=> 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.

Hands down, the best camera is the one you’ve got in your pocket, always at the ready. I must have said that before somewhere, but there’s no better camera than the one you happen to have with you when you need it.

The photo here was taken late at night when I was returning from Dublin. A seriously creepy fog hung over the by-then quiet village (ok, town…) and produced this surreal but chilly atmosphere. I so wished I’d have had my film camera with me, or my digital SLR, but I didn’t. So I tried to take a photo with the camera on my phone… Better than nothing, I thought.

As it was rather dark, the camera basically just said “That’s it, I’m out of here”. Unfortunately, the company with a vegetable in its logo doesn’t let you configure or manipulate in terms of camera settings, exposure or whatnot — you’re stuck in fully automatic mode. On top of that, it appears that the software just won’t use shutter speeds of longer than a 1/10 of a second, and the ISO maxes out at 1000. That meant that the overall picture was quite dark, and I had to push the brightness a lot in post-processing. That, in turn, brought out loads of noise, but hey, that’s fine — just do convert the image to black & white trick and the noise can work for you.

So that’s the picture I made out of it, as I said brightening the original image somewhat, and adjusting the black level up somewhat as to maintain the “low-key” spirit of the picture. Quite a contrast to the previous post, I guess.

Reminiscent of the Sugar loaf picture from a while back, here’s another high-key type of photo. Now when you shoot weddings with brides in white dresses and kids playing around, high-key may feel cheesy and cliché, but every now and then you may get some real gems. High-key in photography usually refers to subjects and scenes that you intentionally overexpose slightly; oftentimes the motives themselves would have light tones to start off with.

Now there’s two ways of getting high-key images. Either you really overexpose the picture when you take it, or you push the brightness afterwards in post-processing (like this one here, which has been brightened by almost 2 EV). For the latter, however, you really want to have been shooting in RAW, otherwise there’s just not enough information in the dark tones to work with…

Finally you also want to play around with the saturation. The sugar loaf photo, for instance, was highly saturated, whereas the one here is a bit more muted. If you really want to go over the top, experiment with a white vignette.

While cyclone “Daisy” has large parts of Europe in its icy grip, Ireland is going “tits up” (as a dear friend from Manchester would phrase it) with even the University postponing exams (can you believe it!!), myself and many other people thought — hey, this is a great photo opportunity. Let’s take some photos while it lasts.

So hoping to make the 2010 NUIM Christmas Card again I grabbed everything I needed and went for a little photo tour of the South Campus.

I’ve talked about snow photos before, so not too much to added apart from don’t forget the exposure compensation (I’ve seen plenty of muddy grey snow pictures floating around in Facebook again) and if you want to be fancy — use a polarising filter to blue-e-fy those skies. Or imitate the effect it in post-processing if you can’t / don’t want to use one. Do that in your favourite photo editing application by darkening, selectively, the blue channel.

Here’s another shot of my favourite daughter, taken at the end of last year. Her eye colour, which started off as very undefined, dark grey, is now beautifully converging to an amazing blue. I wonder who she got the genes from for that…

In terms of photography, I photographed her sitting / laying in her favourite vibrating bouncer seat (looks something like this) next to the window, looking outside. This is one of the most classic locations and is pretty much the perfect place for portraiture. Classic, as it initially provided photographers with a strong enough light source for taking photos in the first place (way back in the day when the light sensitive materials were hardly light sensitive at all, by today’s standards). But even before, it has been widely used in painting for instance.

Positioning your subject next to a window (during the day…) provides you with nice soft-box like lighting (no harsh shadows). Also, natural light contains the full spectrum of visible light (as compared to various artificial light sources that just contain a limited and often times fragmented spectrum) — which will get you beautiful, natural colours if that’s what you want. Apart from that, if you position your subject carefully you might also get some nice catch lights in the eyes (that is the reflections you see on the eye and the iris).

You might want to use a reflector though on the other side of the face that’s away from the window so it doesn’t drown in darkness…

Here are some more portraits I took near windows, 1, 2, 3.

[irrelevant]I’ve spent some time over the Christmas holidays revamping this blog (mostly under the hood though). Just quickly: For a while now I’ve been using a wordpress plugin called Yet another photoblog together with some custom code to automatically generate in a non-messy way the EXIF table you see at the end of each post and to create the reflection below the images. Unfortunately I didn’t use this nice plug­in from the beginning, so there were about 30 picture posts left out. But since the plugin does a very elegant job of everything I’ve decided to migrate the old posts so that now every post goes through the plugin. This then allowed me to automatically generate a comprehensive list of all the pictures discussed so far, which you can find by clicking on any of the “More pictures” links. Also, the random pictures in the top right are now picked from all the images posted so far. Finally, thanks to the wonderful php-typography class the typography of the posts should be cleaner, and best of all: there’s now hyphenation — I never thought this would be possible with HTML, but there you have it![/irrelevant]

Today’s photo was shot way back in 2007, and shows one of the massive sunsets we get here in Maynooth in the winter months. Now when you shoot sunsets, as I said before, the most important thing is exposure and white balance. And composition.

-> Exposure: If you camera is set to automatic, it usually overexposes sunset scenes and you loose all the intense colours. So make sure you set your exposure compensation to some negative value (experiment around a bit, starting from, say, -1 EV).

-> White balance: You’re best off using the a scene mode (most cameras have a “sunset mode” of some sort) which should take care of that. If you have control over the white balance though, make sure your above at least 6000K with some extra magenta added in too.

-> Composition: It always helps if you have an extra subject apart from the sunset in the scene. You see, unfortunately there are way too many sunset (or sky pictures in general) around, so a picture of just a sunset is usually quite boring, no matter how impressive it is. Instead, try to include an extra subject in your picture, like the two guys here you walked past just at the right moment. That way, you generate an extra amount of distinction to all those sunset pictures out there…

Here’s a somewhat “street photography” style shot. I took it about two months ago, when I was spending the better part of the day with Steffi and Sophie at Holles Street Maternity hospital in Dublin. One afternoon I went for a short walk to catch some fresh air, and thankfully took my camera with me. That’s when I spotted this lady sitting there, on the phone.

I politely asked her if it was ok to take a photo and she said “yeah, why not”. So I had a quick think about how I wanted to take the photo and how to best capture whatever it was that made me want to take the photo in the first place. My subsequent considerations included small aperture to get those sun “rays”; center weighted metering on the foreground as to expose for the lady, not the (much brighter) sky behind her; manual mode so not to take any chances with the camera’s own automatic metering; low camera position to get the shadow of the fence more prominent into the frame; one shot only as I didn’t want to bother her too much; etc.

So walking over to where I wanted to shot from I did a quick test shot from the hip to double check proper setting of the exposure (insecure me) and then kneeled down to take the actual picture. It was only then that her conversation had turned into shouting — and from what I could her she was just dumping her boy friend …

How many subjects can you have in a photo? Well, it depends on how you group them, I suppose. Here you could say: “The two cats are the subject”, or you could say: “The cats are the two subjects” …

Well, whichever way you look at it, placing two subjects diagonally opposite in a frame creates a good deal of confusion for your eyes — especially if the subjects look very similar. You will have a hard time settling for one of them, and thus move back and forth between the two points of attraction.

The cats above were two street cats just chilling out in the sunshine at Wat Luang, a Buddhist temple in Pakxé, Southern Laos.

Who’d have thought it. Back in February this year I jumped at the opportunity to take a few pictures of the beautiful NUIM South Campus clad in white.

You see, it doesn’t snow a lot in Ireland, and the snow usually just stays for a couple of hours, so I had to move fast. I grabbed my camera, batteries, a bunch of lenses, gloves, and off I went to take some photos around the university.

And then, about a month ago, the university’s PR office asked me if I had any nice winter pictures of the university, for use on this year’s official NUIM Christmas Card. Well, out I pulled this one and guess what — it made it! You can buy the cards around campus now and see me walk around with a big smile :-)

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.

Back from our little honeymoon, here’s a new post with a fresh picture from València (Spain).

I took this photo on the social “outing” from the POSTA ‘09 conference, where we visited the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències (City of Arts and Sciences), an area right in the city where different buildings, such as opera, science museum, IMAX, etc. compete for the most futuristic look. It quite reminded me of Brasília (the capital of Brazil).

Anyway, today’s tip is to take as many photos as you can when you’re in the so-called Golden Hour, the time just before sunset (or just after sunrise, if you fancy getting up early). This gives you some wonderful light to play with and take amazing, moody shots and portraits of people.

Watch your white balance though (!), make sure your camera (when set to automatic) doesn’t compensate for the warm colours, resulting in too neutral a feeling. Either manually set the white balance to something around 7500°K, or use the “sunset” mode / picture style or whatever it may be called.

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 1st, 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.

Here’s another practical tip for you all. When you take photos of a child, get all the way down to their eye level! This will give you some amazing perspectives plus you’ll have a fun time dodging greasy, gooey fingers that are trying to touch the magically attractive front element of your lens :-)

I’m sure you can image that when you take a photo of a small child from your adult’s perspective, you’ll end up getting a picture that a) makes the small child look even smaller, b) usually doesn’t properly show its face, c) instead provides you with ample vistas of the ground (and not the actual surrounding) and d) is just plain boring because that’s how you perceive the world anyway, every day.

So next time you’re photographing the little ones, down at least to their eye level, if not lower — even if this means laying flat on the ground.

PS: The kid on the photo is the lovely and completely adorable son of a colleague of mine.

And here’s to fine wine. This is anotherone of the shots I had submitted to the “More Than Words” photo competition. This was one of the first photos taken with my (at the time) new macro lens, a 100mm ƒ/2.8 lens, that I had just gotten a few weeks earlier. It shows one of the more “resident” internationals students in Maynooth having a nice glas of white wine in the Caulfield’s pub.

