Please don’t try to find any pat­tern in my post­ing. After that rather ser­i­ous post yes­ter­day here’s some­thing more pho­to­graphic, or shall I say “abstract”.

If you haven’t peeked yet, what do you think it is …? Exactly, it’s a lamp just out­side our apart­ment (there is a few of those light­ing the path). Today I thought: Florian, you need to take more pho­tos. So, I ran­domly decided to focus on shapes for the next couple of days to come. I poped my 135mm prime on my cam­era to make things a bit easier, as the long focal length helps to focus on one thing at a time).

I took this shot only a few hours ago, com­ing home tonight after work. It’s main fea­ture relies on an old trick to make things more dynamic: Place things on one of the diag­on­als of the frame. Apart from that, there’s those lovely smooth curves.

Although it looks like I’ve messed with the col­ours, I haven’t at all this time. Just a delib­er­ately wrong white bal­ance (the cam­era was still set to incan­des­cent light; when I impor­ted the pic­ture into Light­Room I decided to just leave it as it was as it looked kind of inter­est­ing ). The slight vign­ette came nat­ur­ally from the lens (shot wide open on a full frame cam­era…), so I didn’t do that either. A very raw RAW so to speak ;-)

Ok, what else is there to say? Well, the extremely shal­low focal plane (math­em­at­ic­ally, it amoun­ted to 2mm depth of field!) was placed off-​centre as to get the point of interest away from the middle and thus make things more inter­est­ing to look at.

This is one of the tougher pic­tures to digest from our recent South-​East-​Asia trip. Nor­mally I ask people before I take a pho­to­graph of them. That can be by actu­ally talk­ing to them if pos­sible, or just by ges­tic­u­la­tion, point­ing at the cam­era and smil­ing with a ques­tion mark in my face.

In this situ­ation here thought — Steffi and I were wait­ing for a bus in one of the busier areas of the Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh, Ho Chi Minh City or just Sai­gon — I didn’t work up the cour­age to ask the man. And I still feel ashamed for not hav­ing done that. Sure, I shouldn’t be show­ing this pic­utre, but I have other motives for doing that.

I would like to share my dis­gust for the atro­cit­ies of war. Although I don’t know the story behind this sorry soul, I’m cer­tain it is one of utmost pain, be it phys­ical, emo­tional or social. The prob­lem with war and try­ing to achieve usu­ally unachiev­able object­ives (when people shouldn’t have got­ten involved in the first place) is that the war is not over when it’s over. Deep rifts in the pop­u­la­tion remain, the cata­strophic psy­cho­lo­gical dam­age car­ries over and affects many gen­er­a­tions, and apart from unex­ploded ordin­ance or mines that bear lethal sur­prises for many years to come, there was Agent Orange…

There, in that street, sit­ting on the steps of a travel agent, wait­ing for the bus, was just one of those moments (and there were sev­eral on that trip) where you just froze and where a ter­rible, bot­tom­less sad­ness hit you. Add a good dose of anger to that, and hope that you’ll never meet the people respons­ible for all those count­less tragedies.

Here in Ire­land so-​called “Pan­to­mimes” seem to be a bit of a Christ­mas tra­di­tion. In any case, the Drama and Musical Soci­ety of the small little town next to Maynooth appears to be quite fam­ous in the coun­try, hav­ing won sev­eral prices for their stage pro­duc­tions. And right­fully so, I must say — I was blown away when I went there on Sat­urday to take some pho­tos.

The story was an adapt­a­tion of “Robin Hood”, with a some­what dif­fer­ent storyline, tons of great little jokes and gags, but still very well staged so that small chil­dren would also be able to under­stand what’s going on, as a panto is meant to be for the whole fam­ily. The music was bril­liant and the band was amaz­ing too. My good friend Eimear did a great job there, as musical dir­ector of the pro­duc­tion. (How­ever, I still don’t quite under­stand what makes pan­to­mimes so much dif­fer­ent from music­als.)

