Well FINALLY. Let me repeat this. Well FINALLY. Adobe got their heads out of their butts and FINALLY revised their RAW con­ver­sion engine from the ground up to FINALLY provide some decent raw con­ver­sion res­ults, espe­cially for images taken with Sony D-​SLRs.

What’s a RAW? Just quickly, it’s basic­ally just the very raw, unaltered data cap­tured by the camera’s sensor, more or less dir­ectly dumped into a file with (hope­fully) zero pro­cessing done in-​camera. This means that it’s actu­ally not an image, but really just pure data. Just num­bers. These num­bers need to be con­ver­ted later, on the com­puter, into an actual image before you can actu­ally see any­thing. Thus the qual­ity of the final image depends to a large part on the soft­ware used (and less so — to some extend — on the cam­era and its pro­cessing cap­ab­il­it­ies).

Since I shoot 100% of my pic­tures in RAW, it is cru­cial for me to have a soft­ware that does a good job at con­vert­ing them. Unfor­tu­nately, so far Adobe’s Cam­era Raw, which does this job in Light­Room (a beau­ti­ful piece of soft­ware in itself), has done it very badly for Sony RAW files (for a num­ber of reason I won’t get into). In any case, this has rad­ic­ally changed with the Light­Room 3 (beta) that was released a couple of weeks back.

Here’s an excerpt of an image that I had to take at ISO 6400 to get short shut­ter speeds so I could cap­ture the tor­ren­tial rain. Left: Light­Room 2, Right: Light­Room 3 (beta). Check out the dif­fer­ence in how the col­our noise is removed beau­ti­fully, to actu­ally reveal that it was indeed rain­ing quite heav­ily. Also, there’s gen­er­ally much more detail in the image on the right. So I can’t wait for the full ver­sion to come out.

Ireland’s a gen­er­ally rainy place, we all know this. But every now and then — even in autumn — you get a few hours of sun­shine (if you’re lucky).

And so, yes­ter­day, we went for a stroll (the three of us now) around Maynooth to profit from this short win­dow of good weather (which, in the end, only las­ted about 4 hours). Of course we went through the beau­ti­ful Sound Cam­pus of the uni­ver­sity, just because it’s so pretty in sun­shine. This took us past this mag­ni­fi­cent, incred­ibly strongly col­our tree right out­side St. Patrick’s House.

See­ing the blue sky, I also grabbed a polar­ising fil­ter when we left, which then allowed me to really bring out those col­ours. They turned out so intense, that the pic­ture as seen here in a browser (due to the rel­at­ively small gamut of the sRGB col­our space) can­not render the actual sat­ur­a­tion of the colours!

Whoooh… this one’s to toy­ing around and experimentation.…

It’s been a while since I played around with the idea of build­ing a pin­hole cam­era. The cheapest way to do this (if you hap­pen to have a D-​SLR) is to just buy a cheapo body cap for the cam­era (that’s a plastic cap that you can cover the front of the cam­era with if you have no lens attached) and drill a hole into that.

Now with pin­hole pho­to­graphy, you need a very small hole to make the whole thing work. And the best way of achiev­ing this is to actu­ally put a lar­ger hole into the cap (say 3mm dia­meter), and then stick some alu­minium foil over the hole. Then you pierce the actual, tiny hole with a needle into the tin­foil. The cleaner, rounder, per­fect the hole, the bet­ter the sharper image you get out of it. I’ll post a photo of my cam­era with the mod­i­fied cap later on.

The funny thing with pin­hole pho­to­graphy is that you have super small aper­tures (in the hun­dreds or two-​hundreds!), which means two things: 1) pretty much infin­ite depth-​of-​field, i.e. everything is in focus, from right in front of the cam­era all the way to infin­ity, 2) very long shut­ter times (because of the small aper­ture).

The photo above was just some toy­ing around in the liv­ing room, fir­ing my flash­gun into my face in a few dif­fer­ent spots while expos­ing for about 20 s. It’s quite blurry, but I’ll have a few more attempts at pier­cing a bet­ter hole (some people actu­ally use lasers for that!).

Oh, and then it happened. My daugh­ter was born just a tad early…

While I have very little time for hardly any­thing, I don’t want to let this blog rot away, so I’d like to share some of the exper­i­ences I made with this cap­tiv­at­ing little human :-)

First of all: It’s always a good idea to have your cam­era bag packed and ready to go (with a good choice of lenses, charged bat­ter­ies, and empty memory cards). Because when things get rushy, you don’t want to start put­ting your gear together…

Second (which I for­got): In that pack, if you have one, also pack the macro lens. Oth­er­wise, you’ll find that with your “ordin­ary” lenses you just can’t get close enough to the tiny little thing, and it’ll look lost in the frame.

Third: Don’t be afraid of high ISO. Espe­cially in the new born sta­tions they have very dim lights, not to blind the little ones. And since you don’t want to make a fool of your­self drag­ging in a tri­pod — increase the ISO so that you can at least get some kind of shot (flash is, at least for me, com­pletely out of the ques­tion here). They price to pay will be noise, but you can always trans­form the pic­tures to black & white, and that way the noise may even add to the pic­ture.

If you want to find out a bit more about Sophie, or just want to seen some more cute baby pho­tos, have a look over at sophie​.knorn​.org.

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.