Macro lenses classically come in several focal length, typically around 50mm, 100mm and 200mm. In particular the 100mm ones are quite often used as portrait lenses too as they can give quite flattering perspectives in terms of a just-right amount of perspective compression when taking head-shots or a bit further out. Here’s for instance a very nice portrait of Barak Obama taken with a 105mm lens (thanks to the EXIF data left intact ;-)).

So if you happen to own a macro lens of around 100mm, don’t just use it for macros, give it a go with portraits or other non-macro-y subjects too!

Here’s some more about your everyday, cheapo point-and-shoot camera, rather than expensive D-SLRs: Macro shots.

With their short focal lenghts and their small sensors (and the resulting rather large depth-of-field, that is the “depth” of the in-focus parts of the image) they’re really good for taking close-up shots. Most of those little buggers have a dedicated macro mode (have a look for a small flower-symbol somewhere on it) that allows you to get the camera really close to your subject, so that you get a good magnification. While you can achieve similar effects with a dedicated macro lens on an SLR, they easily costs 5 times as much as whole point-and-shoot camera, and you usually have a hard time getting an extensive depth-of-field. In fact, most of the time you’ll find yourself stopping down to ƒ/22 or less, and still not having enough depth-of-field. But then, stopping down the lens that much means that you also need loads of light to take the shot, and you will also get refraction problems from the small aperture… All in all, not nice.

The shot above shows the cappucino I just had a few minutes ago, snapped hand-held on my office desk, with no special lighting or anything. The camera: a 100 EUR (or less) FujiFilm Z20.

Any kind of reflection usually makes pictures more interesting. But flipping a picture upside down may also be a good attention-grabber.

First of all, it takes time for your brain to process the image, figure out what’s going on and why things are slightly odd, why we are not fully at ease when looking at the picture. This takes a couple of seconds or so. It’s only then that we start actually discovering things in the image, like the person on the bottom right, or the cute little waves from the falling rain drops.

Although one should always strive to make a picture as easily “decodable” as possible — that is a clear subject, simple, organised structures and colours, all in a somewhat logical composition — doing the exact opposite may also create some interesting pictures. Here’s a thought: The fact that you have to “fight” a bit with the image until you get through it may just be enough to get some extra attention, so that ultimately the viewer spends a bit more time with it to discover what it has to offer, instead of just skipping to the next image…

You know what happened a couple of nights ago? A really nice constellation of Moon and chapel of Saint Patrick’s College could be seen right from our balcony, including a nice cloud which added to the mood. Unforunately I left my own camera over in the office that day, so I had to dig out Steff’s 7 year old Nikon Coolpix 5700 to capture the scene.

But anyway, having the camera rested on the balcony table, and snapping off a few 8 second exposures, I had to smile a bit when our neighbours had the same idea: Unfortunately, they were trying to use their flashes to get the picture right… This made no sense, as 1) any on-camera flash is so weak that it usually never reaches more than a few meters (and the trees and tower were a couple of hundred meters, and the moon a couple of hundreds of thousands of kilometers away). Thus, all they were doing was 2) wasting their camera batteries and 3) reducing the contrast in the picture (as the flash would have lit the slight mist in the air and thus just make the blacks look “milky”).

What you need to do in such extremely dark conditions would be first of all turn off your flash. Then, make sure you rest your camera on something (a tripod would obviously be the easiest solution) and use the self-timer to take the shot (as pressing the shutter yourself would shake the camera and your picture will loose crispness).

So as I was saying in the last post, it’s not the most expensive camera that takes the photos, but the photographer with his experience and taste.

… but the photographer, that makes the photos. Many people think you need great gear to take great photos. Or shall I say, they equate a “big” (and hence automatically “good”) camera with shooting only “good” photos. While there is some truth in this, there are also a few misconceptions.

First of all, think of a cook and his pots. A ★★★★★ star cook can cook a great meal pretty much anywhere, even in your shitty student accomodation kitchen with the most pathetic, 25 year old pots. But in turn, buying some ridiculously expensive, extra special coated cast iron cooking gear alone probably won’t make you a good cook…

It’s the same with cameras. Of course, having better pots and pans helps a good cook to prepare his meals more easily, and special equipment is needed for some special treats (say a small blow torch for a decent crème brûlée). In photography, sometimes there’s no way around a decent tele lens with a wide aperture, or a super wide angle, or a flash gun. But given a few ingredients, its a cook’s experience, taste or shall I say his “art” that allows him to prepare a good meal. The same holds for a photographer: seeing interesting subjects, lines, colours, light situations, then creating strong compositions, not to mention careful post-processing — that’s actually all independent of what camera you’re using!

Anyway, I just want to rant about all the people that tell me “oh, that’s a great camera, you must be a great photographer”. No, first of all you probably have no clue about the camera, what is capable of (and what not). Second, just having the means and the guts to spend ridiculous amounts of money on photo equipment just doesn’t make you good photographer — that just means you’re either rich, or you’ve lost your senses.

It’s what comes out at the very end of the process, what’s left after you have made all those millions of decisions involved in taking and processing a picture — this is what may or may not make you a “good” photographer.

Reminiscent of the other post of a cross-processed “nautical detail”, here’s another one.

I took it just last Friday when we had a friend of Steffi’s visiting us (Lenko), who’s currently on a Europe-Africa-Tour (he otherwise lives in Canada). We did a little day tour around County Wicklow, which is just south of Dublin. That included hiking in fairly touristy Glendalough (Irish for “valley of two lakes”) — but which is also quite popular among locals — and then back up the east coast to Dublin.

The photo above was taken in the harbour of Arklow, a little coastal town. There were loads of boats rusting away in the sun, next to some big signs complaining about how the EU ruined the lives of Irish fishermen. While there is some truth to it, some of them were also rather populist in nature. But anyway, I tried to make this shot as simple and organised as possible. Keep the fairly geometric shapes as neatly organised, with not too many in the frame, but still enough to make it interesting.

Here are the rest of the photos from the day.

Planned months in ahead to ensure that everybody would be there, today was the day for the group picture of my colleagues from the Systems Biology group here at the Hamilton. Of course, not everyone was there, but that missing person will be edited into the picture (if all goes well) at the top right.

As the weather report promised, the weather wasn’t going to play along nicely; in typical Irish fashion it was, in fact, bucketing down. Hence, the picture had to be taken inside. But that was a wonderful opportunity to get a slightly more interesting shot as compared to the standard, boring group photos outside in front of the institute’s logo.

So I got everyone to come into the seminar room where I had put up a chair on a table so that I could be high up above everyone. After arranging them according to their height, I asked everyone to bunch in as much as possible (the number one tip for group shots!) and shot with a wide angle focal length down on them, bouncing the flash off the ceiling. The picture turned out exactly how I had pre-visualised it this morning, brushing my teeth.

Again, for group photos you 1) want to get people as close as possible together (almost uncomfortably close in real life, but it won’t look like it on the photo!). This not only makes the group look more like a group rather than loosely assemble individuals, but also adds a small bit of fun to the whole action. 2) you want to tell people clearly and explicitly to look directly into the camera, and nowhere else. If there are other people around you, send them away, or people will inevitably get distracted and not look into the camera. 3) take at least (!) three photos or more, because you will always have someone with eyes closed at the exact moment you release the shutter. Having several photos allows you then to clone some pairs of eyes between photos so that everyone can have theirs open in the final image :-)

On a recent trip back home I’ve spent a few hours digging through my boxes in the cellar, which hold loads of old stuff, memories, dust-catchers, etc. One of the things I brought back was a few DVDs with some older photos (i.e. pre-2007), so that I could put them on my photo hard-disk (as well as backup) so I can access them more directly. Et voilà, here’s one from my trip to Iceland back in 2005.

It was taken next to the Perlan, on a little hill in Reykjavík, just after sunset. And the lesson of the day is: Look for silhouettes! When your background has wonderful, intense colours, or it is simply much brighter than your foreground, expose for the background and dial up the blacks in the picture to remove as much definition from the foreground as possible.

As shown here, this works particularly well for sunsets.

For the curious, here are some more photos and background information on that trip to Iceland.

So you’ve got all those pretty pictures from your past vacations, your last hike, that picnic with your beloved one in a park or that snap of some dark, dirty, gritty side street of Dublin. What do you do with it? Well, you leave it to catch digital dust on your hard drive. Or, if you’re really nice, you’ve made some small 6×4 prints at the chemist and sent them to your dad.

But what then? Every time I hold a print of one of my pictures in my hands, I think: Gosh, it’s so much different compared to the screen… so much better! I guess there are a number of obvious reasons for that, but I’m sure you’ve also made the experience that a “physical” copy of a photo just adds so much more to it, compared to seeing it displayed on your screen (even if it’s a 24″ monster).

I’ve just spent an hour hanging 10 of my favourite pictures up at our place, which I’ve mounted on some reasonably priced A3 passe-partouts from eBay. And guess what: All the money and effort getting the high quality prints, the tinkering with the card board and last but not least the tedious hanging (getting them straight, equally spaced, at equal heights) was definitely worth it.

So go ahead, make prints of your best photos, mount them and completely rediscover them in their new incarnation!

PS: Here’s the seller’s shop listing where I bought the mounting equipment: You’ll need picture mounts, mounting boards and ideally some acid-free tape to mount the pictures properly and them frame them. If you don’t want to frame, you can just glue the stuff together, like I did.

Here’s the last photo (in this series at least) from our recent Barcelona trip. I took it under one of the viaducts in the Park Güell. This park has also been designed by Antoni Gaudí (the masterminds behind the Sagrada Familia) and it features the famous, colourful serpentine benches you may have seen in L’Auberge Espagnole.

Although the weather’s not been the best when were there (a bit of the shame, as the place is is covered with colourful mosaics which obviously work best in direct sunshine) we did spent a good amount of time there just wandering around and admiring the crazy / organic features and shapes all around.

The photo above shows one of the viaducts; a great place to hang out when it’s raining ;-) There was not much point in leaving it in colour, as shapes and the interplay of light and shadow are much more prominent in monochrome. Motivated by Jeff Curto’s wonderful Camera Position podcast (and, for instance, this or this episode), I paid particular attention to the precise position from where I took the camera.

