Here’s a some­what “street pho­to­graphy” style shot. I took it about two months ago, when I was spend­ing the bet­ter part of the day with Steffi and Sophie at Holles Street Mater­nity hos­pital in Dub­lin. One after­noon I went for a short walk to catch some fresh air, and thank­fully took my cam­era with me. That’s when I spot­ted this lady sit­ting there, on the phone.

I politely asked her if it was ok to take a photo and she said “yeah, why not”. So I had a quick think about how I wanted to take the photo and how to best cap­ture whatever it was that made me want to take the photo in the first place. My sub­sequent con­sid­er­a­tions included small aper­ture to get those sun “rays”; cen­ter weighted meter­ing on the fore­ground as to expose for the lady, not the (much brighter) sky behind her; manual mode so not to take any chances with the camera’s own auto­matic meter­ing; low cam­era pos­i­tion to get the shadow of the fence more prom­in­ent into the frame; one shot only as I didn’t want to bother her too much; etc.

So walk­ing over to where I wanted to shot from I did a quick test shot from the hip to double check proper set­ting of the expos­ure (insec­ure me) and then kneeled down to take the actual pic­ture. It was only then that her con­ver­sa­tion had turned into shout­ing — and from what I could her she was just dump­ing her boy friend …

How many sub­jects can you have in a photo? Well, it depends on how you group them, I sup­pose. Here you could say: “The two cats are the sub­ject”, or you could say: “The cats are the two subjects” …

Well, whichever way you look at it, pla­cing two sub­jects diag­on­ally oppos­ite in a frame cre­ates a good deal of con­fu­sion for your eyes — espe­cially if the sub­jects look very sim­ilar. You will have a hard time set­tling for one of them, and thus move back and forth between the two points of attrac­tion.

The cats above were two street cats just chilling out in the sun­shine at Wat Luang, a Buddhist temple in Pakxé, South­ern Laos.

Who’d have thought it. Back in Feb­ru­ary this year I jumped at the oppor­tun­ity to take a few pic­tures of the beau­ti­ful NUIM South Cam­pus clad in white.

You see, it doesn’t snow a lot in Ire­land, and the snow usu­ally just stays for a couple of hours, so I had to move fast. I grabbed my cam­era, bat­ter­ies, a bunch of lenses, gloves, and off I went to take some pho­tos around the uni­ver­sity.

And then, about a month ago, the university’s PR office asked me if I had any nice winter pic­tures of the uni­ver­sity, for use on this year’s offi­cial NUIM Christ­mas Card. Well, out I pulled this one and guess what — it made it! You can buy the cards around cam­pus now and see me walk around with a big smile :-)