As prom­ised, here is one of my other sub­mis­sions for the photo com­pet­i­tion.

This was put in for the “Dublin/​Ireland” cat­egory. It shows the river Sneem down in County Kerry and I shot it last year on my second trip around the Ring of Kerry.

Apart from the heavy cross-​processing effect and the strong vign­ette (both to juice the pic­utre up a bit, it was a fairly over­cast, grey day), the par­tic­u­lar­ity of this shot was its expos­ure — 1.3 seconds is rather long for a day­light scene and the ISO /​aper­ture val­ues used.

I wanted to expose longer than usual so that the water is rendered dream-​like and smooth, almost kitschy. This was achieved using a neut­ral dens­ity fil­ter (ND 1.8 in this case). Such a fil­ter basic­ally just reduces the bright­ness of whatever you pho­to­graphy, (ideally) without affect­ing the col­ours. The fil­ter I used takes 6 ƒ-stops of light away, so that I could expose 2⁶ = 64 times longer than without the fil­ter.

Hope you like it! I’ll be away for a few days again over Easter, so all the best to you and see you back soon!

A few weeks back, the Inter­na­tional Office here at the uni­ver­sity ran a photo com­pet­i­tion entitled “More Than Words”, to which I sub­mit­ted a few pho­tos for the dif­fer­ent cat­egor­ies. Two weeks ago, the sub­mis­sions were then exhib­ited over in the lib­rary, so Steffi and I went over and had a look. Apart from a few obvi­ous snap shots there was quite some stiff com­pet­i­tion there, and way more con­tri­bu­tions than I expec­ted. Appar­ently I’m not the only inter­na­tional stu­dent with an interest in pho­to­graphy here in Maynooth…

The award cere­mony then took place last week when I was in Ger­many, so Steffi agreed to go in my stead, not know­ing what to expect. Well, turns out one of my pho­tos (shown above) won in the cat­egory “The Best Night Out”! Awe­some! I actu­ally pre­ferred some of my other pho­tos more (I’ll try to post each entry here in the com­ing weeks), but then again, tastes are dif­fer­ent. The price for that was some uni­ver­sity mer­chand­ise and a much needed price money (to pay off my equip­ment ;-)).

But that wasn’t it. Steffi also receive another price for me — the one for the over­all best sub­mis­sions, i.e. con­cern­ing the entirety of what I had sub­mit­ted. Wow. The price for that was a small point and shoot cam­era, a red Fuji­Film FinePix Z20. Nice :-) I guess I’ll use that mainly for tak­ing small videos, and Steffi might just keep it in her hand back. Never hurts to have a small cam­era around!

So a big thank you to Karen over at the Inter­na­tional Office for organ­ising and run­ning this com­pet­i­tion, to the judges (Peter Thursfield, Irish Times Pic­ture Editor; Glen Hay­ward, Metro Pic­ture Editor; and Denis Con­don, Film Stud­ies lec­turer) who voted in favour of my pho­tos and to Steffi for going to the cere­mony! This is def­in­itely a huge boost for my pho­to­graphy and I hope this will not the last com­pet­i­tion I’ll par­take in!

PS: Tech­nical note about the pic­ture: The secret here was to use so-​called “slow sync”, that is you expose fairly long (an 8^th of a second here) with a high ISO value, but also use the flash on the second cur­tain. That way, you get a lot of motion in the shot, but also freeze some of the ele­ments at the end of the expos­ure. Same tech­nique as with the fall­ing egg the other day.

Before head­ing off to Ger­many for a week (I’m going to Elgers­burg, near Ilmenau), let me post an image that I took last year, also in Ger­many.

A bunch of friends from uni got together and we went on a small canoe tour on the river Havel, pho­tos here. While ready­ing our canoe on the pon­toon where we left, I notice this super old ship just rust­ing and pretty much dying away, a great photo oppor­tun­ity.

The shot presen­ted here is a detail in the ship’s hull plank­ing. Hav­ing cropped it a bit, I gave Matt Kloskowski’s cross-​processing Light­Room pre­set a got, and I think it works great. This was inspired by an epis­ode of the lovely Pho­towalk­through pod­cast, in which John Arnold showed a cross pro­cessing tech­nique for Pho­toshop, apply­ing it to a sim­ilar “naut­ical detail”.