At the time, I was consciously trying to achieve to things: (roughly) balance lights and darks, as well as nicely guide the eye through the picture. As we’re naturally attracted to the bright parts, here our eye will start in the top left (generally a popular point to start reading a picture anyway, at least in Western cultures). It should the continue down along the stairs anticlockwise to come underneath the viaduct and follow along the walking direction of the people towards those beautiful arches. Note also the dark elements at the corners of the frame which help to keep the eyes inside the picture. Also, some amount of patience was required for this shot, as the other people walking around were not always where I would have loved them to be …

But overall, I really like this picture, and it’s definitely going to be hung up next time I get some pictures printed.

No visit to Barcelona is complete without a visit to the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família. Love it or hate it, but hands down: this is one of the most impressive buildings on this planet!

They’ve been building over 100 years on it now — apparently it’s just over 50% done now. Should take another 20 to 40 years (note the precise estimate). The whole thing is just gigantic, and mind bogglingly intricate.

I’m not going to elaborate on how crazy this church is. Steffi and I spent a whole afternoon there (that’s not counting the queuing to get in), and you should also try to visit it at some stage.

The photo here shows a detail of the Nativity Facade, which is dedicated to Jesus’ birth. To pick out Maria, Joseph and the Little One from the overwhelmingly detailed, almost “overloaded” facade I chose to use my latest toy: the Lensbaby. It’s basically a lens designed for imperfections, the distortions you see are all produced by the lens, there was no “Photoshopping” involved at all as many people would think.

And again more than a handful of days between posts ;-) But: There’s 2 excuses for it (see PS below). Anyway, I should get back to posting more regularly now (I hope). So last week-end, Steffi surprised me by taking me on a small trip to Barcelona (probably as “revenge” for the Aran-Islands-Trip…). It’s amazing what a few days of sun, warm temperatures and shorts can do :-)

The first of the three days of our visit we spent pretty much just walking around the city and “soaking” it all in. What a beautiful place, with the old city quarter (Barri Gòtic — Gothic Quarter) and all. The above photo was shot in the small courtyard of the Casa de l’Ardiaca, and there are two things that I’d like to talk about.

First of all: The perspective. Looking straight up can give you new angles. So whenever you walk around and don’t really see anything inspiring, try looking straight up and check if there’s anything interesting to find.

Second: Lens flare. To get those nice, star-shaped flares you need control over the aperture. For some physical reason (couldn’t find a good link quickly) the more you close the aperture (i.e. increase the F-number), the more star-like they appear — typically, anything above ƒ/16 works pretty well. Only problem then: You’ll see all the dirt on your lens and sensor, so some spot removal might be required ;-)

For a best-of of the Barcelona trip, check out this album; alternatively, here’s the complete album.

PS: 1) I was in Barcelona, 2) I rebuilt my website. This took a good while but is finished now (I basically migrated the contents of my hand-written website to Wordpress, and reworked the theme to accommodate for static pages and the guestbook).

Here’s another photo from our South-East-Asia trip. The gist of today’s post: Ask first before you take a photo.

While sometimes it is not possible — or desirable — to ask a person for permission before taking their photo (e.g. when the person is too far away, or when you’re going for candids, meaning you want to capture the “natural” situation, without the awareness that a photo is being taken), it should be done as often as possible. This could be as little as making eye contact, smiling, pointing at your camera and putting a big question mark on your face, or as much as introducing yourself, getting to know the person and explaining why you would like to take a photo.

That way you’re not only being polite, but you also pay respect to the person’s private sphere and their feelings. Do take “no” for an answer. But more than often — you’ll be surprised — people will be flattered that you want take a photograph of them! Ask them politely, and be honest why exactly you would like to make them the main subject in your picture. For instance, let them know that they look great, interesting, funny, or that you are amazed by what they are doing, etc. It does take some amount of “courage”, but do give it a shot! And make the world a better place in the process ;-)

Coming back to the photo, it shows a gold smith in Vientiane (the capital of Laos); I just thought he looked really cool with his sunglasses and just the general expressing in face, doing his crafty job in the smouldering summer heat. And — he didn’t mind.

Last bank holiday weekend, Steffi and I went to Stockholm, for a change. With the cheap RyanAir flights nowadays a quick weekend away to some random European city is easily done, and a great way to get a small time-out from the everyday life of Maynooth.

What a wonderful city. We really, really enjoyed our time there — which was also helped by the fact that we had brilliant weather, and everybody was out and about because of that. We were surprised by how clean everything was, making it possibly the cleanest city we’ve seen so far. Also, the prices aren’t as bad as people say, at least if your pain barrier has been lowered over the years by life in Ireland.

Apart from the usual tourist stuff you should see (like the narrowest alleyway in the city), we especially liked the Rådhuset (“city hall”). It contains a number of very interesting halls and chambers, such as the famous “Blue Hall” (which isn’t blue; this is where the Nobel Price banquets are held every year), the “Council Chamber” with its amazing ceiling and colours, as well as the “Golden Hall” completely covered with a gigantic mosaic. There’s actually a funny story about that mosaic: Apparently, the artist had to do it in such a hurry — and some plans had been changed during his work on the mosaic — that in the end one of the most important figures in the mosaic got “decapitated” by the ceiling…

As you can see, a fun place to visit. Honourable mentions also go to the Royal Palace (try to be there for the change of guards), the Vasa Museet, Gamla Stan (the old city), the amazing Nordiska Museum as well as this warning sign next to an elevator about how not to kill yourself.

For a full pictorial run-down of our trip, see this flickr set.

How often do you hear somebody talking about “photoshopping” an image? It often seems that in this case, people either don’t really know what you can do with Photoshop, or what it is usually used for.

Well, in any case, a fun way of using Photoshop (and GIMP and the other programs) is colour matching. This basically means the following: Take your lame picture, and also take an amazing picture of some famous artist / painter that really knows his stuff (about colours) and finally use least squares (or the likes) to match the colours of the kick-ass image to your lame-ass image.

About two years ago tried this technique on the above photo, which in itself was pretty much grey-in-grey. The picture I “stole” the colours off was the rather famous and mindboggling Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (“Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”) by Caspar David Friedrich.

There you go, Ulf, another technique to spice up washed out pictures ;-)

Let’s play some catch-up. About a month or so ago, a friend of mine and Steffi’s (Nancy) came over from Austria to visit us and Maynooth again (she was here on Erasmus last year).

We all agreed that we wanted to use the Easter days off to see the a bit more of Ireland and since none of us had seen much of the (geographic) north of the island it was quickly decided that we hire a car and follow the compass needle on a trip from Sligo along the coast of Donegal all the way up to Malin Head.

What magnificent landscape up there, I must say! We really enjoyed it! But I guess, the great weather also played part in that ;-)

Coming back from a little detour to see beautiful Mullaghmore Castle there was this strange lighting situation that happens every now and then where the sun shines on the ground before you and making it look almost brighter than the sky in the background. And as if someone had staged it, there was this bright white swan on the lake (a tad too far away though).

In post processing I just cranked up the blacks a good bit and desaturated the colours ever so slightly to compensate for the increase in saturation (that occurs when you raise the black point). Done.

PS: A selection of my best photos from the trip can be found here; the bulk of them is up on flickr.

Sorry it took me so long to post something new. But we’re all super busy these days, aren’t we?

I’m particularly excited about today’s photo; let me tell you why. When I was singing with the NUI Maynooth Gospel Choir(and a bunch of other choirs as well as Irish stars) was singing at a fundraising Gala Concert last week, I obviously brought my camera along and shot a few photos surrounding the event. Unfortunately I didn’t pack my wide angle lens and was stuck with “only” 24mm (which is still quite wide, compared to the usual 30mm or even 35mm+ you get with compact cameras).

Being up in the choirs stalls we had this great view of the venue (the Helix in Dublin) and I desperately wanted to capture it. So I tried something I haven’t done in a good while — a panorama shot. As I didn’t bring a tripod either, I had to do take it handheld. So I set the camera to manual mode, adjusted the exposure and took 5 photos (in portrait orientation in order to get as large a vertical field of view as possible).

I then remapped the photos in Hugin — a wonderful but slightly technical open-source, cross-platform panorama stitching software — and blended them together in Photoshop. Basically the remapping step “distorts” the images so that the overlapping parts match on top of each other, and the blending step, well, blends the pictures seamlessly into each other.

When the whole process was done I was absolately amazed by the result, considering it was done hand held in a quite challenging light situation, with people moving and all. I’ve experimented with panaromas quite a while now. It started on our New Zealand trip five years ago, continued in Iceland and culminated in me buying a panoramic tripod head, which produced (among others) these panoramas (1, 2, 3). However, I’ve taken less and less panoramas lately because they are rather time consuming to make, and also hard to print.

But seeing the constant progress of the panorama making software and how well this latest one worked out, I’ll definitely try to do more (partial) panoramas in the future! Also, because of the very wide angle of view, this would hardly have been possible with a traditional camera lens — and if so, the rectilinear projection happening in such lenses would have heavily distorted people especially in the corners of the frame, which is not the case here (thanks to the equirectangular projection used here). If you would like to find out more about these technical term, start with this great overview of the different projections.

Having gotten to some beautiful location, do you also sometimes wish that — especially when travelling — you were the only person there? How many times do we try to take photos with as little other people on it as possible? Maybe what is happening is that (subconsciously) we believe that the picture will be more special without other tourists in it, as in we were the only person capturing this wonderful moment / place.

While of course there are many situations where it is much more aesthetic to have no persons in the picture (also, from a compositional point of view, people usually draw a lot of attention to them, away from other potential subjects in the picture), fellow humans can also give a bit of life and fun to a picture, or a situation.

