Here’s some more about your every­day, cheapo point-​and-​shoot cam­era, rather than expens­ive D-​SLRs: Macro shots.

With their short focal lenghts and their small sensors (and the res­ult­ing rather large depth-​of-​field, that is the “depth” of the in-​focus parts of the image) they’re really good for tak­ing close-​up shots. Most of those little bug­gers have a ded­ic­ated macro mode (have a look for a small flower-​symbol some­where on it) that allows you to get the cam­era really close to your sub­ject, so that you get a good mag­ni­fic­a­tion. While you can achieve sim­ilar effects with a ded­ic­ated macro lens on an SLR, they eas­ily costs 5 times as much as whole point-​and-​shoot cam­era, and you usu­ally have a hard time get­ting an extens­ive depth-​of-​field. In fact, most of the time you’ll find your­self stop­ping down to ƒ/​22 or less, and still not hav­ing enough depth-​of-​field. But then, stop­ping down the lens that much means that you also need loads of light to take the shot, and you will also get refrac­tion prob­lems from the small aper­ture… All in all, not nice.

The shot above shows the cap­pu­cino I just had a few minutes ago, snapped hand-​held on my office desk, with no spe­cial light­ing or any­thing. The cam­era: a 100 EUR (or less) Fuji­Film Z20.

Any kind of reflec­tion usu­ally makes pic­tures more inter­est­ing. But flip­ping a pic­ture upside down may also be a good attention-​grabber.

First of all, it takes time for your brain to pro­cess the image, fig­ure out what’s going on and why things are slightly odd, why we are not fully at ease when look­ing at the pic­ture. This takes a couple of seconds or so. It’s only then that we start actu­ally dis­cov­er­ing things in the image, like the per­son on the bot­tom right, or the cute little waves from the fall­ing rain drops.

Although one should always strive to make a pic­ture as eas­ily “decod­able” as pos­sible — that is a clear sub­ject, simple, organ­ised struc­tures and col­ours, all in a some­what logical com­pos­i­tion — doing the exact oppos­ite may also cre­ate some inter­est­ing pic­tures. Here’s a thought: The fact that you have to “fight” a bit with the image until you get through it may just be enough to get some extra atten­tion, so that ulti­mately the viewer spends a bit more time with it to dis­cover what it has to offer, instead of just skip­ping to the next image…

You know what happened a couple of nights ago? A really nice con­stel­la­tion of Moon and chapel of Saint Patrick’s Col­lege could be seen right from our bal­cony, includ­ing a nice cloud which added to the mood. Unforun­ately I left my own cam­era over in the office that day, so I had to dig out Steff’s 7 year old Nikon Coolpix 5700 to cap­ture the scene.

But any­way, hav­ing the cam­era res­ted on the bal­cony table, and snap­ping off a few 8 second expos­ures, I had to smile a bit when our neigh­bours had the same idea: Unfor­tu­nately, they were try­ing to use their flashes to get the pic­ture right… This made no sense, as 1) any on-​camera flash is so weak that it usu­ally never reaches more than a few meters (and the trees and tower were a couple of hun­dred meters, and the moon a couple of hun­dreds of thou­sands of kilo­met­ers away). Thus, all they were doing was 2) wast­ing their cam­era bat­ter­ies and 3) redu­cing the con­trast in the pic­ture (as the flash would have lit the slight mist in the air and thus just make the blacks look “milky”).

What you need to do in such extremely dark con­di­tions would be first of all turn off your flash. Then, make sure you rest your cam­era on some­thing (a tri­pod would obvi­ously be the easi­est solu­tion) and use the self-​timer to take the shot (as press­ing the shut­ter your­self would shake the cam­era and your pic­ture will loose crisp­ness).

So as I was say­ing in the last post, it’s not the most expens­ive cam­era that takes the pho­tos, but the pho­to­grapher with his exper­i­ence and taste.

… 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 :-)