Every­one is try­ing to be dif­fer­ent, in order to make a dif­fer­ence. As I’ve poin­ted out many times, in order to stand out, you should try to take pho­tos from a dif­fer­ent angle or view point.

Here’s a clas­sical one: the rear-​view. Instead of pho­to­graph­ing the action, from the back, over people’s heads — pho­to­graph the people, from the front, watch­ing the action. While we’re not talk­ing video here, this kind of reminds me of those funny clips of ten­nis spec­tat­ors watch­ing a game and their heads turn­ing left-​right-​left-​right at the same time.

So this photo was taken at the “elec­tion party” for the Ger­man gen­eral elec­tions two weeks back, organ­ised by the Goethe Insti­tute Dub­lin and the Ger­man Embassy (which has three of my pho­tos from the event on their web­site). People were pretty much on the edge to see what the out­come would be (and right­fully so, gen­eral elec­tions only hap­pen every four years!), you could almost think they were watch­ing a game of soc­cer…

It was a great even­ing even if things didn’t turn out the way I per­son­ally would have liked them to be (polit­ic­ally), espe­cially with all the deli­cious typ­ical Ger­man food on offer! So thanks to the Goethe Insti­tute, the Embassy — and ulti­mately the Ger­man tax payer ;-)

And now for a more abstract shot again, which I took about a year and a half ago.

As you prob­ably already guessed, it shows a spider web covered with ice crys­tals. Nature at its best pro­duces these typ­ic­ally in the winter time, com­bin­ing thick fog with freez­ing tem­per­at­ures.

Tech­nic­ally it was quite hard to shoot, as my fin­gers were pretty much frozen after a few minutes… No, but ser­i­ously now, although the crys­tals were very pretty and all it was rather dif­fi­cult to make them look good on sil­icon. I exper­i­mented a bit and ended up using a flash gun dir­ectly below the net shoot­ing straight up.

This not only gave the crys­tals nice “three dimen­sional” char­ac­ter, but it also helped to pretty much remove the (fairly cluttered) back­ground of the stu­dent res­id­ences’ rub­bish dump…

Just like now, I think I got a cold out of this shot.

Back from our little hon­ey­moon, here’s a new post with a fresh pic­ture from Valèn­cia (Spain).

I took this photo on the social “out­ing” from the POSTA ’09 con­fer­ence, where we vis­ited the Ciutat de les Arts i les Cièn­cies (City of Arts and Sci­ences), an area right in the city where dif­fer­ent build­ings, such as opera, sci­ence museum, IMAX, etc. com­pete for the most futur­istic look. It quite reminded me of Brasília (the cap­ital of Brazil).

Any­way, today’s tip is to take as many pho­tos as you can when you’re in the so-​called Golden Hour, the time just before sun­set (or just after sun­rise, if you fancy get­ting up early). This gives you some won­der­ful light to play with and take amaz­ing, moody shots and por­traits of people.

Watch your white bal­ance though (!), make sure your cam­era (when set to auto­matic) doesn’t com­pensate for the warm col­ours, res­ult­ing in too neut­ral a feel­ing. Either manu­ally set the white bal­ance to some­thing around 7500°K, or use the “sun­set” mode /​pic­ture style or whatever it may be called.

And off I go again to Spain. Seems like I just left Bar­celona yes­ter­day ;-)

This time I’m off to a con­fer­ence in Valèn­cia (POSTA ’09), and right after that Steffi and I will have a small “Ersatz”-honeymoon since our ori­ginal plans to go to Hawaii had to change… We’ll have a small roadtrip around the south of the Iberian pen­in­sula.

The photo here was taken on our last Spain trip to Bar­celona and it shows one of the nar­row streets in the old part of the city. I just loved the warm col­ours of the build­ings, and to intensify that I cranked up the white bal­ance to a fairly high value (must have been above 10’000 °K I think). That’s a very simple but neat trick to add some extra warmth to your pic­tures without much too much effort. Along the same lines, if you add in some more magenta, you can achieve a more of sunset-​y type of flair.

Another com­mon thing done here is the com­pres­sion of per­spect­ive by using a tele­photo lens and a fairly long focal length. This addi­tion­ally reduces the depth of field to high­light two little details in the pic­ture, the wind-​wheel-​flower and the street light.