Take the picture above. I had just set up to take the shot of the Cathedral of Brasilia when a horde of tourist poured out of a bus and jumped into the picture to take their group photo. I almost got annoyed by what I felt to be a rather rude thing to do, but then I saw that those crazy young people actually give so much more liveliness to the shot (compare it to this shot someone else posted on flickr). In a moment of adventure, I asked if they all could cheer and wave and scream — and spontaneously they did!

So here’s something to think about: Tourists may also be your friend in pictures! Also, intentionally including people helps to give scale and perspective to some shots. Here are some more examples (1, 2, 3).

It’s time again, I need a new passport and thus some up-to-date photos of myself. Possessing all that photographic gear, why not try to make them myself? Last time I paid 11 EUR for them and the main street photographer just used a trusty old Canon 350D with a cheapish Sigma 18-200mm lens (from what I remember, set to around 60mm i.e. 96mm considering the 1.6x crop factor), plus some minor studio equipment: In short, nothing a mere mortal couldn’t reproduce.

I then had a read up on the official specs of the Bundesdruckerei (the German Federal Printing Office) and decided that the conditions there aren’t too hard to meet either.

So I sat my to studio flashes with their softboxes up in our living room, tethered the camera to LightRoom, grabbed a remote release, and off I shot. Here’s a small making-off shot. After about 10 shots of adjusting my head, I finally go the image right (as far as I can see).

Finally some pimple-removing (this photo will be on my passport for 10 years, so a bit of vanity is o.k.) and more importantly: careful cropping according to the specifications (35×45mm, with nose, eyes, chin etc. in appropriate locations), and I was done. To get prints, I reproduced the picture eight times on a 6×4 canvas and dropped the file off at the chemist.

While I don’t know if the embassy will take it, I don’t know why they shouldn’t. I’ll let you know if it worked!

My attempt at using my camera to be funny…

When I was coming back from Germany two weeks ago I had to spend a few hours in Frankfurt to catch my flight back to Dublin. When I opened my notebook, first thing I did was to turn off the WiFi (called “AirPort” on a Mac) in order to safe some battery power. Well, there you go. You’re in an airport and you click something on your laptop to turn the AirPort off.

Ok, even if the photo is of limited humouristic value, technically it was somewhat tricky to realise. As this is almost a macro shot, the biggest problem here is depth of field. As you can see, I dialled in a fairly high aperture of ƒ/13 so that the background didn’t get too blurred. I would have loved to go higher, but I didn’t want to increase the ISO any further (and the shot was done hand-held, with the laptop, well, on the top of my lap).

I made this shot pretty much exactly a year ago, coming back from church where they had the place decorated with these lovely colourful egg-candles. At the end of the day, there were a few left for the taking, so I took these two in order to re-create the flickr logo with those egg shaped candles ;-)

The set-up was very simple — I just placed the candles on a few A3 sheets of white paper and put an external flash on a tripod, together with an improvised snoot made from the carton of a roll of tin-foil. As the flash was just outside the field of view of the lens I got this nice smooth lens flare. The dreaminess was achieved by overlaying a semi-transparent, blurred version of the picture.

In any case, Happy Easter to you all, enjoy the days off, go for a walk, take some photos or just chill out.

Another submission for the photo competition. This one was for the category “The Epitome of Maynooth”.

Last year, the Tradition Music Society played every other Wednesday evening in the “Brady’s”, one of the nicer and probably the most “original” pubs of Maynooth (maybe “authentic” is a better word). Unfortunately, these gigs have gotten fewer and fewer, so I hope the Trad Soc will get a bit more organised again to put those wonderful sessions of traditional Irish music on again!

Blurred in the background is Joey working away on the guitar, the Uilleann pipes in the forground were played by Yoann (this is a tradition Irish instrument, somewhat similar but still quite different to the Scottish bagpipes you’re all familiar with.)

To get some of the nice old-folks’-pub atmosphere into the picture I processed it with to a sepia tone (something I’m not too fond of, usually). This photo is again one out of a great many, shot in 5 pictures per second burst mode to be able to pick the one with the least camera shake (1/5th of a second is rather long for hand-holding a lens at 75mm equivalent) but best motion blur on the fingers flying across the pipes.

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 8th 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.

Here’s one of my earlier photos, after I had gotten my first DSLR.

I shot this photo (secretly) in one of my favourite pubs in Dublin, the JJ Smyth’s. Its upstairs part is fairly famous, being one of the main Jazz locations in the city; there are small gigs almost every day, and every now an then someone famous plays there too. On the street level, however, it’s just “normal”, pub — but a very nice and original one at that (i.e. with pretty much no tourists). Usually, you can see some pretty cool, funky old folks hanging out there, downing pints of dark stout at a rate I could never keep up with (or afford, for that matter)…

In any case, it was a very dark situation, so I had put on my brightest lens, a 50mm ƒ/1.4 and set the camera’s ISO setting to the highest possible value (1600) — this gave me a 1/40s of a second (which is still “handholdable”, thanks to the stabilised sensor). However, at the time, Sony was with their Alpha 100 even worse when it came to noise at high ISO values than they are today, so the picture had some really brutal noise in it.

So here comes the cheap solution: Try converting your picture to black and white. Depending on your camera, the noise may then look rather natural and pleasing — adding to the “flair” of the pictures.

The previous post inspired me to write about this picture here. (Eggs => breakfast => “Your Morning”, an assignment given pretty much exactly a year ago by the Digital Photography School Blog.)

It was shot, again, for an assigment. At the time I was still living in my dull student flat on campus, and my mornings — thanks to an boring elaborate routine were rather identical. My breakfast consisted of toast, Nutella® and cheap orange marmelade (thick cut!) plus a tea chosen at random from the set {peppermint, rose hip, chamomile, fennel}.

To capture my most exciting start-of-the-day, I grabbed the Peleng 8mm fisheye, set the camera (my Alpha 700 at the time, with it’s APS-C sized sensor) on a tripod and took a few timer-delayed shots of me holding the plate directly above it.

So I guess what makes this photo interesting (it actually won the assignment!) is the combination of unusual perspective (straight up) and the distortion caused by the fisheye lens. Using a handy desaturation trick I made the colours a bit colder / duller, with only a few colour accents left (the trick consists of desaturating the picture with the “Vibrancy” slider, not the “Saturation” slider in the CameraRaw module / LightRoom).

PS: I’m on a much healthier diet now that I don’t live alone anymore ;-)

Reminiscent of my strobist ambitions a while back here’s a photo I shot recently for the HappyShooting assigment “weich“.

The idea was to show a boiled egg dropping onto the ground and shedding its skin. So I boiled an egg, peeled it very carefully, arranged the skin and dropped the egg onto it. The overall set-up and making-of of the photo can be seen here.

In more detail: I chose an oven tray as “stage” in order to get a slight reflection (you know I like reflections); the egg was lit using a combination of flashes and some continuous light. The latter was meant to show a bit of motion blur, the former to freeze the picture and provide some clarity and sharpness. In hindsight, I should have had an even longer exposure time and a tad more continuous light in order to get a longer and more visible motion “trail”, but I was in a hurry and didn’t have too much time to fiddle around.

As background I used a black shirt of mine, and since all of the light was coming from the flashes I got this naturally black background, without any extra post-processing. In fact, there is zero PP in this picture — what you see here is the out-of-the-camera result!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone! If Google has a special logo for today, I should also make a special entry. For that reason, the rest of this post will be in green!

Having been to the Dublin St. Patrick’s parade twice (2007, 2008) I wasn’t too keen on going into town again this year. The problem is that the city is just too full, and you have to be at the parade track 9am at the latest to get a spot (the parade itself starts at 12…). Just catching the train is a pain. So I convinced Steffi that we should give the small parade here in Maynooth a go.

I was told that it would be “pathetic”, but to the contrary, it was pretty cool! This otherwise sleepy town does go beyond the university student population! The parade itself obviously was no comparison to the big one in Dublin, but it was a nice effort none the less by local clubs and businesses to put a few floats together.

However, the best part really was the people / families / kids, all dressed up in green and orange, faces painted, cheering and smiling from ear to year :-) What a great opportunity to take some great shots. Of course, always check back with the parents first if it is ok to take some photos of their little ones.

Anyways, I’m off to the pub — Happy St. Paddy’s everyone!

PS: Here are the photos from the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Maynooth.

Having taken the promotional shots for “Remembering Rose”, I also went to one of the performances to take some photos of the “action”.

In one word: Awesome. A really great play / script / performance altogether. I really hope this play has a “future” beyond three performances here in Maynooth. But I heard that they will be competing with it at some biggish theatre festival. I’ll keep my fingers crossed!

Photographywise — well, I already had a post about event photography, and there’s not too much to add here, apart from one thing: It always helps (if possible) to have someone next to you who can give you a “heads up” when there will be some sudden, unpredictable action. This way, you can prepare yourself (switch lens, dial in faster shutter speeds, etc.), prefocus and be ready for it. In my case, Steffi was next to me and gave me a few such clues (she knew the play as she had a small walk-on role in it), which really helped!

PS: Photos from the night here.

The drama society recently produced a play call “Remembering Rose”. Written by a student here at NUIM, it was one of the funniest pieces I’ve ever seen! I hope the script makes it beyond three performances here on campus.

Anyway, I offered them to make some promo shots and they gladly accepted. Here’s what came out of it.

So how did I do these photos? Well, the secret to a black backdrop is that you kill all light sources and just use flashes, but making sure that you only light the subject, not the back background (i.e. don’t put your subject in front of a wall). The set-up here was: 1 large softbox fairly close to the person, about 45° from the left, just above eye-level, and another flash with a reflector and honeycomb-filter (to direct the light) from behind to the right, about at hip-level, a fair bit off so it doesn’t fire into the camera.

