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…

Sorry there hasn’t been any post in such a long time, but I was busy get­ting mar­ied… (that, plus pre– and post-​paring it).

Any­way, let’s get back to dis­cuss­ing pho­tos. This one here I took a couple of weeks back when I was wan­der­ing around cam­pus to take some pic­tures for an assign­ment I got. I noticed this motiv a while back already but never got around actu­ally pho­to­graph­ing it. As you can see, it shows from under­neath a back lit stair­case inside a build­ing (that’s why I wasn’t in a par­tic­u­lar hurry to take it, it’s there every day).

What fas­cin­ated me was the play of light and shadow. In fact, the reg­u­lar shadow pat­terns pro­duced by stair­cases or lad­ders are a quite com­mon pho­to­graphic sub­ject, but this one I thought was par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing because of the shape of the steps and the res­ult­ing criss-​cross pat­tern of light and shadow.

The col­ours are all nat­ural, all I did was pump up the black level (again) and add a fairly strong vign­ette (again). Also note the diag­onal com­pos­i­tion (again) to add some dynam­ics to the oth­er­wise quite static pic­ture.

PS: Thanks to the sensor-​based image-​stabilisation of my cam­era I could take this photo hand­held even at 70mm at 1/​5 s exposure!

After the rather extens­ive last post, here’s a slightly shorter one. At least with a shorter mor­ale: “Be ready”.

Well, to be ready to pho­to­graph any inter­est­ing things you might come accross in your daily routine, you’ll need a cam­era to cap­ture it. Unless you have a semi-​decent cam­era in your cell­phone /​mobile /​handy, you’ll thus need to bring one along every­where you go, since you never know what’s going to hap­pen.

Ever since I got the small Fuji­Film Z20 I try to keep it in my jacket — of course with it’s bat­tery charged and with at least some space left on the memory card. That way, whenever I see some­thing curi­ous, beau­ti­ful, ugly, puzz­ling or whatever, I can take a photo.

What you see above is a lonely plant in the middle of a park­ing lot, fight­ing to sur­vive (I guess) or just hanging out. I tried to go low again to give some per­spect­ive and back­ground inform­a­tion on where the photo was taken, inten­tion­ally includ­ing a few the road mark­ing. A bit of vign­ette, desat­ur­ated col­ours and there you go. An impres­sion of the “con­crete jungle” of mod­ern days.

Here’s some really basic (and quite import­ant) info that’ll help you take bet­ter pic­tures, trust me. It’s a long post, but worth your while read­ing it (at least I hope).

Ever wondered what the little +/​-​but­ton (or menu entry) on your cam­era does? It when you access it your cam­era will usu­ally dis­play a scale like so: [ -2 … -1 … 0 … +1 … +2 EV ] and might men­tion some­thing along the lines of expos­ure com­pens­a­tion or adjust­ment.

Well this func­tion­al­ity is quite an import­ant one and worth­while under­stand­ing. Let me start by (loosely) explain­ing how your cam­era determ­ines how to set the expos­ure in the first place (that is, how much light it’ll have to cap­ture so that the scene looks “cor­rectly” exposed, not too dark, not too bright, but “just right”). Sci­ence has shown that your aver­age, cor­rectly exposed pic­ture will have a cer­tain aver­age bright­ness of around some value x (on a cer­tain scale). In other words, if you cal­cu­late the aver­age bright­ness of each pixe in the image, you should get a value around that cer­tain value x. Hence, to get a “nor­mal” pic­ture, your cam­era adjusts aper­ture, shut­ter speed and ISO so that the res­ult­ing image will have an aver­age bright­ness of x. Got that? Right.

Here’s a prob­lem: not every situ­ation you will pho­to­graph will be “aver­age”. Two extreme examples would be 1) a white bunny sit­ting in the snow — a pic­ture where your aver­age pixel will be much brigther than “nor­mal” — or 2) an actor dressed in black on a theatre stage with a black back­drop — here the aver­age pixel bright­ness will clearly be darker than nor­mal. Well in both cases, your cam­era doesn’t know that it’s look­ing at “extreme” scenes and thus will try to do what it always does: expose such that the aver­age pixel bright­ness will be x. The res­ult: bunny and snow will be grey, instead of white — and the theatre back­ground will be grey, instead of black.

The solu­tion: In those extreme cases, you tell the cam­era that it’s con­fron­ted with an extreme situ­ation, that is a scene that is either brighter or darker than aver­age. And, you guess right … this is what the expos­ure com­pens­a­tion func­tion is for: Neg­at­ive val­ues on that scale tell the cam­era the scene is darker, and pos­it­ive val­ues stand for brighter than aver­age. Easy enough, right?

Here are some more situ­ation where you might want to try using this adjust­ment: Even­ing scenes and sun­sets (set neg­at­ive val­ues), bright days and sum­mer beaches (try a pos­it­ive value). The photo above was taken late-​ish in the even­ing. Without any com­pens­a­tion the pic­ture taken by the cam­era was way to bright, the sky was almost white and it looked like it was taken in the middle of the day. But with a –2 EV com­pens­a­tion the pic­ture then reflec­ted much more what the world looked like when I was there.