Oh, and then it happened. My daugh­ter was born just a tad early…

While I have very little time for hardly any­thing, I don’t want to let this blog rot away, so I’d like to share some of the exper­i­ences I made with this cap­tiv­at­ing little human :-)

First of all: It’s always a good idea to have your cam­era bag packed and ready to go (with a good choice of lenses, charged bat­ter­ies, and empty memory cards). Because when things get rushy, you don’t want to start put­ting your gear together…

Second (which I for­got): In that pack, if you have one, also pack the macro lens. Oth­er­wise, you’ll find that with your “ordin­ary” lenses you just can’t get close enough to the tiny little thing, and it’ll look lost in the frame.

Third: Don’t be afraid of high ISO. Espe­cially in the new born sta­tions they have very dim lights, not to blind the little ones. And since you don’t want to make a fool of your­self drag­ging in a tri­pod — increase the ISO so that you can at least get some kind of shot (flash is, at least for me, com­pletely out of the ques­tion here). They price to pay will be noise, but you can always trans­form the pic­tures to black & white, and that way the noise may even add to the pic­ture.

If you want to find out a bit more about Sophie, or just want to seen some more cute baby pho­tos, have a look over at sophie​.knorn​.org.

Every­one is try­ing to be dif­fer­ent, in order to make a dif­fer­ence. As I’ve poin­ted out many times, in order to stand out, you should try to take pho­tos from a dif­fer­ent angle or view point.

Here’s a clas­sical one: the rear-​view. Instead of pho­to­graph­ing the action, from the back, over people’s heads — pho­to­graph the people, from the front, watch­ing the action. While we’re not talk­ing video here, this kind of reminds me of those funny clips of ten­nis spec­tat­ors watch­ing a game and their heads turn­ing left-​right-​left-​right at the same time.

So this photo was taken at the “elec­tion party” for the Ger­man gen­eral elec­tions two weeks back, organ­ised by the Goethe Insti­tute Dub­lin and the Ger­man Embassy (which has three of my pho­tos from the event on their web­site). People were pretty much on the edge to see what the out­come would be (and right­fully so, gen­eral elec­tions only hap­pen every four years!), you could almost think they were watch­ing a game of soc­cer…

It was a great even­ing even if things didn’t turn out the way I per­son­ally would have liked them to be (polit­ic­ally), espe­cially with all the deli­cious typ­ical Ger­man food on offer! So thanks to the Goethe Insti­tute, the Embassy — and ulti­mately the Ger­man tax payer ;-)

And now for a more abstract shot again, which I took about a year and a half ago.

As you prob­ably already guessed, it shows a spider web covered with ice crys­tals. Nature at its best pro­duces these typ­ic­ally in the winter time, com­bin­ing thick fog with freez­ing tem­per­at­ures.

Tech­nic­ally it was quite hard to shoot, as my fin­gers were pretty much frozen after a few minutes… No, but ser­i­ously now, although the crys­tals were very pretty and all it was rather dif­fi­cult to make them look good on sil­icon. I exper­i­mented a bit and ended up using a flash gun dir­ectly below the net shoot­ing straight up.

This not only gave the crys­tals nice “three dimen­sional” char­ac­ter, but it also helped to pretty much remove the (fairly cluttered) back­ground of the stu­dent res­id­ences’ rub­bish dump…

Just like now, I think I got a cold out of this shot.

Back from our little hon­ey­moon, here’s a new post with a fresh pic­ture from Valèn­cia (Spain).

I took this photo on the social “out­ing” from the POSTA ’09 con­fer­ence, where we vis­ited the Ciutat de les Arts i les Cièn­cies (City of Arts and Sci­ences), an area right in the city where dif­fer­ent build­ings, such as opera, sci­ence museum, IMAX, etc. com­pete for the most futur­istic look. It quite reminded me of Brasília (the cap­ital of Brazil).

Any­way, today’s tip is to take as many pho­tos as you can when you’re in the so-​called Golden Hour, the time just before sun­set (or just after sun­rise, if you fancy get­ting up early). This gives you some won­der­ful light to play with and take amaz­ing, moody shots and por­traits of people.

Watch your white bal­ance though (!), make sure your cam­era (when set to auto­matic) doesn’t com­pensate for the warm col­ours, res­ult­ing in too neut­ral a feel­ing. Either manu­ally set the white bal­ance to some­thing around 7500°K, or use the “sun­set” mode /​pic­ture style or whatever it may be called.

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 :-)