But the biggest thing here for me was that it was my first proper photo shoot (if you don’t count the one with Andrea a few weeks back). These guys didn’t know me, I didn’t know them, I just bluntly promised them some nice photos (and I didn’t tell them it was my “first time” until afterwards). But it all turned out quite well, I think. The biggest lesson I learned (again) was that you really need to direct people. The more concrete, explicit and precise you are, the better. Being photographed by a stranger is in itself a fairly awkward situation, you’re not quite sure what’s going on, if you’re “doing it right”, and so on — so being told what to do reduces this insecurity as you can just focus on what you’re told to do. However, this can be challenging as you also have to think about all the technical as well as artistic issues… But the best way around this is: practice, practice, practice.

While this photo is not the most spectacular shot in the world, it documents something rather funny. One for the “Boing Boing” category, so to speak.

For some reason, the folks over at the Kinlay House Hostel in Cork thought that the emergency exit signs don’t need to be too large, and don’t have to be hung up at eye level either.

Rather, it looks like the emergency signage was conceived for dwarfs, as the signs were tiny (maybe 2×3 inches?) and just a few inches off the ground.

Lesson to be learnt here may include:
– in Cork, it pays to be vertically challenged ;-)
– when you walk around, keep your eyes open for funny things
– small things are best photographed up close, from a low standpoint, and with other objects in the frame to give something to compare the sizes with (although I didn’t quite manage here as I didn’t feel like crawling around on the dirty floor to check the framing).

Ok, enough curiosities, let’s go back to something more visually interesting.

The gentle ready may have already seen that we are now looking at a dirty, rusty, old lock on an old door with fading paint. I spotted it on our walk around the inner city of Cork, near the docks — generally a great place to keep an eye open for grungy shots.

What I find particularly interesting here is that this is no play on the colours, at all. This picture is processed with the correct white balance, and nothing but a tad more contrast and an increased black level (it, as always, was a grey day). In other words, no selective desaturation, as some might have suspected. The paint was really fading in colour…

When I took the shot, I stopped down the lens quite a bit so that the depth of field would be large enough to cover the lock, and also to get maximum sharpness. My standard walk-around lens (the Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar 24-70 ƒ/2.8 SSM) unfortunately tends to be a bit soft at the long end).

I still haven’t gotten around posting any photos from our recent weekend trip to Cork, a lovely city in the south west of Ireland.

On our sightseeing walkabout we also went past the campus of the University College Cork (UCC). When we came past the student residences, I couldn’t believe what I saw: In the centre of a circle of buildings was this “christmas tree” of no less than six CCTV cameras…! [By the way, CCTV stands for "Closed Circuit TeleVision"].

Well, let’s hope this much surveillance is really necessary, and helps prevent oh so many crimes…

In terms of photography, this was pretty straightforward thing. Shot at an angle to create some more tension, I processed it to sepia tones as it was a grey, unspectacular day. I underexposed carefully not to blow out the sky, and had the aperture closed down to ƒ/10 to get a maximum amount of detail and reduce lens flare in this backlight situation. Finally a few selective dodge and burns here and there were needed to bring out the cameras a bit more.

PS: More photos from the Cork trip here.

I’m… dreaming of a whiiiiite… Christmassss… Well, I was but no, not in Irland. Instead, we were finally blessed with a few centimetres of snow a couple of weeks back (but which only hung around for a few hours) — and I used this opportunity to shoot a couple of pictures around the beautiful old campus.

Unfortunately I can’t show these pictures just yet, as some of them will be used elsewhere and the photos ought to be “fresh” for that ;-)

But anyway, here’s some tips for winter photography: First of all, when you go out in the cold, make sure you pack some warm clothes (obviously) so you can devote all your attention to the picture, and not your shaking body. Also, gloves are handy. Keep all your batteries as close to your body as possible (i.e. in your pockets, not the camera bag), so that they are kept warm — this will make the last longer.

Next, make sure you use plenty of positive exposure compensation (that’s the +/– EV thingy on your camera you always wondered about), as pictures in the snow tend to be generally brighter than your average lighting situation, and without compensating for that fact your camera will probably underexpose, making white snow look grey and ugly.

Finally, when you come back inside with your camera (mine is almost 2kg of metal and glass), it’ll take a good while before it warms up. In the meantime, this cold block of high-tech will make a lot of water condense on it, so you may want to put it in an airtight plastic bag before go back inside. That way it can warm up in there without getting all the humidity inside. You definitely do not want mushrooms or lichens grow inside your gear…

On Steffi’s 25th birthday I surprised her by taking her not into the office (like every morning), but rather to the Aran Islands. This is a wonderful place in the west of Ireland that I had visited about a year and a half ago and always wanted to come back to.

As we were outside the tourist season the island was pretty much in its original, raw, barren state — that is no trees, only bare rock and hundreds (if not thousands) of kilometres of stone-walls to keep the wind from blowing the few inches of sand off this otherwise bare rock. We were lucky that one of the bicycle hire shops was still operating and lend us two bikes with which to explore the island.

Unfortunately the weather wasn’t too much on our side (ok, it could have rained more), so in terms of photography I decided to pretty much just stick with black & white: Punchy blacks and strong contrast can make even the grayest of days and places look wow. The best photos from the trip can be seen here.

The above picture, however, had too much dynamic range (that is how far the darkest tones are apart from the brightest), so I had to resort to a fairly new trick: exposure fusion. Basically, first you take several photos with different exposures, and then you combine or “fuse” these into one picture.

Ooops, almost a month gone since my last post… So let’s catch up with some of the stuff that’s been going on / coming through the lens of my camera.

Last month, the annual Social Sciences Festival took place again in the Library. Since there were a bunch of important people going to give a talk, I thought it might be a good idea to go over with my camera an take a few photos. And a good idea it was.

I got some really nice “journalistic” photos of some important figures from the university and beyond, like, for instance, Prof. John Hughes (the person on the right), the university president. Shooting reportage style means that you’re there to reflect the situation, the moment. No funky colour post-processing or weird angles, but clean, neutral and informative pictures.

For most of the shots I bounced my external flash off the ceiling (which was white, fortunately), together with some light reflected off the built-in bounce card. Together with a high ISO and open aperture I tried to get a nice balance between natural light and flash light — unlike the university photographer who just killed all ambience with his over-powered flash (here’s his picture of the same situation that he took just after me ;-)).

Having processed the pictures the same evening, I offered them to the Library as well as the Communications / PR Office of the university, and they were very interested. One photo is already used on the Library website (replacing a similar, but less pretty one from the official photographer that they initially used), and some more will appear in the next university newsletter :-) Now how is that?

Andrea, a colleague of mine from work, needed some photos for her vita. Since I just got my brand new Elinchrom D-Lite 2 To Go kit, this was a great opportunity to give “studio photography” a shot.

The D-Lite kit is a set of studio flashes with some useful accessories aimed at amateurs that would like to get their feet wet in the world of studio photography. Well, I’m not going to start a photo studio, but I always wanted to try out that “whole different world”. More on that at some later point.

The actual photo shoot was done at work in the evening, after the place settled down a bit. For the first set of shots I had Andrea “pose” in front of a white board. I wanted to get a shallow depth of field as not to get too many distracting details in the shot. As — contrary to popular belief — the problem with studio flashes is that they are rather too powerful than too weak, I couldn’t use directly, even dialed down to the lowest setting. Instead, I just stuck with their modelling lights.

The second series of photos then was taken in front of a white wall, to get a more neutral, clean passport-photo type of shot to put on the application letter. The look I tried to create here was to show self-assurance, confidence and preparedness, but still with a friendly, human touch ;-)

On a technical side, one thing that completely blew me away (apart from the natural colours produced by the studio flashes) was how amazing 25 Megapixels can look. Check out the 100% view!

Are you ready for a change? Yes, we can! Ok, leaving shapes now.

This was a photo out of a series that I shot last year for the front cover of the “Spoke”, the student magazine here. And, guess what, one photo actually made it :-) This one here, however, was obviously not meant for that series (front cover photos are usually in portrait format…); rather, I took it for the fun of using my fisheye lens, that I had just gotten a few days earlier.

Although it is a manual focus lens built like a World War II tank (it’s made in Minsk, in a plant that also manufactures stuff for the Russian space program (!) and the Military), it delivers pretty stunning results — considering it only costs 4x as little as the “official” Minolta / Sony Lens.

In terms of shooting this, I got really close to the daffodils (20cm close!) and just shot a burst of photos — it was quite windy that day and the flowers were moving back and forth, in and out of focus. Also, I had put a large white reflector on the ground as close as possible to the flowers to bounce back some light from below and reduce the harsh shadows a bit (think “fill light”). Steffi loves this shot, and so do I :-)

Next one up. This time, it’s the window shades of our guest room.

Oh boy, what did I do with this image? Well, first of all I cranked up most of the sliders I could find in LightRoom, I boosted the saturation and sharpened the hell out of things. That’s how I got this very strong chroma noise. It’s the noise that is produced by the sensor (the picture was shot in pretty dark conditions at ISO 3200, and Sony cameras are still anytthing but famous for their noise performance).

Apart from that I really messed around with the colour sliders as well, saturating this, desaturating that…

Something that’s quite interesting is the fact that, as I said, it was rather dark when I took the photo. But with ISO 3200 + wide open ƒ/1.8 + 1/15 s exposure I eventually got the brightness I wanted. I didn’t use a tripod (too lazy), but instead relied on the in-body stabilisation of my camera (something very useful to have — and unique to the Sony D-SLRs, at least when it comes to full frame sensors). As you can see it worked very well — this is the only shot I took (no burst-trick this time).

Please don’t try to find any pattern in my posting. After that rather serious post yesterday here’s something more photographic, or shall I say “abstract”.

If you haven’t peeked yet, what do you think it is …? Exactly, it’s a lamp just outside our apartment (there is a few of those lighting the path). Today I thought: Florian, you need to take more photos. So, I randomly decided to focus on shapes for the next couple of days to come. I poped my 135mm prime on my camera to make things a bit easier, as the long focal length helps to focus on one thing at a time).

I took this shot only a few hours ago, coming home tonight after work. It’s main feature relies on an old trick to make things more dynamic: Place things on one of the diagonals of the frame. Apart from that, there’s those lovely smooth curves.

