My attempt at using my cam­era to be funny…

When I was com­ing back from Ger­many two weeks ago I had to spend a few hours in Frank­furt to catch my flight back to Dub­lin. When I opened my note­book, first thing I did was to turn off the WiFi (called “Air­Port” on a Mac) in order to safe some bat­tery power. Well, there you go. You’re in an air­port and you click some­thing on your laptop to turn the Air­Port off.

Ok, even if the photo is of lim­ited humour­istic value, tech­nic­ally it was some­what tricky to real­ise. As this is almost a macro shot, the biggest prob­lem here is depth of field. As you can see, I dialled in a fairly high aper­ture of ƒ/​13 so that the back­ground didn’t get too blurred. I would have loved to go higher, but I didn’t want to increase the ISO any fur­ther (and the shot was done hand-​held, with the laptop, well, on the top of my lap).

I made this shot pretty much exactly a year ago, com­ing back from church where they had the place dec­or­ated with these lovely col­our­ful egg-​candles. At the end of the day, there were a few left for the tak­ing, so I took these two in order to re-​create the flickr logo with those egg shaped candles ;-)

The set-​up was very simple — I just placed the candles on a few A3 sheets of white paper and put an external flash on a tri­pod, together with an impro­vised snoot made from the car­ton of a roll of tin-​foil. As the flash was just out­side the field of view of the lens I got this nice smooth lens flare. The dream­i­ness was achieved by over­lay­ing a semi-​transparent, blurred ver­sion of the pic­ture.

In any case, Happy Easter to you all, enjoy the days off, go for a walk, take some pho­tos or just chill out.

Another sub­mis­sion for the photo com­pet­i­tion. This one was for the cat­egory “The Epi­tome of Maynooth”.

Last year, the Tra­di­tion Music Soci­ety played every other Wed­nes­day even­ing in the “Brady’s”, one of the nicer and prob­ably the most “ori­ginal” pubs of Maynooth (maybe “authen­tic” is a bet­ter word). Unfor­tu­nately, these gigs have got­ten fewer and fewer, so I hope the Trad Soc will get a bit more organ­ised again to put those won­der­ful ses­sions of tra­di­tional Irish music on again!

Blurred in the back­ground is Joey work­ing away on the gui­tar, the Uilleann pipes in the for­ground were played by Yoann (this is a tra­di­tion Irish instru­ment, some­what sim­ilar but still quite dif­fer­ent to the Scot­tish bag­pipes you’re all famil­iar with.)

To get some of the nice old-folks’-pub atmo­sphere into the pic­ture I pro­cessed it with to a sepia tone (some­thing I’m not too fond of, usu­ally). This photo is again one out of a great many, shot in 5 pic­tures per second burst mode to be able to pick the one with the least cam­era shake (1/​5^th of a second is rather long for hand-​holding a lens at 75mm equi­val­ent) but best motion blur on the fin­gers fly­ing across the pipes.

As prom­ised, here is one of my other sub­mis­sions for the photo com­pet­i­tion.

This was put in for the “Dublin/​Ireland” cat­egory. It shows the river Sneem down in County Kerry and I shot it last year on my second trip around the Ring of Kerry.

Apart from the heavy cross-​processing effect and the strong vign­ette (both to juice the pic­utre up a bit, it was a fairly over­cast, grey day), the par­tic­u­lar­ity of this shot was its expos­ure — 1.3 seconds is rather long for a day­light scene and the ISO /​aper­ture val­ues used.

I wanted to expose longer than usual so that the water is rendered dream-​like and smooth, almost kitschy. This was achieved using a neut­ral dens­ity fil­ter (ND 1.8 in this case). Such a fil­ter basic­ally just reduces the bright­ness of whatever you pho­to­graphy, (ideally) without affect­ing the col­ours. The fil­ter I used takes 6 ƒ-stops of light away, so that I could expose 2⁶ = 64 times longer than without the fil­ter.

Hope you like it! I’ll be away for a few days again over Easter, so all the best to you and see you back soon!

A few weeks back, the Inter­na­tional Office here at the uni­ver­sity ran a photo com­pet­i­tion entitled “More Than Words“, to which I sub­mit­ted a few pho­tos for the dif­fer­ent cat­egor­ies. Two weeks ago, the sub­mis­sions were then exhib­ited over in the lib­rary, so Steffi and I went over and had a look. Apart from a few obvi­ous snap shots there was quite some stiff com­pet­i­tion there, and way more con­tri­bu­tions than I expec­ted. Appar­ently I’m not the only inter­na­tional stu­dent with an interest in pho­to­graphy here in Maynooth…

The award cere­mony then took place last week when I was in Ger­many, so Steffi agreed to go in my stead, not know­ing what to expect. Well, turns out one of my pho­tos (shown above) won in the cat­egory “The Best Night Out”! Awe­some! I actu­ally pre­ferred some of my other pho­tos more (I’ll try to post each entry here in the com­ing weeks), but then again, tastes are dif­fer­ent. The price for that was some uni­ver­sity mer­chand­ise and a much needed price money (to pay off my equip­ment ;-)).

But that wasn’t it. Steffi also receive another price for me — the one for the over­all best sub­mis­sions, i.e. con­cern­ing the entirety of what I had sub­mit­ted. Wow. The price for that was a small point and shoot cam­era, a red Fuji­Film FinePix Z20. Nice :-) I guess I’ll use that mainly for tak­ing small videos, and Steffi might just keep it in her hand back. Never hurts to have a small cam­era around!

So a big thank you to Karen over at the Inter­na­tional Office for organ­ising and run­ning this com­pet­i­tion, to the judges (Peter Thursfield, Irish Times Pic­ture Editor; Glen Hay­ward, Metro Pic­ture Editor; and Denis Con­don, Film Stud­ies lec­turer) who voted in favour of my pho­tos and to Steffi for going to the cere­mony! This is def­in­itely a huge boost for my pho­to­graphy and I hope this will not the last com­pet­i­tion I’ll par­take in!

PS: Tech­nical note about the pic­ture: The secret here was to use so-​called “slow sync”, that is you expose fairly long (an 8^th of a second here) with a high ISO value, but also use the flash on the second cur­tain. That way, you get a lot of motion in the shot, but also freeze some of the ele­ments at the end of the expos­ure. Same tech­nique as with the fall­ing egg the other day.

Before head­ing off to Ger­many for a week (I’m going to Elgers­burg, near Ilmenau), let me post an image that I took last year, also in Ger­many.

A bunch of friends from uni got together and we went on a small canoe tour on the river Havel, pho­tos here. While ready­ing our canoe on the pon­toon where we left, I notice this super old ship just rust­ing and pretty much dying away, a great photo oppor­tun­ity.

The shot presen­ted here is a detail in the ship’s hull plank­ing. Hav­ing cropped it a bit, I gave Matt Kloskowski’s cross-​processing Light­Room pre­set a got, and I think it works great. This was inspired by an epis­ode of the lovely Pho­towalk­through pod­cast, in which John Arnold showed a cross pro­cessing tech­nique for Pho­toshop, apply­ing it to a sim­ilar “naut­ical detail”.

Fun­nily enough, the hose com­ing out of the hole now almost looks like a tongue stuck out of it, hence the title ;-)