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.

[irrelevant]I’ve spent some time over the Christ­mas hol­i­days revamp­ing this blog (mostly under the hood though). Just quickly: For a while now I’ve been using a word­press plu­gin called Yet another pho­tob­log together with some cus­tom code to auto­mat­ic­ally gen­er­ate in a non-​messy way the EXIF table you see at the end of each post and to cre­ate the reflec­tion below the images. Unfor­tu­nately I didn’t use this nice plug­in from the begin­ning, so there were about 30 pic­ture posts left out. But since the plu­gin does a very eleg­ant job of everything I’ve decided to migrate the old posts so that now every post goes through the plu­gin. This then allowed me to auto­mat­ic­ally gen­er­ate a com­pre­hens­ive list of all the pic­tures dis­cussed so far, which you can find by click­ing on any of the “More pic­tures” links. Also, the ran­dom pic­tures in the top right are now picked from all the images pos­ted so far. Finally, thanks to the won­der­ful php-​typography class the typo­graphy of the posts should be cleaner, and best of all: there’s now hyphen­a­tion — I never thought this would be pos­sible with HTML, but there you have it![/irrelevant]

Today’s photo was shot way back in 2007, and shows one of the massive sun­sets we get here in Maynooth in the winter months. Now when you shoot sun­sets, as I said before, the most import­ant thing is expos­ure and white bal­ance. And com­pos­i­tion.

-> Expos­ure: If you cam­era is set to auto­matic, it usu­ally over­ex­poses sun­set scenes and you loose all the intense col­ours. So make sure you set your expos­ure com­pens­a­tion to some neg­at­ive value (exper­i­ment around a bit, start­ing from, say, –1 EV).

-> White bal­ance: You’re best off using the a scene mode (most cam­eras have a “sun­set mode” of some sort) which should take care of that. If you have con­trol over the white bal­ance though, make sure your above at least 6000K with some extra magenta added in too.

-> Com­pos­i­tion: It always helps if you have an extra sub­ject apart from the sun­set in the scene. You see, unfor­tu­nately there are way too many sun­set (or sky pic­tures in gen­eral) around, so a pic­ture of just a sun­set is usu­ally quite bor­ing, no mat­ter how impress­ive it is. Instead, try to include an extra sub­ject in your pic­ture, like the two guys here you walked past just at the right moment. That way, you gen­er­ate an extra amount of dis­tinc­tion to all those sun­set pic­tures out there…

Here’s a some­what “street pho­to­graphy” style shot. I took it about two months ago, when I was spend­ing the bet­ter part of the day with Steffi and Sophie at Holles Street Mater­nity hos­pital in Dub­lin. One after­noon I went for a short walk to catch some fresh air, and thank­fully took my cam­era with me. That’s when I spot­ted this lady sit­ting there, on the phone.

I politely asked her if it was ok to take a photo and she said “yeah, why not”. So I had a quick think about how I wanted to take the photo and how to best cap­ture whatever it was that made me want to take the photo in the first place. My sub­sequent con­sid­er­a­tions included small aper­ture to get those sun “rays”; cen­ter weighted meter­ing on the fore­ground as to expose for the lady, not the (much brighter) sky behind her; manual mode so not to take any chances with the camera’s own auto­matic meter­ing; low cam­era pos­i­tion to get the shadow of the fence more prom­in­ent into the frame; one shot only as I didn’t want to bother her too much; etc.

So walk­ing over to where I wanted to shot from I did a quick test shot from the hip to double check proper set­ting of the expos­ure (insec­ure me) and then kneeled down to take the actual pic­ture. It was only then that her con­ver­sa­tion had turned into shout­ing — and from what I could her she was just dump­ing her boy friend …

How many sub­jects can you have in a photo? Well, it depends on how you group them, I sup­pose. Here you could say: “The two cats are the sub­ject”, or you could say: “The cats are the two subjects” …

Well, whichever way you look at it, pla­cing two sub­jects diag­on­ally oppos­ite in a frame cre­ates a good deal of con­fu­sion for your eyes — espe­cially if the sub­jects look very sim­ilar. You will have a hard time set­tling for one of them, and thus move back and forth between the two points of attrac­tion.

The cats above were two street cats just chilling out in the sun­shine at Wat Luang, a Buddhist temple in Pakxé, South­ern Laos.

Who’d have thought it. Back in Feb­ru­ary this year I jumped at the oppor­tun­ity to take a few pic­tures of the beau­ti­ful NUIM South Cam­pus clad in white.

You see, it doesn’t snow a lot in Ire­land, and the snow usu­ally just stays for a couple of hours, so I had to move fast. I grabbed my cam­era, bat­ter­ies, a bunch of lenses, gloves, and off I went to take some pho­tos around the uni­ver­sity.

And then, about a month ago, the university’s PR office asked me if I had any nice winter pic­tures of the uni­ver­sity, for use on this year’s offi­cial NUIM Christ­mas Card. Well, out I pulled this one and guess what — it made it! You can buy the cards around cam­pus now and see me walk around with a big smile :-)