Although it looks like I’ve messed with the colours, I haven’t at all this time. Just a deliberately wrong white balance (the camera was still set to incandescent light; when I imported the picture into LightRoom I decided to just leave it as it was as it looked kind of interesting ). The slight vignette came naturally from the lens (shot wide open on a full frame camera…), so I didn’t do that either. A very raw RAW so to speak ;-)

Ok, what else is there to say? Well, the extremely shallow focal plane (mathematically, it amounted to 2mm depth of field!) was placed off-centre as to get the point of interest away from the middle and thus make things more interesting to look at.

This is one of the tougher pictures to digest from our recent South-East-Asia trip. Normally I ask people before I take a photograph of them. That can be by actually talking to them if possible, or just by gesticulation, pointing at the camera and smiling with a question mark in my face.

In this situation here thought — Steffi and I were waiting for a bus in one of the busier areas of the Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh, Ho Chi Minh City or just Saigon — I didn’t work up the courage to ask the man. And I still feel ashamed for not having done that. Sure, I shouldn’t be showing this picutre, but I have other motives for doing that.

I would like to share my disgust for the atrocities of war. Although I don’t know the story behind this sorry soul, I’m certain it is one of utmost pain, be it physical, emotional or social. The problem with war and trying to achieve usually unachievable objectives (when people shouldn’t have gotten involved in the first place) is that the war is not over when it’s over. Deep rifts in the population remain, the catastrophic psychological damage carries over and affects many generations, and apart from unexploded ordinance or mines that bear lethal surprises for many years to come, there was Agent Orange…

There, in that street, sitting on the steps of a travel agent, waiting for the bus, was just one of those moments (and there were several on that trip) where you just froze and where a terrible, bottomless sadness hit you. Add a good dose of anger to that, and hope that you’ll never meet the people responsible for all those countless tragedies.

Here in Ireland so-called “Pantomimes” seem to be a bit of a Christmas tradition. In any case, the Drama and Musical Society of the small little town next to Maynooth appears to be quite famous in the country, having won several prices for their stage productions. And rightfully so, I must say — I was blown away when I went there on Saturday to take some photos.

The story was an adaptation of “Robin Hood”, with a somewhat different storyline, tons of great little jokes and gags, but still very well staged so that small children would also be able to understand what’s going on, as a panto is meant to be for the whole family. The music was brilliant and the band was amazing too. My good friend Eimear did a great job there, as musical director of the production. (However, I still don’t quite understand what makes pantomimes so much different from musicals.)

With regards to photographing the show, three things were most important: Bright lenses, tons of memory, and a tripod. Clearly, bright lenses were needed to achieve fast shutter speeds (dancing people never hold still ;-)) at not too high ISOs, memory cards as you want to be zapping frames like a madman (again to capture the best moment when people are dancing and acting, plus you want to be shooting RAW in those difficult lighting situations), and a tripot so you don’t get tired (my 70-200/2.8 lens + camera + battery weighs in at about 2.5 kg, something you do not want to be holding for alomst 2 hours…).

My best shots from the evening can be found here.

Normally there are always cars parked in front of the old Maynooth Castle ruins, but on St. Steven’s Day (Dec 25th) the town was as empty as I’ve ever seen it, and no cars spoiled a shot that I wanted to take since a long time. Apart from messing with the colours, there are two interesting things about this photo.

On the one hand it was taken with my new camera (finally I’m also in possession of a full frame camera, that is a camera whose sensor is the size of a 35mm film negative) and as well as my new wide-angle lens.

On the other, I used the lens distortion tool in Photoshop to correct the perspective distortion that comes with shooting at an angle. By perspective distortion I mean the effect where vertical lines (that ought to be parallel) converge toward the vanishing point, and buildings appear to be falling backwards, if left uncorrected. There’s basically three things you can do to avoid this effect. (1) Buy a (tilt/)shift-lens, (2) shoot horizontally at a wide enough angle to capture what you want to capture, but crop afterwards, like so or (3) correct for the perspective afterwards in post-processing, e.g. with the Lens Correction Tool in Photoshop. The best technique would be (1) to use the specialised lens as it allows you to use the full resolution of your sensor, but those are expensive and not available for all camera systems (e.g. mine). As for (2), you throw away resolution afterwards as you’ll be cropping large parts of the image, and you have to think of this technique on the spot already, while you’re taking the photo. The last method is kind of in between, you don’t loose too much information, but it is a destructive transformation to your images (at least for the time being, fingers crossed it’ll be included in LightRoom soon).

In this present photo I chose technique (3) as I don’t have a tilt/shift-lens, and 17mm was not wide enough to do trick (2). Anyway, I hope you’ve now learned a little bit about how you can avoid perspective distortion, provided you have the right gear / software at hand.

Happy New Year everyone, sorry this new post took so long. This one was taken on the famed “Bamboo Train”. It’s a Cambodian invention (one of the kids told me proudly) and consists basically of three parts: A motor, a very light bamboo flat bed, and a pair of axles. This modular built allows it to be assembled and taken apart again in a matter of seconds, even by a bunch of kids. Those trains used to run between the official train service on the national railway network, and there is only one simple (and obvious) rule: The lighter train gets out of the way (off the tracks) first…

I love this picture with those cool kids enjoying the freedom of speeding down the twisted rails while making a few bucks off random tourists that made it out there. Photographywise it was shot with a polarising filter for increased saturation and colours, with an elevated shutter speed as it was shaking quite a bit. I chose a rather wide angle of view in order to capture those converging lines from the bamboo platform as well, which kind of intensifies the whole picture.

PS: Here’s a short video over on YouTube where at about 2:00 the guy talks about this crazy form of train.

Ever been stuck along the lines of “Oh, I’ve taken all the photos I can think of, what else can I do?! There’s nothing left to photograph!” ? Well, a good way out of that misery — and generally a great way to fuel your creativity — is to participate in photography assignments / contest. Pretty much every photography community, forum, podcast, etc. gives out assignments, sooner or later. This basically just means you’re given a theme to illustrate and time frame to do that in. The topics are usually pretty abstract things, but sometimes it can get pretty concrete as well.

I shot the photo above for an assignment given out by Happy Shooting, a very nice photography podcast (in German). The topic was “blitzgescheit”, which is a bit hard to translate into English. It literally means “smart as a tack”, but it can also be seen as a play on words, as it combines “Blitz” – flash and “gescheit” – clever. I had spent about a week pondering about the topic, when I finally came up with an idea, inspired by camera tossing (a rather risky branch of photography, where you throw your camera in the air and see what comes out): Flash Tossing! I put my camera on a tripod in my room (at night, with the lights turned off), set it to a long exposure, released and threw my flash gun across the frame, after pushing its TEST button which makes it fire a burst of flashes.

After about 20 throws, I got the picture above. It had the nicest movement through the air, and fit nicely in the frame. Oh, and of note: I threw the flash over my bed, so it had a soft landing. However, on second though, I wouldn’t do it again, as the filament in the flash bulb might just as well have ripped, even with a soft landing… Not sure how robust they are.

Last night was the Christmas Party of the place I work, the Hamilton Institute. We all took the train into town, went to the Porterhouse, and pretty much just got p***ed.

As it was a foreseeable time of happiness and merriness, I decided to bring my camera and snap some shots of the people I work with, but in a more relaxed and cosy setting. The problem with most pubs is that although they are beautifully lit they are usually very dark places, so the only choice was to mount my precious little 50mm ƒ/1.4 prime lens — the classic, standard lens in pretty much any camera system. Mine is over 20 years old! It has two main advantages: its focal length is very close to the human eye’s focal length (i.e. the pictures look and feel like seen in reality), and it is a very “bright” lens meaning that it allows more light than usual to enter the camera. This allows you, together with a high ISO, to work with the available light, so that no flash has to destroy the atmosphere. Also, at ƒ/1.4 you have a very limited depth of field, which isolates your subjects from any distracting background.

The rest of the of the photos from the evening can be seen here.

Steffi and I were doing a three day boat tour in the famous Halong Bay and, when you’re at at see, one of the best things are the sunrises (and sunsets). We had missed the sunset the previous day so I definitely wanted to see the sunrise…

Since for the most parts of our trip we / I usually got up about 5:30 am (that’s when the roosters [ok, not out on the sea] politely ask you in their language to stop sleeping), this was no problem.

So up I went on deck, took a few wide-angle shots, but then got out the tele just in time to take this shot. I couldn’t have gotten a better view. The little fishing boat — as if someone had arranged for it to be there!

There rest then was just a no-brainer. The good old Rule of Thirds for the composition, and some (negative) exposure compensation to preserve the highlight details in the reflection on the water (otherwise it would have blown out). This is definitely one of my favourites from the whole trip.

Alright, alright, it’s taken a long time, I know. And I’m sorry! Really! The reason why I took so long to update this blog is that I had so much other stuff to do (seriously) that I only managed to finish post-processing the photos from our big trip today, almost 3 weeks after we got back!

Anyway, without further ado, let’s get back to business. This photo I took secretly in/on a “sawngthaew” (literally “two rows”), one of the main forms of transportation in Laos. These are basically just a pick-up truck with two benches on the back and a roof over them, like so.

The funny thing about them is that they transport anything. Anything. [Note for example the duck on the floor]. And you wouldn’t believe how much quantity of anything. If you think it’s full, it’s not. However, even if it’s cramped, it’s a cheap way to get around and has a certain adventurous flavour to it.

Photographically, I used my wide angle for this shot to capture as much as possible of the confined space. Since I took the photo secretly, and it was a rather challenging lighting situation, I had set the camera to automatic bracketing, making it take 5 pictures in quick succession at different exposures, so that I could then choose the best exposed one.

Ok, there’s not too much depth to this. I guess, only the German speaking readers will get this ;-)

Steffi and I are going on our “big holidays” for this year, this time it’s Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. If everything goes well, we should be back mid-November.

