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 :-)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.