
I can’t help taking photos from our balcony. There’re just too many interesting scenes your get throughout the day and the night.
This one here was taken one foggy evening with the moon up in the sky. Unfortunately, the moon always feels larger in real life than it turns out on your photos. Unless you use a really long focal length, it just ends up really small :(
But I still liked the colour contrast (again) between the orange glow from the street lams and the blue-ish moon. Also — it’s kind of hard to see on this picutre — but the layer of fog that night wasn’t very high and the moon was just above it, in the clear. Not the greates picture, but I still wanted to share it :-)
| Focal length: | 24 mm |
| Aperture: | ƒ/9.0 |
| Exposure: | 5.0 s |
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Posted at 18:54

There are several interesting times througout the day to take photos. For instance, I recently talked about the Golden Hour. Today, I’d like to talk about the last moments of the dusk.
Famous buildings and structures are typically lit with Sodium vapour or Halogen lamps which produce an orangy /yellowy type of light. Now what’s the complementary colour of that? You’re right, it’s blue. What do we know about warm and cold colours? Warm colours stand out, make the object appear closer, more present, wherease cold colours create distance and separation. Now that’s a wonderful contrast, isn’t it?
So next time you want to take a night shot of something, try not to take it when it’s already completely dark, but a bit earlier, towards the end of dusk. That way, you can achieve a lovely deep, dark blue in the sky (weather permitting…) which can give you beautiful night shots with a not-so-boring skye.
| Focal length: | 18 mm (≈27 mm) |
| Aperture: | ƒ/3.5 |
| Exposure: | 1/30 s |
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Posted at 21:27

Hands down, the best camera is the one you’ve got in your pocket, always at the ready. I must have said that before somewhere, but there’s no better camera than the one you happen to have with you when you need it.
The photo here was taken late at night when I was returning from Dublin. A seriously creepy fog hung over the by-then quiet village (ok, town…) and produced this surreal but chilly atmosphere. I so wished I’d have had my film camera with me, or my digital SLR, but I didn’t. So I tried to take a photo with the camera on my phone… Better than nothing, I thought.
As it was rather dark, the camera basically just said “That’s it, I’m out of here”. Unfortunately, the company with a vegetable in its logo doesn’t let you configure or manipulate in terms of camera settings, exposure or whatnot — you’re stuck in fully automatic mode. On top of that, it appears that the software just won’t use shutter speeds of longer than a 1⁄10 of a second, and the ISO maxes out at 1000. That meant that the overall picture was quite dark, and I had to push the brightness a lot in post-processing. That, in turn, brought out loads of noise, but hey, that’s fine — just do convert the image to black & white trick and the noise can work for you.
So that’s the picture I made out of it, as I said brightening the original image somewhat, and adjusting the black level up somewhat as to maintain the “low-key” spirit of the picture. Quite a contrast to the previous post, I guess.
| Focal length: | 3.85 mm (≈37 mm) |
| Aperture: | ƒ/2.8 |
| Exposure: | 1/10 s |
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Posted at 0:25

Reminiscent of the Sugar loaf picture from a while back, here’s another high-key type of photo. Now when you shoot weddings with brides in white dresses and kids playing around, high-key may feel cheesy and cliché, but every now and then you may get some real gems. High-key in photography usually refers to subjects and scenes that you intentionally overexpose slightly; oftentimes the motives themselves would have light tones to start off with.
Now there’s two ways of getting high-key images. Either you really overexpose the picture when you take it, or you push the brightness afterwards in post-processing (like this one here, which has been brightened by almost 2 EV). For the latter, however, you really want to have been shooting in RAW, otherwise there’s just not enough information in the dark tones to work with…
Finally you also want to play around with the saturation. The sugar loaf photo, for instance, was highly saturated, whereas the one here is a bit more muted. If you really want to go over the top, experiment with a white vignette.
| Focal length: | 50 mm (≈75 mm) |
| Aperture: | ƒ/2.0 |
| Exposure: | 1/125 s |
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Posted at 23:41

While cyclone “Daisy” has large parts of Europe in its icy grip, Ireland is going “tits up” (as a dear friend from Manchester would phrase it) with even the University postponing exams (can you believe it!!), myself and many other people thought — hey, this is a great photo opportunity. Let’s take some photos while it lasts.
So hoping to make the 2010 NUIM Christmas Card again I grabbed everything I needed and went for a little photo tour of the South Campus.
I’ve talked about snow photos before, so not too much to added apart from don’t forget the exposure compensation (I’ve seen plenty of muddy grey snow pictures floating around in Facebook again) and if you want to be fancy — use a polarising filter to blue-e-fy those skies. Or imitate the effect it in post-processing if you can’t /don’t want to use one. Do that in your favourite photo editing application by darkening, selectively, the blue channel.
| Focal length: | 50 mm |
| Aperture: | ƒ/10.0 |
| Exposure: | 1/125 s |
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Posted at 0:31

Here’s another shot of my favourite daughter, taken at the end of last year. Her eye colour, which started off as very undefined, dark grey, is now beautifully converging to an amazing blue. I wonder who she got the genes from for that…
In terms of photography, I photographed her sitting /laying in her favourite vibrating bouncer seat (looks something like this) next to the window, looking outside. This is one of the most classic locations and is pretty much the perfect place for portraiture. Classic, as it initially provided photographers with a strong enough light source for taking photos in the first place (way back in the day when the light sensitive materials were hardly light sensitive at all, by today’s standards). But even before, it has been widely used in painting for instance.
Positioning your subject next to a window (during the day…) provides you with nice soft-box like lighting (no harsh shadows). Also, natural light contains the full spectrum of visible light (as compared to various artificial light sources that just contain a limited and often times fragmented spectrum) — which will get you beautiful, natural colours if that’s what you want. Apart from that, if you position your subject carefully you might also get some nice catch lights in the eyes (that is the reflections you see on the eye and the iris).
You might want to use a reflector though on the other side of the face that’s away from the window so it doesn’t drown in darkness…
Here are some more portraits I took near windows, 1, 2, 3.
| Focal length: | 100 mm |
| Aperture: | ƒ/2.8 |
| Exposure: | 1/200 s |
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Posted at 19:53
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