In the meantime, enjoy yourselves and be good,

Florian

Even though the last few days it was absolutely p***ing down, this morning we were blessed with just pure sunshine. Fortunately I still had my camera in my backpack so I just spent 20 minutes outside the office taking autumn pictures.

The colours of the trees and leafs are even more extreme than last week, and together with the blue sky (as I said, a rarity around here) and my friend the polarising filter I just went mad on the hunt for interesting angles with exploding colours and contrasts.

I’ll hopefully get around posting some of the other pictures I took this morning on my flickr account. I’ll let you know. Now back to work.

Update: More autumn-y photos now here.

Same lens, completely different situation.

This time, it’s all about event photography. Last year the Gospel Choir (which I’m part of) had a gig with two impersonators (Elvis, and Tina Turner). During the bits where we sang with them (photos here) I got the chance to take some photos myself of those two professionals doing their job — great singing, and dancing, and looking like the original.

Being part of the “crew” I could pretty much go anywhere I wanted during the show, which also means backstage. That’s how I got this nice angle. Obviously I had to shoot wide open with a fairly high ISO to avoid too much motion blur in those lighting conditions. Again, the burst trick really helped to get some crisp shots. Another benefit of this technique is that you usually get a lot of funny faces when someone is singing (or talking for that matter), so getting several shots in a row allows you to select the nicer ones ;-)

Just as a big Californian company is releasing new products as we speak, let’s go back again to a purely “photographic” entry.

This shot was a bit of an experiment… Inspired by this post in the amazing Digital Photography School blog, I wanted to take a photo involving water drops. For the set-up of the shot, check out this “making of” photo.

The apple was placed on a glass in a sink where I “fine tuned” the tap so that only a small volleys of drops would come out every now and then. If you look at the aperture and the exposure time, you’ll see that the ambient light couldn’t possibly influence the shot. That’s why the background appears completely black. The reason for these extreme settings was to achieve exactly that, to freeze the motion as good as possible and to have a large enough depth of field in this rather macro-y situation.

Lighting. As you can see in this shot, the only light here was coming from an external flash (triggered wirelessly), a mirror (to bounce some of the light back) as well as two improvised reflectors. After fiddling with the exposure parameters and arranging the reflectors, I took about 20 shots trying to get the timing right with the drops randomly coming out of the tap (which is harder than you’d think). In the end, I was really happy with the outcome, I got pretty much exactly what I wanted.

PS: Thanks to Kfir (my office-mate) for borrowing me an apple — I’m allergic to them, so I returned it after the shot :-)

Last night, someone privately pointed out to me that it seems that the stuff I’m posting here I just make up as I go along.

That is correct.

And that some things I say are hardly relevant to the photo presented.

That is correct too.

Anyways, this photo is another “fresh” one, I took it last Sunday when we (NUIM Volleyball Club) had our first two games here in Maynooth, as part of the Men’s National League 2nd Division.

We got our arses beaten all over the place (here’s an account of our heroism), losing both games. However, it was great fun nevertheless, and we’re just in there for the craic and the training effect (we don’t have a coach, and are just barely enough players to form a team!). No one had any ambitions of winning anything, so there were no tears shed.

Also, no one got hurt, which is surprising, because one of the teams was made up entirely of “killing machines”. Take this guy in the photo, who regularly spiked super-sonic balls over people trying to block him (he was a giant). During those balls he regularly deformed the space-time-continuum, as can be witnessed in the shot… More photos from the event here.

Last semester, when I still lived on campus, one of my lovely flatmates (Nancy from Austria) often had another friend of hers / mine over, Vazul (Austrian too). Just day I had read about “Jowlers“, check out the link, so I asked Vazul if he’d be in for trying it out.

Unfortunately, in the end it didn’t work out as desired (at least the shots didn’t really look cool). However, in the process of setting up / configuring the gear I got this interesting shot :-)

To get this look (which pretty much invited itself by the chemical green paint of our creepy kitchen, as well as Vazul’s tough-boy expression), I desaturated the reds and the yellows (while boosting the oranges a bit) and drastically reduced the brightness values of these colours, all in LightRoom. This is how you can get some nice, strong, rough texture out of the skin (do the opposite if you want to make it look more smooth). To increase the effect, I applied some hard core sharpening to the final image.

Some say, Vazul never looked so “manly”… all I know is that I just love this shot. So Kudos and thanks to Vazul (wherever you are now)!

I just noticed that until now I’ve posted anything but portraits. So let’s change that.

Today’s picture is one I took in July this year, when Steffi and I spent a wonderful afternoon in Dublin. The weather was great, so we went for a stroll around the city and passed through St. Patrick’s Garden, which is right next to the St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the biggest church in Ireland.

In the park, there was that old man just enjoying himself, his newspaper, the beautiful weather (rare enough), his grandchildren speeding about the park, or probably a mix of all that. He looked so happy and relaxed that I worked up the courage to go over and ask him politely if he’d mind if I photographed him. He smiled, said he did not at all and wondered where / how best to look. I told him “just as you did before, as if I wasn’t here”. And so he looked back at his grandchildren …

The post-processing of this picture involved a lot of cleaning up of the ground underneath the bench (mostly using the clone-stamp tool) and of course the b/w conversion (giving more weight to the red channel, as it had most of the contrast). Some careful sharpening and a bit of black clipping (to further boost contrast) gave the final image.

I don’t really know what you’re interested in, beloved reader, but I assume you would also like to see the odd “fresh” picture, not from my “back catalogue”.

Well, here’s one I took just this morning. At the breakfast table I let my mind wander. Eventually, it wandered by the fact that I hadn’t used my macro lens in a good while. So I decided to throw it onto the camera leave it on for the rest of the day.

Some people like Autumn (others don’t, and yet others have no other choice but to like it, since they live in it 365 days a year). Anyway, I shot a bunch of photos today, involving sunlit spider webs, the cucumber a colleague of mine had for lunch, and a dead tree trunk. But in the end, this lovely coloured leaf made it up here, with its beautiful, well, leaf texture, morning dew, spider web leftovers and even some hair on it (???). Check out the larger view of it.

This is the best (as in sharpest) shot of the 10 I took in burst mode, as I was shaking (it’s not too warm here at the moment) and, moreover, the leaf was dancing in the wind. So here’s another good (and old) tip: If your photo risks blurring (especially due to camera shake), set your camera to burst mode and shoot a whole bunch of pictures, then there’s bound to be one which is significantly sharper then the others. This one you’ll keep ;-)

An another one from the contrast department.

At the time I was on my way into town to meet someone, and didn’t plan on taking my camera along, but then I thought, what the heck, take it anyway. I was still kind of new to Dublin, and being the anxious German I am I hoped off the bus about 3 stops too early. Since I had plenty of time (again being a good German…) / to “punish” myself / to better get to know the city I decided to walk the rest of the way — and was promptly rewarded: For no apparent reason, there was a screaming yellow balloon tied to a screaming blue door, which gave, thanks to the sun, a beautiful strong contrast.

Apart from that there is not much to say I guess, except I was glad that I did take my camera. So here’s the lesson to be learnt: Always have your camera with you, and hop off the bus waaaaaay too early ;-)

PS: I got my first photo-blog-comment today, yaaay! Thanks Clara!

Ok, back to the “Arts”. Here’s a photo I took on my trip to Scotland with Steffi, just this August. I saw this little girl in a bright white dress jumping around in the Harbour of a little town called Portree on the Isle of Skye.

She already kind of “popped” out of the darkish murk left behind by the sea, but playing a bit with the grey scale conversion module in LightRoom I manage to make her stand out even more. Eventually I decided this wasn’t enough, and went on a dodging and burning rampage, until it ended up as presented here :-)

This is a photo for the darker souls among us. Muaaa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha …

Let’s squeeze some pretty irrelevant news in here for a second: There’s a new kid on the block, or rather a new lens in my collection :-)

The lawn mower is of no particular importance, except it was one of the very first shots I took with the new lens.

It’s a brilliant new telephoto lens with a focal length range from 70 to 300 mm, at apertures of ƒ/4.5-5.6, so it’s a fairly compact. It’ll replace my lovely old beercan (a classic 70-210mm ƒ/4 Minolta lens) which was nice in that it is an extremely compact lens for its focal length and constant aperture, but it suffered terrible longitudinal chromatic aberrations and was rather soft wide open, meaning I had to stop it down to at least ƒ/5.6 anyway.

The new lens in turn shows virtually no chromatic aberrations whatsoever, and is fully usable wide open. Also, it has an ultrasonic focussing mechanism which makes its focus fast, accurate and perfectly quiet. Also, the lens is not much larger nor heavier than the beercan, but has a larger focal length range. I think that’s a fair trade :-)

PS: Here’s a comparison shot of the lenses, showing the difference in image quality. At ƒ/5.6, the Sony was wide open, whereas the beercan was stopped down one stop.

Let’s stay in the “Shape” category. Here’s one of my all-time favourites.

Brazília, the capital of Brazil, is a unique city, with a unique (hi)story and unique architecture. Some parts of it just look like taken straight from some 70s sience fiction movie (check out some more photos here), created by the master architect Oscar Niemeyer. For photography, perfectly white, space age looking buildings and deep blue sky (if you use a polariser) just work together.

This photo here was taken in the entrance of the Museu Nacional da República (National museum), which looks like a big huge white ball buried in the ground with just the top bit sticking out. I was looking for an interesting angle, with few, clear lines and strong contrast. I first composed the picture so that I wouldn’t have the lamp in bit, but then decided that including the lamp would give it a tad more balance and something concrete to look at, apart from the shape created by the wall.

However, the more I look at it now I thing it might have been better to leave the lamp out… that would simplify, purify things even more. Ah well, too bad.

Let’s leave weirdness behind and move on to shape. Here’s a photo that I took on my trip to London last year in the entrance of the Monument of the Great Fire of London (bit of a lengthy name, that).

