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.

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 ;-)

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.

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.

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).

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!