Oh boy … I know, it’s very pink. But what can you do?

Here’s another “SOOC” shot. Yes, really. The strong dis­tor­tions are cre­ated by more of a toy than a lens — a “Lens­baby” (in my case the Com­poser). It’s a fun lens with an inten­tion­ally “bad” optical design (only a small area is sharp, the rest is blurred) com­bined with a ball and socket design which allows you to move that “sweet spot” around in the image and place it where you want. It’s quite dif­fi­cult you handly though, and the fact that it’s a manual focus lens doesn’t help.

Yet, it’s fun, fun, fun!

This images was shot back in Janu­ary; I place the little mis­sis right next to our large bal­cony win­dow which gives this lovely, flat­ter­ing soft light.

And just for the record: All of the pink col­oured items in the image were given to us. While it’s a tad “kitsch”, we’re still very grate­ful for the gifts and donations!

Next up in my series of Adobe Cam­era Raw Lens Pro­files is a lens that many people use, but no-​one seems to have gone through the rather labor­i­ous pro­cess of cre­at­ing a pro­file for it.

Well, here it is. This one’s for the Min­olta AF 17-​35mm F2.8 – 4 D wide angle lens, pro­filed on a Sony Alpha 900 (DSLR-​A900) body. How­ever, this pro­file should also work well for its Tam­ron incarn­a­tion (with the long name “Tam­ron SP AF17-35/2.8 – 4 Di LD Aspher­ical (IF)” or just “A05S”) as well as when moun­ted on an Alpha 850 body.

I shot the fol­low­ing series: 3 Focal Lengths [17mm, 24mm, 35mm ] x 6 Aper­tures [2.8, 4.0, 5.6, 8.0, 11.0, 16.0] x 2 Focus dis­tances [≈0.4m, ≈2.5m], res­ult­ing in a total of over 360 pic­tures used in the cal­ib­ra­tion pro­cess, the shoot­ing of which alone took over 4 hours… The ZIP file again con­tains sev­eral files — one that con­tains all the sub pro­files in one file, as well as two sep­ar­ate files for “close” and “far” focus (since you can’t select sub pro­files in Light­Room at the time of writ­ing).

But wait, there’s more. As a goodie I’m also throw­ing in my DNG col­our pro­file for this lens (again, moun­ted to an A900), meas­ured both for tung­sten and day light (using a MacBeth Col­orChecker and Adobe’s DNG pro­file editor) which should give you much more accur­ate col­ours than using the default pro­files sup­plied by Adobe.

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

Thank you!

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…

=> St. Mary Square in Ire­land

Here’s another première — and the reason why it’s been so quiet here, lately: Pan­or­amics. Hav­ing played around with pan­or­amic pho­to­graphy for quite a while I never got it quite right.

I mean, I’ve had a pan­or­amic tri­pod head for a good while now, but using it together with a wide angle lens res­ul­ted in a rather involved, lengthy pro­cess to put the final pan­or­amic image together (it took me sev­eral days for just one pan­or­ama). Plus you don’t always want to be lug­ging all this gear around…

Any­way, what changed all this was this art­icle which presents a tech­nique that only requires 4 pic­tures to be taken (with a fisheye lens) to get a decent 360°x180° view of basic­ally everything. Together with the insane 25 mega­pixel res­ol­u­tion of my cam­era and some suit­able soft­ware (which just does work sig­ni­fic­antly bet­ter, more reli­able and faster than the free Hugin) I can get a 8200×4100 pixel pan­or­ama without a tri­pod and in no time at all!

So I’ve spent the past two weeks dip­ping my toes in pan­or­amic waters, and I’ve cre­ated quite a few lately. Watch this space as I post more images and talk a bit more about the actual tech­nique (in case you’re inter­ested). Ulti­mately, of course, I’d like to mon­et­ise my grow­ing exper­i­ence in the area, just like with my reg­u­lar pho­to­graphy.