Here’s a new “cat­egory” of posts I want to start: SOOC. This funny acronym stands for “straight out of cam­era” and means just this — uned­ited pic­tures as cre­ated by the cam­era.

While you can do alot in-​camera when it comes to col­ours, con­trast, etc., you have to nail the fram­ing when you take the pic­ture as you’re not allowed to touch it once it’s on the memory card… [And you should clean your sensor, see the top left corner of this pic­ture ;-)]

In order to get this pic­ture, I used the “sun­set” mode on my cam­era (yours should have this too) which renders said light­ing situ­ations in a par­tic­u­larly nice way with warm col­ours and strong con­trasts (but I also dialed in a –1EV expos­ure com­pens­a­tion to get even more detail and sat­ur­a­tion in the sky). I can’t emphas­ise enough the import­ance of know­ing the “scene modes”, “cre­at­ive styles”, or whatever it is called on your cam­era. Know which ones you have, what they do exactly (either the manual or some in-​camera help will tell you) and make sure use them in the appro­pri­ate situ­ations!

One could be temp­ted to think this shot was taken some­where spe­cial (like Africa), but no, it’s just good old Maynooth. This is what we get to see every day whenever the weather per­mits it.

Here’s another new series of posts. I’ll be post­ing Adobe Cam­era Raw Lens Pro­files that I’ve cre­ated. If you don’t know what this is, don’t worry ;-)

The first one is the Sony AF 35mm F1.4 G (or SAL-​35F14G) pro­filed on a Sony Alpha 900 (DSLR-​A900) body. How­ever, this pro­file should also work well for the two pre­vi­ous Min­olta ver­sions of the lens as well as when moun­ted on an Alpha 850 body.

I shot the fol­low­ing series: 7 Aper­tures [1.4, 2.0, 2.8, 4.0, 5.6, 8.0, 11.0] x 3 Focus dis­tances [0.35m, 1m, 1.7m], res­ult­ing in a total of 126 pic­tures. The ZIP file con­tains sev­eral files. One that con­tains all the sub pro­files in one file, as well as sep­ar­ate files for the dif­fer­ent focus dis­tances (since you can’t select sub pro­files in Light­Room at the time of writ­ing). Update: The file now also con­tains a DNG color pro­file for the lens! The fol­low­ing link will attempt to open a popup win­dow, so please allow this.

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As you may know, cre­at­ing such pro­files takes a con­sid­er­able amount of time and large prints of the cal­ib­ra­tion charts. If you find this pro­file use­ful, please con­sider a small dona­tion (con­veni­ently via PayPal):

Thank you!

Phew, long time no post. That’s mainly due to all my pan­or­amic activ­it­ies of late… But well.

Here’s a quick snap I took this lunch time, just walk­ing home to cook din­ner. This was shot again with my cell­phone, and post-​processed a little in-​phone as well (using the rather handy “Pho­to­grene” App).

All I did was adjust the levels (increas­ing the black clip­ping point) in order to boost con­trast, raise the col­our tem­per­at­ure a little (the pic­ture felt rather “cold” with what the phone’s auto­matic white bal­ance had chosen) and add the almost oblig­at­ory vign­ette.

The reason I took this pic­tures is obvi­ous — a beau­ti­ful mix­ture of lights and darks as the (rare) sun light was fil­ter­ing through the trees above. I tried to be as sym­met­ric as pos­sible with the com­pos­i­tion as not to dis­tract from but rather sup­port the main sub­ject of the image: the ligth patches. I framed the two big­ger blobs at the lower end of the frame as to give a start­ing point to the eye. It’s typ­ic­ally drawn to them, but then wanders off down the path…