On a recent trip back home I’ve spent a few hours dig­ging through my boxes in the cel­lar, which hold loads of old stuff, memor­ies, dust-​catchers, etc. One of the things I brought back was a few DVDs with some older pho­tos (i.e. pre-​2007), so that I could put them on my photo hard-​disk (as well as backup) so I can access them more dir­ectly. Et voilà, here’s one from my trip to Ice­land back in 2005.

It was taken next to the Per­lan, on a little hill in Reykjavík, just after sun­set. And the les­son of the day is: Look for sil­hou­ettes! When your back­ground has won­der­ful, intense col­ours, or it is simply much brighter than your fore­ground, expose for the back­ground and dial up the blacks in the pic­ture to remove as much defin­i­tion from the fore­ground as pos­sible.

As shown here, this works par­tic­u­larly well for sun­sets.

For the curi­ous, here are some more pho­tos and back­ground inform­a­tion on that trip to Ice­land.

So you’ve got all those pretty pic­tures from your past vaca­tions, your last hike, that pic­nic with your beloved one in a park or that snap of some dark, dirty, gritty side street of Dub­lin. What do you do with it? Well, you leave it to catch digital dust on your hard drive. Or, if you’re really nice, you’ve made some small 6×4 prints at the chem­ist and sent them to your dad.

But what then? Every time I hold a print of one of my pic­tures in my hands, I think: Gosh, it’s so much dif­fer­ent com­pared to the screen… so much bet­ter! I guess there are a num­ber of obvi­ous reas­ons for that, but I’m sure you’ve also made the exper­i­ence that a “phys­ical” copy of a photo just adds so much more to it, com­pared to see­ing it dis­played on your screen (even if it’s a 24″ mon­ster).

I’ve just spent an hour hanging 10 of my favour­ite pic­tures up at our place, which I’ve moun­ted on some reas­on­ably priced A3 passe-​partouts from eBay. And guess what: All the money and effort get­ting the high qual­ity prints, the tinker­ing with the card board and last but not least the tedi­ous hanging (get­ting them straight, equally spaced, at equal heights) was def­in­itely worth it.

So go ahead, make prints of your best pho­tos, mount them and com­pletely redis­cover them in their new incarn­a­tion!

PS: Here’s the seller’s shop list­ing where I bought the mount­ing equip­ment: You’ll need pic­ture mounts, mount­ing boards and ideally some acid-​free tape to mount the pic­tures prop­erly and them frame them. If you don’t want to frame, you can just glue the stuff together, like I did.

Here’s the last photo (in this series at least) from our recent Bar­celona trip. I took it under one of the via­ducts in the Park Güell. This park has also been designed by Ant­oni Gaudí (the mas­ter­minds behind the Sagrada Familia) and it fea­tures the fam­ous, col­our­ful ser­pent­ine benches you may have seen in L’Auberge Espagnole.

Although the weather’s not been the best when were there (a bit of the shame, as the place is is covered with col­our­ful mosa­ics which obvi­ously work best in dir­ect sun­shine) we did spent a good amount of time there just wan­der­ing around and admir­ing the crazy /​organic fea­tures and shapes all around.

The photo above shows one of the via­ducts; a great place to hang out when it’s rain­ing ;-) There was not much point in leav­ing it in col­our, as shapes and the inter­play of light and shadow are much more prom­in­ent in mono­chrome. Motiv­ated by Jeff Curto’s won­der­ful Cam­era Pos­i­tion pod­cast (and, for instance, this or this epis­ode), I paid par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to the pre­cise pos­i­tion from where I took the cam­era.

At the time, I was con­sciously try­ing to achieve to things: (roughly) bal­ance lights and darks, as well as nicely guide the eye through the pic­ture. As we’re nat­ur­ally attrac­ted to the bright parts, here our eye will start in the top left (gen­er­ally a pop­u­lar point to start read­ing a pic­ture any­way, at least in West­ern cul­tures). It should the con­tinue down along the stairs anti­clock­wise to come under­neath the via­duct and fol­low along the walk­ing dir­ec­tion of the people towards those beau­ti­ful arches. Note also the dark ele­ments at the corners of the frame which help to keep the eyes inside the pic­ture. Also, some amount of patience was required for this shot, as the other people walk­ing around were not always where I would have loved them to be …

But over­all, I really like this pic­ture, and it’s def­in­itely going to be hung up next time I get some pic­tures printed.