Fun­nily enough, the hose com­ing out of the hole now almost looks like a tongue stuck out of it, hence the title ;-)

Let me tell you a little story: The story behind my latest pho­to­graphic “creation”.

I was pon­der­ing for two weeks about another photo-​assignment, this time on the topic hart (as in, the Ger­man word for “hard”). After a while I came up with Hässlich Aber Richtig Teuer, which means “ugly, but really expens­ive”. I was thus look­ing for an object (or sub­ject even…) that would fit this descrip­tion, like an u.b.r.e. piece of jew­ellery, an u.b.r.e. car, or what­not — but unfor­tu­nately I didn’t come across any­thing fit­ting this tagline, and the assignment’s dead­line was approach­ing fast.

At some stage I remembered this Boing Boing post, more spe­cific­ally it’s title: “Man in ‘I [Heart] My Mar­riage’ t-​shirt arres­ted for domestic bat­tery”. Bingo. “Heart” is a beau­ti­ful hom­onym of “hart”, so there we go.

Next up: How to render “heart” in a photo. Well, many people (includ­ing myself) some­times end up express­ing their affec­tion towards someone using “I ♥ You”, so that’s it. Finally. Here’s my image.

Tues­day then I set up my cam­era with a long cable release (that I oper­ated with my toe), some flashes and a black back­ground and went ahead for a series of silly self-​portraits, the end res­ult of which you see above.

I think this is another nice example how pho­to­graphic assign­ments can really fuel your cre­ativ­ity (or weird associations).

Today’s photo has been taken at a Poetry Slam in Stut­tgart, just over a year ago. I was vis­it­ing Steffi (who was doing her intern­ship at the time) and we had decided to go to one of the slams in the Rosenau which that hosts them reg­u­larly. I took a few pic­tures at the event, all excited to test my Min­olta 100mm ƒ/2.8 macro as well as the Kon­ic­aMin­olta 28 – 75mm ƒ/2.8, both of which I had just bought on eBay and got­ten them delivered to Steffi to save on the ship­ping.

When I got back, I pro­cessed the pic­tures and pos­ted them, as usual, on my flickr account. I also sent the artists (that had per­formed on the night) links to their pic­tures — to make them aware of the fact that I pos­ted them (in case they mind), and maybe to sell them. In the end, I didn’t sell any, but offered them for free to the pro­ject, as it turned out to be non-​profit (which I didn’t know at first). They were glad to be able to use some of the pho­tos for their web­sites and other pro­mo­tions. As a small thank you, I got a few free tick­ets.

How­ever, the best bit was that one of the more “stock” like pic­tures was used in a num­ber of print pub­lic­a­tions for RUHR.2010 European Cap­ital of Cul­ture events as well as on their web­site. This was the first time one of my pho­tos was pub­lished — and I was all to happy to “license” the pic­ture to this non-​profit organ­isa­tion. I would never have thought it when I first took the pic­ture, so watch out, maybe one day you’ll get an email with people kindly ask­ing per­mis­sion to use one of your snaps…

Last Sunday a bunch of col­leagues and Steff&I went on a little hike to the ”Great Sugar Loaf”. It is (by orders of mag­nitude) less impress­ive than the real deal, but it makes for a very nice hike (provided it’s a nice day ;-)).

After a bit of ran­dom walk­ing and not really find­ing where the track star­ted we finally were ready for the ascend. Up there, we were really sur­prised to find hordes of people going for the sum­mit, and quite a few of them rather not suit­ably dressed for the tast… But they were lucky and the weather played along nicely.

So on the way up I took this spon­tan­eous photo of Łukasz’s girl friend Christina. Apart from the strong flare in the bot­tom left (I still had my polar­iser on when I took this shot) a pretty nice photo, except that it was com­pletely over­ex­posed. I’ve recovered as much as I could from the RAW file, but large parts of the sky are still blown out. Also, as a res­ult, all the dark tones were way to bright and looked rather washed out. How­ever, pho­tos like that don’t have to be lost — just increase the black level until the dark tones are back dark again. You will then get a nice high-​key type of pic­ture with tons of con­trast and nobody will com­plain about blown out skies ;-)

PS: My pho­tos from the hike can be seen here.