Apo­lo­gies for slowly loos­ing track of what I’ve men­tioned so far and what not, but in case I’m repeat­ing myself — “Repe­ti­tion is the mother of all learn­ing”, or so it goes, right?

Any­way, here’s a lovely autumny shot from last year. It’s main fea­ture; Side-​light, also known as “rim light” (but I think the lat­ter term is more used in por­trait­ure).

In this present pic­ture, the won­der­ful light­ing really brings out the col­ours in the leafs, which also con­trast beau­ti­fully against the blue sky (remem­ber, blue and orange are com­pli­ment­ary col­ours…) and the dark shad­ows behind the church.

Quite a lot of fill light went into this (to bring out the details in the cathed­ral too which oth­er­wise would have been left almost black due to the high con­trast in the scene) — all major photo edit­ing applic­a­tions allow you to do this. How­ever, as I keep say­ing, you have sig­ni­fic­antly more lee­way for such manip­u­la­tions if you shoot RAW.

Here’s part 2 (of 5) of my little pan­or­amic pho­to­graphy tutorial series. It shows you how I use Adobe Light­Room 3 to post-​process the RAW images shot in Part 1.

The title of this post refers to some­what of a hype of recent years — use a bunch of small, port­able flashes to light a scene in an inter­est­ing, unusual way.

Well, call­ing this a “hype” is prob­ably too pejor­at­ive as there are tons of bril­liant images com­ing out of this philsophy. Just check the blog of the “father” of stro­bism David Hobby.

So I wanted to try it out at some stage, and decided to do so with this group shot of last year’s uni­ver­sity vol­ley­ball team (that I used to be in, but not any­more for lack of time). I used two flashes situ­ated about two meters to the left and right of the cam­era, and triggered them wire­lessly from the cam­era. As this is prob­ably the simplest setup ima­gin­able, I don’t dare call­ing this a great sto­bist set-​up, but at least it’s in the spirit ;-)

So what have I been doing lately, apart from not get­ting much sleep?

I’m in the pro­cess of record­ing a num­ber pan­or­ama tutorial videos. I thought, it’s about time to give some more back to the greater inter­net com­munity from which I have learnt so much over the last years.

The series shows my typ­ical work­flow for my pan­or­amic pho­to­graphy. Here’s part 1 (of 5), where I show my three favour­ite pan­or­ama shoot­ing tech­niques. Hope you find it use­ful!

Happy New Year to you all! High Five for another good one!

This is just a quick snap, lil’ Sophie on her mom’s back, on the way to the crèche, one beau­ti­ful autumn morn­ing. Noth­ing too spe­cial, except a cute shot to get us all star­ted into the new year. And a blatant applic­a­tion of the Rule of Thirds.

Res­ol­u­tions? Well, of course. Fin­ish Ph.D. and blog more ;-)

How about you?

=> Chapel, St. Patrick’s Col­lege Maynooth in NUI Maynooth.

Quite fit­ting to my three-​part inter­view with the Ger­man Pod­cast “Happy Shoot­ing, here’s my second-​highest res­ol­u­tion pan­or­ama sofar — the inside of the beau­ti­ful Col­lege Chapel of the St. Patrick’s Col­lege in Maynooth.

This was shot with a reg­u­lar lens, set to 24mm. This meant tak­ing 29 images, three rows of 9 plus one up, one down.

It took a bit longer to shoot than expec­ted… The place is typ­ic­ally empty — you can just walk in, if you know where to go and when the doors are not locked, but since it isn’t heav­ily advert­ised and Maynooth doesn’t really have hun­dreds of thou­sands of tour­ists run­ning around, you hardly ever find someone else in the chapel. But that one day when I wanted to shoot this pan­or­ama, people out of nowhere con­stantly walked in and around. And asked ques­tions. And tryed to not be in the pic­ture, while, well, still being in the pic­ture… But any­way, it all went well in the end and after a couple of hours of stitch­ing, it was done!

Yay :-)

PS: Appar­ently, this place has the largest num­ber of choir stands around. Everything needs a super­lat­ive, doesn’t it?

PPS: Merry belated Christmas!