Any­way, will be back in a couple of weeks time, hope­fully with some more pictures :-)

Most fil­ters (in front of lenses) that people try to sell you don’t make sense in digital pho­to­graphy. In par­tic­u­lar UV fil­ters, sky light fil­ters or pro­tect­ive fil­ters — the first two are irrel­ev­ant, and you usu­ally pro­tect your lens much bet­ter by using a lens hood. All that these “use­less” fil­ters do is degrade image qual­ity.

The only two fil­ters that make sense, I guess, are polar­isers and neut­ral dens­ity (or just “grey-​”) fil­ters. I might talk about the lat­ter at some other time, today’s topic is the polar­iser. If you don’t have one, get one. Unfor­tu­nately, the bet­ter ones (that’s the ones you want to buy, since they have decent coat­ings on them, are more col­our neut­ral and usu­ally live longer) can be quite pricey, espe­cially when you have large lens dia­met­ers.

Why? Well, the main effect of these fil­ters is one that you just can’t repro­duce prop­erly in post-​processing: They reduce reflec­tions. There are mainly two situ­ations where this is import­ant 1) in the sky and 2) on col­our­ful objects (well, actu­ally 3) on trans­lu­cent sur­faces). In the sky the fil­ter gives you much deeper blues as it removes some of the sun­light reflec­ted off the haze in the air (which leaves the deep blue rather “milky”). On objects, such as grass, leaves, build­ings, etc. it reduces the reflec­tion of the ambi­ent light to again just give you the actual sig­ni­fic­antly more sat­ur­ated col­our of the object. Third, it allows you to shoot through win­dows or water sur­faces to reveal what’s behind (again, by can­cel­ling out reflec­tions of the sur­round­ing).

Sounds great, doens’t it? Well, there’s a catch or two. On the one hand, you lose about 1 to 3 stops of bright­ness. On the other, in order to be able to can­cel reflec­tions, you need to get the angles right (this has to do with the phys­ics behind all this). Since the post is already long enough, I won’t go into explain­ing how exactly to use them — if you’re inter­ested you can have a look at this art­icle for instance, or this page.

As for the photo above — you guessed right, it’s been shot using a polar­ising fil­ter. No post-​processing really, just the filter’s magic :-)

Not that this is the greatest photo ever shot (of course I don’t mean the two ladies on it, but in gen­eral), there still must be some­thing about this shot that people want to use it… Now there’s two kinds of people: those that want to use it and pay for it, and those that just use it, without pay­ing for it (or even ask­ing per­mis­sion, for that mat­ter).

Here’s the whole story. I was recently approached by an ad agency who wants to buy a hand­ful of pho­tos of me for use in a pro­spectus for the uni­ver­sity. When the deal was almost sealed, they sent me an email say­ing that they saw one of the pho­tos they were about to pur­chase (the one above) in a sim­ilar pro­spectus from another uni­ver­sity, and that they weren’t really happy about that (since they thought they are get­ting the pic­ture “exclus­ively”, which is the nor­mal thing to assume).

Turns out there are actu­ally two pro­specti (?) from Dundalk IT where some of my images are used in. The best bit: They never asked for my per­mis­sion to print the pic­tures! This is bad in a num­ber of ways. It’s bad form to start off with, it’s a viol­a­tion of the copy­right I own for the images, it does not hon­our the licence under which I pos­ted the images on flickr (which only allows for non-​commercial use with appro­pri­ate attri­bu­tion only, whereas the ad agency was obvi­ously paid for mak­ing the pro­spectus, and my name was nowhere in it), and last but not least: I don’t have a model-​release from the two Erasmus stu­dents on it — so if they were upset about their pic­ture being prin­ted in hun­dreds (or thou­sands) of leaf­lets, I’d be in trouble now!

Any­way, I sent an email to the agency about the issue, and they now for­war­ded me to someone in the uni­ver­sity that provided them with the pic­tures. That per­son is away until Septem­ber 1^st, so I’ll have to wait and see how they react. I’d be inter­est­ing to see what they have to say though…