Happy St. Patrick’s Day every­one! If Google has a spe­cial logo for today, I should also make a spe­cial entry. For that reason, the rest of this post will be in green!

Hav­ing been to the Dub­lin St. Patrick’s parade twice (2007, 2008) I wasn’t too keen on going into town again this year. The prob­lem is that the city is just too full, and you have to be at the parade track 9am at the latest to get a spot (the parade itself starts at 12…). Just catch­ing the train is a pain. So I con­vinced Steffi that we should give the small parade here in Maynooth a go.

I was told that it would be “pathetic”, but to the con­trary, it was pretty cool! This oth­er­wise sleepy town does go bey­ond the uni­ver­sity stu­dent pop­u­la­tion! The parade itself obvi­ously was no com­par­ison to the big one in Dub­lin, but it was a nice effort none the less by local clubs and busi­nesses to put a few floats together.

How­ever, the best part really was the people /​fam­il­ies /​kids, all dressed up in green and orange, faces painted, cheer­ing and smil­ing from ear to year :-) What a great oppor­tun­ity to take some great shots. Of course, always check back with the par­ents first if it is ok to take some pho­tos of their little ones.

Any­ways, I’m off to the pub — Happy St. Paddy’s every­one!

PS: Here are the pho­tos from the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Maynooth.

Hav­ing taken the pro­mo­tional shots for “Remem­ber­ing Rose”, I also went to one of the per­form­ances to take some pho­tos of the “action”.

In one word: Awe­some. A really great play /​script /​per­form­ance alto­gether. I really hope this play has a “future” bey­ond three per­form­ances here in Maynooth. But I heard that they will be com­pet­ing with it at some big­gish theatre fest­ival. I’ll keep my fin­gers crossed!

Pho­to­graphy­wise — well, I already had a post about event pho­to­graphy, and there’s not too much to add here, apart from one thing: It always helps (if pos­sible) to have someone next to you who can give you a “heads up” when there will be some sud­den, unpre­dict­able action. This way, you can pre­pare your­self (switch lens, dial in faster shut­ter speeds, etc.), pre­fo­cus and be ready for it. In my case, Steffi was next to me and gave me a few such clues (she knew the play as she had a small walk-​on role in it), which really helped!

PS: Pho­tos from the night here.

The drama soci­ety recently pro­duced a play call “Remem­ber­ing Rose”. Writ­ten by a stu­dent here at NUIM, it was one of the fun­ni­est pieces I’ve ever seen! I hope the script makes it bey­ond three per­form­ances here on cam­pus.

Any­way, I offered them to make some promo shots and they gladly accep­ted. Here’s what came out of it.

So how did I do these pho­tos? Well, the secret to a black back­drop is that you kill all light sources and just use flashes, but mak­ing sure that you only light the sub­ject, not the back back­ground (i.e. don’t put your sub­ject in front of a wall). The set-​up here was: 1 large soft­box fairly close to the per­son, about 45° from the left, just above eye-​level, and another flash with a reflector and honeycomb-​filter (to dir­ect the light) from behind to the right, about at hip-​level, a fair bit off so it doesn’t fire into the cam­era.

But the biggest thing here for me was that it was my first proper photo shoot (if you don’t count the one with Andrea a few weeks back). These guys didn’t know me, I didn’t know them, I just bluntly prom­ised them some nice pho­tos (and I didn’t tell them it was my “first time” until after­wards). But it all turned out quite well, I think. The biggest les­son I learned (again) was that you really need to dir­ect people. The more con­crete, expli­cit and pre­cise you are, the bet­ter. Being pho­to­graphed by a stranger is in itself a fairly awk­ward situ­ation, you’re not quite sure what’s going on, if you’re “doing it right”, and so on — so being told what to do reduces this insec­ur­ity as you can just focus on what you’re told to do. How­ever, this can be chal­len­ging as you also have to think about all the tech­nical as well as artistic issues… But the best way around this is: prac­tice, prac­tice, practice.

While this photo is not the most spec­tac­u­lar shot in the world, it doc­u­ments some­thing rather funny. One for the “Boing Boing” cat­egory, so to speak.

For some reason, the folks over at the Kin­lay House Hostel in Cork thought that the emer­gency exit signs don’t need to be too large, and don’t have to be hung up at eye level either.

Rather, it looks like the emer­gency sig­nage was con­ceived for dwarfs, as the signs were tiny (maybe 2×3 inches?) and just a few inches off the ground.

Les­son to be learnt here may include:
 – in Cork, it pays to be ver­tic­ally chal­lenged ;-)
 – when you walk around, keep your eyes open for funny things
 – small things are best pho­to­graphed up close, from a low stand­point, and with other objects in the frame to give some­thing to com­pare the sizes with (although I didn’t quite man­age here as I didn’t feel like crawl­ing around on the dirty floor to check the framing).

Ok, enough curi­os­it­ies, let’s go back to some­thing more visu­ally inter­est­ing.

The gentle ready may have already seen that we are now look­ing at a dirty, rusty, old lock on an old door with fad­ing paint. I spot­ted it on our walk around the inner city of Cork, near the docks — gen­er­ally a great place to keep an eye open for grungy shots.

What I find par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing here is that this is no play on the col­ours, at all. This pic­ture is pro­cessed with the cor­rect white bal­ance, and noth­ing but a tad more con­trast and an increased black level (it, as always, was a grey day). In other words, no select­ive desat­ur­a­tion, as some might have sus­pec­ted. The paint was really fad­ing in col­our…

When I took the shot, I stopped down the lens quite a bit so that the depth of field would be large enough to cover the lock, and also to get max­imum sharp­ness. My stand­ard walk-​around lens (the Carl Zeiss Vario-​Sonnar 24 – 70 ƒ/2.8 SSM) unfor­tu­nately tends to be a bit soft at the long end).

I still haven’t got­ten around post­ing any pho­tos from our recent week­end trip to Cork, a lovely city in the south west of Ire­land.

On our sight­see­ing walk­about we also went past the cam­pus of the Uni­ver­sity Col­lege Cork (UCC). When we came past the stu­dent res­id­ences, I couldn’t believe what I saw: In the centre of a circle of build­ings was this “christ­mas tree” of no less than six CCTV cam­eras…! [By the way, CCTV stands for “Closed Cir­cuit Tele­Vi­sion”].

Well, let’s hope this much sur­veil­lance is really neces­sary, and helps pre­vent oh so many crimes…

In terms of pho­to­graphy, this was pretty straight­for­ward thing. Shot at an angle to cre­ate some more ten­sion, I pro­cessed it to sepia tones as it was a grey, unspec­tac­u­lar day. I under­ex­posed care­fully not to blow out the sky, and had the aper­ture closed down to ƒ/​10 to get a max­imum amount of detail and reduce lens flare in this back­light situ­ation. Finally a few select­ive dodge and burns here and there were needed to bring out the cam­eras a bit more.

PS: More pho­tos from the Cork trip here.