No visit to Bar­celona is com­plete without a visit to the Temple Expi­atori de la Sagrada Família. Love it or hate it, but hands down: this is one of the most impress­ive build­ings on this planet!

They’ve been build­ing over 100 years on it now — appar­ently it’s just over 50% done now. Should take another 20 to 40 years (note the pre­cise estim­ate). The whole thing is just gigantic, and mind bog­glingly intric­ate.

I’m not going to elab­or­ate on how crazy this church is. Steffi and I spent a whole after­noon there (that’s not count­ing the queuing to get in), and you should also try to visit it at some stage.

The photo here shows a detail of the Nativ­ity Facade, which is ded­ic­ated to Jesus’ birth. To pick out Maria, Joseph and the Little One from the over­whelm­ingly detailed, almost “over­loaded” facade I chose to use my latest toy: the Lens­baby. It’s basic­ally a lens designed for imper­fec­tions, the dis­tor­tions you see are all pro­duced by the lens, there was no “Pho­toshop­ping” involved at all as many people would think.

And again more than a hand­ful of days between posts ;-) But: There’s 2 excuses for it (see PS below). Any­way, I should get back to post­ing more reg­u­larly now (I hope). So last week-​end, Steffi sur­prised me by tak­ing me on a small trip to Bar­celona (prob­ably as “revenge” for the Aran-​Islands-​Trip…). It’s amaz­ing what a few days of sun, warm tem­per­at­ures and shorts can do :-)

The first of the three days of our visit we spent pretty much just walk­ing around the city and “soak­ing” it all in. What a beau­ti­ful place, with the old city quarter (Barri Gòtic — Gothic Quarter) and all. The above photo was shot in the small court­yard of the Casa de l’Ardiaca, and there are two things that I’d like to talk about.

First of all: The per­spect­ive. Look­ing straight up can give you new angles. So whenever you walk around and don’t really see any­thing inspir­ing, try look­ing straight up and check if there’s any­thing inter­est­ing to find.

Second: Lens flare. To get those nice, star-​shaped flares you need con­trol over the aper­ture. For some phys­ical reason (couldn’t find a good link quickly) the more you close the aper­ture (i.e. increase the F-​number), the more star-​like they appear — typ­ic­ally, any­thing above ƒ/​16 works pretty well. Only prob­lem then: You’ll see all the dirt on your lens and sensor, so some spot removal might be required ;-)

For a best-​of of the Bar­celona trip, check out this album; altern­at­ively, here’s the com­plete album.

PS: 1) I was in Bar­celona, 2) I rebuilt my web­site. This took a good while but is fin­ished now (I basic­ally migrated the con­tents of my hand-​written web­site to Word­Press, and reworked the theme to accom­mod­ate for static pages and the guest­book).

Here’s another photo from our South-​East-​Asia trip. The gist of today’s post: Ask first before you take a photo.

While some­times it is not pos­sible — or desir­able — to ask a per­son for per­mis­sion before tak­ing their photo (e.g. when the per­son is too far away, or when you’re going for can­dids, mean­ing you want to cap­ture the “nat­ural” situ­ation, without the aware­ness that a photo is being taken), it should be done as often as pos­sible. This could be as little as mak­ing eye con­tact, smil­ing, point­ing at your cam­era and put­ting a big ques­tion mark on your face, or as much as intro­du­cing your­self, get­ting to know the per­son and explain­ing why you would like to take a photo.

That way you’re not only being polite, but you also pay respect to the person’s private sphere and their feel­ings. Do take “no” for an answer. But more than often — you’ll be sur­prised — people will be flattered that you want take a pho­to­graph of them! Ask them politely, and be hon­est why exactly you would like to make them the main sub­ject in your pic­ture. For instance, let them know that they look great, inter­est­ing, funny, or that you are amazed by what they are doing, etc. It does take some amount of “cour­age”, but do give it a shot! And make the world a bet­ter place in the pro­cess ;-)

Com­ing back to the photo, it shows a gold smith in Vien­tiane (the cap­ital of Laos); I just thought he looked really cool with his sunglasses and just the gen­eral express­ing in face, doing his crafty job in the smoul­der­ing sum­mer heat. And — he didn’t mind.