As with most stair cases, it’s fun to shoot straight up when you’re at the bottom of them. So out I took my bean-bag, put the camera on it and shot straight up. This was actually on top of the little booth where you pay the admission, so the dude inside it gave me an annoyed look when he got up to see where the noise above his head came from ;-)

Luckily enough the first shot was good enough — well exposed and, by total chance, perfectly aimed. So the rest was just a bit of cropping, B/W conversion (with emphasis on the greens, giving most contrast in the picture) and sharpening.

Here’s another one, probably one of my weirdest photos, mood-wise. I took it on campus, some winter morning when there was that proper Irish Fog in the air.

Clearly, the photo is heavily post-processed, but only in a global way — so no local manipulations, just mucking around with brightness, contrast and tone curve. I have to admit that I didn’t “see” the picture like that when I pressed the shutter release. The original image itself is fairly “boring” due to all the fog and low contrast, or let’s say “straight forward”. But it was really through playing with pretty much all the sliders in LightRoom 1.3 at the time that the picture came out that way.

The big white disk (which many people think is the moon, but it is actually the sun) came from controlled blowing out of the highlights. In the original image the blown out area is just a few dozen pixels wide, as I intentionally underexposed the picture when I took it, not to loose any information. But then pumping up those highlights again made the sun transform almost into a supernova which adds this extra bit of weirdness to the image.

I might come back to that picture one day and fiddle with it a bit more. Probably remove those posts in the foreground, and maybe the lamp. I’d probably brighten the picture up a bit too, but I’ll leave it as it is for the time being :-)

PS: I posted the LightRoom settings for this picture here, if you’re interested.

Couldn’t find Xzibit anywhere to comment on this one, so I have to do it myself ;-)

This April I went to Phoenix, Arizona, to give a (small) talk at the INFOCOM 2008 conference. As the dollar still had a terrific value compared to the Euro, it was pretty much compulsory to buy some stuff while over there. So one night I went on a small shopping tour, and it was at the car park of some big electronics store that I saw this car. Out I took my camera and bean bag, and popped a polarizing filter on the lens. Yes, this did make sense: The sun had just sat in a perfect angle to my position, that’s how I got this magnificent dark blue sky (I took another shot where it was much more prominent, but the was car less “pimpy”, so I chose this one to post here).

Although I was using a bean bag, I increased the ISO and shot wide open as I didn’t want to spend too much time crawling in front of some car whose owner I didn’t want to meet… it’s still unbelievable how much detail I got out of the shot, again considering it was taken at the shortest end of the lens, with minimum aperture. You just gotta admire the work Carl Zeiss and friends are doing!

Anyway, I was being a bit lazy in terms of post-processing and just used an (absolutely amazing!) LightRoom preset called Surreal Edgy Look, created by Matt Kloskowski (thanks!). It just worked out-of-the-box.

This is a very “fresh” photo, just out of Steffi’s camera (a trusty old Nikon Coolpix 5700, but it does shoot RAW). We went over to the Post Primary School again to help paint, clean, transform and prepare the old gymnasium in it for use as a meeting place of the Maynooth Community Church.

As it was a sunny day today (for a change) the sun was shining beautifully through the windows in the roof, creating those interesting shadows with the support beams. So I grabbed a ladder went to one side of the hall and took a photo from as high up as possible to get this perspective shot, somewhat compressing the view with a tad of zoom.

Since the small camera has not the best optics, I corrected some of its defects (rather strong barrel distortion and chromatic aberrations) in Photoshop, with the really useful Lens Correction tool (it’s hidden in Filters -> Distort). A bit of messing around with the tone curve as well as the saturation of some of the colours plus the usual vignette (thanks John for addicting me to them through your wonderful PhotoWalkthrough podcast…) and I got this picture.

Next up, another shot from one of the International Students’ Society trips (actually my first). We went down to Killarney to drive around the Ring of Kerry, a famous and most beautiful region / landscape in the south west of Ireland. More photos from the trip can be seen here.

At the time I was still pretty new to D-SLR photography and the Sony Alpha 100. I also just got my external flash gun, so I was experimenting as much as I could. Considering how complicated getting a good exposure with flash and ambient lighting is to a newbie like me, you can imagine how happy I was when this photo just came out as beautiful and perfectly exposed as it is!

The photo shows the guitarist of the band “Fred” ripping an awesome solo, literally on the dance floor. Turning the photo upside down just gave it the extra bit of, well, weirdness :-)

And on we go to another picture. This one was taken on a different continent, and in a different world…

Last year, Steffi and I went on a big rount-trip through Brazil. The other photos from the trip can be seen here, and I will surely post some more photos from the trip here too.

Anyway, on our trip we also made a stop in Salvador. Its historical centre has been declared a world heritage site, and rightly so. Strolling through the city, we walked up one street, and there I saw some kids kicking a ball back and forth just in front of these massive steps leading up to a church (you can’t see the boys in this picture, they’re just outside to the left and right of the frame). Since they didn’t seem to mind me pointing my camera at them, I took a few pictures up the stairs and they kept playing. In one of the shots the ball just bounced off the fence and came flying past me. For a while I preferred that shot, as it was on of those lucky snaps.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work too well from an aesthetic point of view, the eye pretty much just gets lost. I hope this is not the case in the shot presented here, where the kid that’s just chillin’ out is much more prominent and has some of the lines pointing straight at it. A bit of split toning again and some dodging and burning, et voilà.

So here we go with the first photo in my re-baptised (photo)blog, chosen for no particular reason to be the first other than pure randomness.

I took it last year in November in Cork when we went down there with the International Students’ Society. The two kewl looking girls are actually two French Erasmus students that came along, and they were just having a cigarette outside the hostel when I was returning from a little pub crawl. Seeing this streetphotography-ish scene, I asked them if they’d mind if I took a photo — which they did not — and so I pulled out my bean-bag, put the camera on it without much framing, set the aperture to ƒ/4, upped the ISO a bit, enabled the self-timer and kindly asked the girls to freeze for the half second long exposure (just like in the old, old times…).

The photo came out surprisingly good, well exposed, nicely focussed and sharp — the girls really did freeze well :-) Given the rushed nature of the shot (didn’t want to bother them too much) and the amount of alcohol I had in my blood I really like the result. Post-processing basically just involved the somewhat aggressive B/W conversion and the “chemical” split toning (blueish highlights, greenish shadows) plus some vignetting, all done in Lightroom.

PS: When you click on the picture you get to see a bigger version of it!

So many people (ok, 1 or 2) have asked me to revive this blog. I just haven’t found the time or the energy to get back to posting regularly again, and of course — the longer you wait, the harder it gets. Interestingly enough though, I started this blog by posting daily for a good while (back in 2006). Posting frequency has decreased since then significantly, with the last post before this being about 8 months old (!).

Anyway, I’ve thought about doing this for a while now (it all started with this article at this wonderful website / blog) and so I’m just going to give it at shot. I’ll start (read: this blog into) a photoblog. What exactly this means, I don’t know yet. But I think it’ll be something along the lines of: I pick a photo from my archives or a recent one and talk about it. Be it the story behind it, what’s so special about it (technically, emotionally, artistically, or whatnot) or what went through my head when I was taking it. Not sure how often I’ll manage to post something, but I hope more frequently then once every 8 months ;-)

Oh, I’ll stop writing silly one-liners at the end of my posts [I'm running out of them].

As a follow-up to my attempts described here — that is use the Sony Remote Camera Control (on a Mac) to take n pictures at specified intervals — I finally came up with a (free) solution!

The problem was that the app seems to be so badly programmed (for instance, there is the issue with the graphics) that it’s neither Applescript-able nor UI-scriptable. It doesn‘t even have a single keyboard shortcut — why at least can‘t I take a picture with the space key?? Anyway, so I had to resort to the Automator with its new “Watch me do” functionality (plus a little bit of Applescript), and it finally works! Here is how you can profit from it too:

1. Download this archive
2. Put the two files into “/Applications/Sony Image Data Suite”
3. Connect your Alpha 700 (in Remote Connection mode) and start the “Remote Camera Control” App
4. Make all your photographic settings and adjustments
5. Open “Interval Timer”
6. Run the script

Of course you’re welcome to modify things, this is just a very elementary, quick & dirty approach. If you have any suggestions for this, please let me know.

UPDATE: Used this technique today (1 pic every 10s, 600 in total). Check it out on youtube.

I was so drunk, I couldn’t even pee attention.

Letztes Wochenende war ich in Limerick, im südlichen Westen von Irland. Dort fanden zwei Sachen statt: Ein Gospel -Workshop, und ein Konzert — von niemand geringerem als dem Harlem Gospel Choir!!!

Der Workshop war ganz nett, aber hat mir persönlich nicht wirklich viel gebracht. Es gab irgendwie nichts zu lernen / mit nach Hause nehmen. Bei dem Konzert war das allerdings was ganz anderes. Ich hatte zwar erwartet, dass es bestimmt schon cool wird, aber dass es dann sooo genial war hätte ich mir nie träumen lassen. Dass die Mitglieder in dem Chor die Oberhammerstimmen haben war ja abzusehen, aber die Energie und Dynamik, die sie an den Tag gelegt haben, das war einfach unglaublich…

Das beste war aber: Da wir ein paar ausgewählte von uns “Vorband” waren, wurden wir dann auch zu den letzten 5 Songs mit ihnen auf die Bühne gebeten und durften somit “Oh Happy Day”, “Isn’t She Lovely”, “Celebration”, “We Are The World” sowie “Amen” mit ihnen zusammen singen! Hammer, was für eine Erfahrung. Das ist bestimmt, wie mit Boris Becker mal ein paar Sätze Tennis zu spielen!

Danach ging’s dann mit den ganzen Chorleuten (fast alles Iren) in der Hotelbar zur Sache, wo wir bis in die Morgenstunden gezecht und gefeiert haben…

Marriage is a relationship in which one person is always right and the other is the husband!