
Last bank holiday weekend, Steffi and I went to Stockholm, for a change. With the cheap RyanAir flights nowadays a quick weekend away to some random European city is easily done, and a great way to get a small time-out from the everyday life of Maynooth.
What a wonderful city. We really, really enjoyed our time there — which was also helped by the fact that we had brilliant weather, and everybody was out and about because of that. We were surprised by how clean everything was, making it possibly the cleanest city we’ve seen so far. Also, the prices aren’t as bad as people say, at least if your pain barrier has been lowered over the years by life in Ireland.
Apart from the usual tourist stuff you should see (like the narrowest alleyway in the city), we especially liked the Rådhuset (“city hall”). It contains a number of very interesting halls and chambers, such as the famous “Blue Hall” (which isn’t blue; this is where the Nobel Price banquets are held every year), the “Council Chamber” with its amazing ceiling and colours, as well as the “Golden Hall” completely covered with a gigantic mosaic. There’s actually a funny story about that mosaic: Apparently, the artist had to do it in such a hurry — and some plans had been changed during his work on the mosaic — that in the end one of the most important figures in the mosaic got “decapitated” by the ceiling…
As you can see, a fun place to visit. Honourable mentions also go to the Royal Palace (try to be there for the change of guards), the Vasa Museet, Gamla Stan (the old city), the amazing Nordiska Museum as well as this warning sign next to an elevator about how not to kill yourself.
For a full pictorial run-down of our trip, see this flickr set.
| Focal length: | 24 mm |
| Aperture: | ƒ/2.8 |
| Exposure: | 1/640 s |
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Posted at 11:08

How often do you hear somebody talking about “photoshopping” an image? It often seems that in this case, people either don’t really know what you can do with Photoshop, or what it is usually used for.
Well, in any case, a fun way of using Photoshop (and GIMP and the other programs) is colour matching. This basically means the following: Take your lame picture, and also take an amazing picture of some famous artist /painter that really knows his stuff (about colours) and finally use least squares (or the likes) to match the colours of the kick-ass image to your lame-ass image.
About two years ago tried this technique on the above photo, which in itself was pretty much grey-in-grey. The picture I “stole” the colours off was the rather famous and mindboggling Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (“Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”) by Caspar David Friedrich.
There you go, Ulf, another technique to spice up washed out pictures ;-)
| Focal length: | 24 mm (≈36 mm) |
| Aperture: | ƒ/9.0 |
| Exposure: | 1/100 s |
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Posted at 18:59

Let’s play some catch-up. About a month or so ago, a friend of mine and Steffi’s (Nancy) came over from Austria to visit us and Maynooth again (she was here on Erasmus last year).
We all agreed that we wanted to use the Easter days off to see the a bit more of Ireland and since none of us had seen much of the (geographic) north of the island it was quickly decided that we hire a car and follow the compass needle on a trip from Sligo along the coast of Donegal all the way up to Malin Head.
What magnificent landscape up there, I must say! We really enjoyed it! But I guess, the great weather also played part in that ;-)
Coming back from a little detour to see beautiful Mullaghmore Castle there was this strange lighting situation that happens every now and then where the sun shines on the ground before you and making it look almost brighter than the sky in the background. And as if someone had staged it, there was this bright white swan on the lake (a tad too far away though).
In post processing I just cranked up the blacks a good bit and desaturated the colours ever so slightly to compensate for the increase in saturation (that occurs when you raise the black point). Done.
PS: A selection of my best photos from the trip can be found here; the bulk of them is up on flickr.
| Focal length: | 24 mm |
| Aperture: | ƒ/8.0 |
| Exposure: | 1/400 s |
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Posted at 17:38