With regards to pho­to­graph­ing the show, three things were most import­ant: Bright lenses, tons of memory, and a tri­pod. Clearly, bright lenses were needed to achieve fast shut­ter speeds (dan­cing people never hold still ;-)) at not too high ISOs, memory cards as you want to be zap­ping frames like a mad­man (again to cap­ture the best moment when people are dan­cing and act­ing, plus you want to be shoot­ing RAW in those dif­fi­cult light­ing situ­ations), and a tri­pot so you don’t get tired (my 70−200÷2.8 lens + cam­era + bat­tery weighs in at about 2.5 kg, some­thing you do not want to be hold­ing for alomst 2 hours…).

My best shots from the even­ing can be found here.

Nor­mally there are always cars parked in front of the old Maynooth Castle ruins, but on St. Steven’s Day (Dec 25^th) the town was as empty as I’ve ever seen it, and no cars spoiled a shot that I wanted to take since a long time. Apart from mess­ing with the col­ours, there are two inter­est­ing things about this photo.

On the one hand it was taken with my new cam­era (finally I’m also in pos­ses­sion of a full frame cam­era, that is a cam­era whose sensor is the size of a 35mm film neg­at­ive) and as well as my new wide-​angle lens.

On the other, I used the lens dis­tor­tion tool in Pho­toshop to cor­rect the per­spect­ive dis­tor­tion that comes with shoot­ing at an angle. By per­spect­ive dis­tor­tion I mean the effect where ver­tical lines (that ought to be par­al­lel) con­verge toward the van­ish­ing point, and build­ings appear to be fall­ing back­wards, if left uncor­rec­ted. There’s basic­ally three things you can do to avoid this effect. (1) Buy a (tilt/)shift-lens, (2) shoot hori­zont­ally at a wide enough angle to cap­ture what you want to cap­ture, but crop after­wards, like so or (3) cor­rect for the per­spect­ive after­wards in post-​processing, e.g. with the Lens Cor­rec­tion Tool in Pho­toshop. The best tech­nique would be (1) to use the spe­cial­ised lens as it allows you to use the full res­ol­u­tion of your sensor, but those are expens­ive and not avail­able for all cam­era sys­tems (e.g. mine). As for (2), you throw away res­ol­u­tion after­wards as you’ll be crop­ping large parts of the image, and you have to think of this tech­nique on the spot already, while you’re tak­ing the photo. The last method is kind of in between, you don’t loose too much inform­a­tion, but it is a destruct­ive trans­form­a­tion to your images (at least for the time being, fin­gers crossed it’ll be included in Light­Room soon).

In this present photo I chose tech­nique (3) as I don’t have a tilt/​shift-​lens, and 17mm was not wide enough to do trick (2). Any­way, I hope you’ve now learned a little bit about how you can avoid per­spect­ive dis­tor­tion, provided you have the right gear /​soft­ware at hand.

Happy New Year every­one, sorry this new post took so long. This one was taken on the famed “Bam­boo Train”. It’s a Cam­bod­ian inven­tion (one of the kids told me proudly) and con­sists basic­ally of three parts: A motor, a very light bam­boo flat bed, and a pair of axles. This mod­u­lar built allows it to be assembled and taken apart again in a mat­ter of seconds, even by a bunch of kids. Those trains used to run between the offi­cial train ser­vice on the national rail­way net­work, and there is only one simple (and obvi­ous) rule: The lighter train gets out of the way (off the tracks) first…

I love this pic­ture with those cool kids enjoy­ing the free­dom of speed­ing down the twis­ted rails while mak­ing a few bucks off ran­dom tour­ists that made it out there. Pho­to­graphy­wise it was shot with a polar­ising fil­ter for increased sat­ur­a­tion and col­ours, with an elev­ated shut­ter speed as it was shak­ing quite a bit. I chose a rather wide angle of view in order to cap­ture those con­ver­ging lines from the bam­boo plat­form as well, which kind of intens­i­fies the whole pic­ture.

PS: Here’s a short video over on You­Tube where at about 2:00 the guy talks about this crazy form of train.