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.

A small per­mière — here’s my first “ana­log” image on this blog. Yes, “ana­log” as in taken with an old ana­log cam­era on black & white film (Ilford XP2 Super). Noth­ing too spe­cial, just a nice, moody photo I took down in the snooker hall of the col­lege.

I recently star­ted tak­ing film pho­tos again for a num­ber of reas­ons. First of all, it’s kind of cool. Second, press­ing the shut­ter but­ton costs me roughly 50c each time, so even though these are not huge sums (com­pared to medium format or even large format pho­to­graphy) you don’t just go simply snap­ping away like you were using a digital cam­era. No, you end up slow­ing down a lot. Double and triple check­ing everything, com­pos­i­tion, cam­era set­tings — espe­cially shut­ter speed as there’s no “sensor based” image sta­bil­isa­tion on film, so I have to be very con­scious of the 1-​over-​focal-​length rule, see here for example — and if the per­son I’m about to shoot is about to blink her eyes. Third — not that I think my pho­to­graphy will be any more rel­ev­ant in 50 years than it is now — people will always be able to do some­thing with a film neg­at­ive, but not neces­sar­ily with a file in an ancient film format, if it sur­vives that long any­way and doesn’t get lost in a hard drive crash.

At the moment I’m just get­ting the film devoloped down at the chem­ist (3 EUR for a roll of 36), then “scan” the images using my digital cam­era on a self-​built light table, together with a macro lens and flash gun from below. For­give me, but I’m really proud of the set-​up — you can see the proof of concept set-​up here, and the cur­rent ver­sion here. Obvi­ously a flim scan­ner would be bet­ter at han­del­ing dust and other types of air­born dirt, but none of the afford­able ones give you 25 Mega­pixel scans ;-)

I can’t help tak­ing pho­tos from our bal­cony. There’re just too many inter­est­ing scenes your get through­out the day and the night.

This one here was taken one foggy even­ing with the moon up in the sky. Unfor­tu­nately, the moon always feels lar­ger in real life than it turns out on your pho­tos. Unless you use a really long focal length, it just ends up really small :(

But I still liked the col­our con­trast (again) between the orange glow from the street lams and the blue-​ish moon. Also — it’s kind of hard to see on this pic­utre — but the layer of fog that night wasn’t very high and the moon was just above it, in the clear. Not the greates pic­ture, but I still wanted to share it :-)

There are sev­eral inter­est­ing times througout the day to take pho­tos. For instance, I recently talked about the Golden Hour. Today, I’d like to talk about the last moments of the dusk.

Fam­ous build­ings and struc­tures are typ­ic­ally lit with Sodium vapour or Halo­gen lamps which pro­duce an orangy /​yel­lowy type of light. Now what’s the com­ple­ment­ary col­our of that? You’re right, it’s blue. What do we know about warm and cold col­ours? Warm col­ours stand out, make the object appear closer, more present, where­ase cold col­ours cre­ate dis­tance and sep­ar­a­tion. Now that’s a won­der­ful con­trast, isn’t it?

So next time you want to take a night shot of some­thing, try not to take it when it’s already com­pletely dark, but a bit earlier, towards the end of dusk. That way, you can achieve a lovely deep, dark blue in the sky (weather per­mit­ting…) which can give you beau­ti­ful night shots with a not-​so-​boring skye.