Sorry it took me so long to post something new. But we’re all super busy these days, aren’t we?
I’m particularly excited about today’s photo; let me tell you why. When I was singing with the NUI Maynooth Gospel Choir(and a bunch of other choirs as well as Irish stars) was singing at a fundraising Gala Concert last week, I obviously brought my camera along and shot a few photos surrounding the event. Unfortunately I didn’t pack my wide angle lens and was stuck with “only” 24mm (which is still quite wide, compared to the usual 30mm or even 35mm+ you get with compact cameras).
Being up in the choirs stalls we had this great view of the venue (the Helix in Dublin) and I desperately wanted to capture it. So I tried something I haven’t done in a good while — a panorama shot. As I didn’t bring a tripod either, I had to do take it handheld. So I set the camera to manual mode, adjusted the exposure and took 5 photos (in portrait orientation in order to get as large a vertical field of view as possible).
I then remapped the photos in Hugin — a wonderful but slightly technical open-source, cross-platform panorama stitching software — and blended them together in Photoshop. Basically the remapping step “distorts” the images so that the overlapping parts match on top of each other, and the blending step, well, blends the pictures seamlessly into each other.
When the whole process was done I was absolately amazed by the result, considering it was done hand held in a quite challenging light situation, with people moving and all. I’ve experimented with panaromas quite a while now. It started on our New Zealand trip five years ago, continued in Iceland and culminated in me buying a panoramic tripod head, which produced (among others) these panoramas (1, 2, 3). However, I’ve taken less and less panoramas lately because they are rather time consuming to make, and also hard to print.
But seeing the constant progress of the panorama making software and how well this latest one worked out, I’ll definitely try to do more (partial) panoramas in the future! Also, because of the very wide angle of view, this would hardly have been possible with a traditional camera lens — and if so, the rectilinear projection happening in such lenses would have heavily distorted people especially in the corners of the frame, which is not the case here (thanks to the equirectangular projection used here). If you would like to find out more about these technical term, start with this great overview of the different projections.
| Focal length: | 24 mm |
| Aperture: | ƒ/4.0 |
| Exposure: | 1/30 s |
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Posted at 20:51

Having gotten to some beautiful location, do you also sometimes wish that — especially when travelling — you were the only person there? How many times do we try to take photos with as little other people on it as possible? Maybe what is happening is that (subconsciously) we believe that the picture will be more special without other tourists in it, as in we were the only person capturing this wonderful moment /place.
While of course there are many situations where it is much more aesthetic to have no persons in the picture (also, from a compositional point of view, people usually draw a lot of attention to them, away from other potential subjects in the picture), fellow humans can also give a bit of life and fun to a picture, or a situation.
Take the picture above. I had just set up to take the shot of the Cathedral of Brasilia when a horde of tourist poured out of a bus and jumped into the picture to take their group photo. I almost got annoyed by what I felt to be a rather rude thing to do, but then I saw that those crazy young people actually give so much more liveliness to the shot (compare it to this shot someone else posted on flickr). In a moment of adventure, I asked if they all could cheer and wave and scream — and spontaneously they did!
So here’s something to think about: Tourists may also be your friend in pictures! Also, intentionally including people helps to give scale and perspective to some shots. Here are some more examples (1, 2, 3).
| Focal length: | 18 mm (≈27 mm) |
| Aperture: | ƒ/4.5 |
| Exposure: | 1/250 s |
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Posted at 18:11

It’s time again, I need a new passport and thus some up-to-date photos of myself. Possessing all that photographic gear, why not try to make them myself? Last time I paid 11 EUR for them and the main street photographer just used a trusty old Canon 350D with a cheapish Sigma 18-200mm lens (from what I remember, set to around 60mm i.e. 96mm considering the 1.6x crop factor), plus some minor studio equipment: In short, nothing a mere mortal couldn’t reproduce.
I then had a read up on the official specs of the Bundesdruckerei (the German Federal Printing Office) and decided that the conditions there aren’t too hard to meet either.
So I sat my to studio flashes with their softboxes up in our living room, tethered the camera to LightRoom, grabbed a remote release, and off I shot. Here’s a small making-off shot. After about 10 shots of adjusting my head, I finally go the image right (as far as I can see).
Finally some pimple-removing (this photo will be on my passport for 10 years, so a bit of vanity is o.k.) and more importantly: careful cropping according to the specifications (35x45mm, with nose, eyes, chin etc. in appropriate locations), and I was done. To get prints, I reproduced the picture eight times on a 6×4 canvas and dropped the file off at the chemist.
While I don’t know if the embassy will take it, I don’t know why they shouldn’t. I’ll let you know if it worked!
| Focal length: | 85 mm |
| Aperture: | ƒ/8.0 |
| Exposure: | 1/250 s + 2x D-lite 2 |
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Posted at 17:28
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