult­ing criss-​cross pat­tern of light and shadow.

The col­ours are all nat­ural, all I did was pump up the black level (again) and add a fairly strong vign­ette (again). Also note the diag­onal com­pos­i­tion (again) to add some dynam­ics to the oth­er­wise quite static pic­ture.

PS: Thanks to the sensor-​based image-​stabilisation of my cam­era I could take this photo hand­held even at 70mm at 1/​5 s exposure!