Here’s a shot I took, erm, a year ago, playing around with ultra long exposures. Or, to be more precisely, simulating an ultra-long exposure by stacking many individual exposures.

On the shooting side, I simply set my camera to manual mode, 30s exposures in continuous drive mode and used a lockable remote release to fire off one shot after another (having disabled the dark-frame subtraction function as missing out 30s between each exposures produces ugly dotted lines rather than smooth trails).

Then, to “merge” the images, there are a fair few programs available. A well working, free and cross-platform one would be StarStaX.

As you can see in the little EXIF table below, this slightly confusing and anything but pretty photo was taken over the course of 11 h, out the back from our bedroom balcony. A bit of math tells you that’s more than 1300 exposures, all in the spirit of experimentation…

To see what interfaces you have on your computer, type

netsh interface ipv4 show subinterfaces

To change the MTU, type

netsh interface ipv4 set subinterface "Local Area Connection" mtu=nnnn store=persistent

where

Local Area Connection is the name of the network connection on your computer, from the list obtained above, and nnnn is the desired value for MTU.

Reboot after making the change.

An MTU size of 9014 did it for me, and it worked straight away without rebooting.

I meant to write a post about the “Brenizer method” for a fair while now, but never got around doing it. Anyway, what are “Brenizer panoramas” or “bokeh panoramas” as some people like to call it?

The idea is to create an image that would be pretty much impossible to achieve with a real lens. Like the one above, which has the look (according to this calculator) of a 30mm ƒ/0.4 lens. Some say, ƒ/0.5 is the limit of what’s physically possible, so that’s something, hey? Also, since you combine the images, you will get a very high resolution result, which, downscaled, will just be super sharp.

Anyway, such images are produced by shooting with a long focal length and wide open aperture to achieve a super shallow depth of field, but then stitching many such images together to get a wider angle coverage of the subject. You can use a panoramic tripod head if you want to be precise, but for speed you probably have to work handheld. The above shot is the composition of about 60 shots taken with a 135mm lens at ƒ/1.8.

It can be tricky to put the images together, and neither Photoshop CS6′s Photomerge nor PTGui did a good job with this one here (half the shots could not be linked automatically, in particular those with mostly blurry parts). Thankfully, Kolor’s Autopano Pro did a better job, and even if 10 or so images were not automatically linked, I could manually add control points fairly quickly to eventually tie all the images together sufficiently. Then, I exported it as a Panotools file, which I could then load and finish off in PTGui (which I am much more familiar with and have a license of). Here’s what the project looked like before exporting and cropping.

Since bokeh (the out of focus bits) will be very prominent with this technique, you really want to use a lens that is known for good quality bokeh. Also, choose a nicer background than I did for this test (night shots with distant background lights work particularly great).

Here’s one of my last photos from Germany, a bit of night sky. Steffi‘s family home is out in the country side in Germany (me being a city boy), so whenever I go there I just love the silence and clarity of the sky at night.

On our farewell trip back in Winter, when it was about -10°C, I decided to take one last picture of the night sky, since where we were going would show completely different constellations (not than I know much about it) and there’s no harm in risking a cold just before embarking on a big trip…

Lacking any special photo gear, I shot this with my camera and wide angle lens laying on the ground, with a kitchen towel as support. I then used my cellphone to light paint the fence and bushes a little bit for reference, and to get some extra colour into the image beyond the faint orange background glow from Jerichow. By light painting I mean running around like mad man, continuously waving the phone screen in front of my body, at the same time trying to block the camera from seeing the phone light directly (there was a “light leak” though as you can see by the horizontal line in the corner of the fence).

Hoping you like the dense night sky, best wishes from Australia again! This blog is coming a bit full circle now, since I started it right here in Newcastle over six years ago!

We recently drove up to the Hunter Valley, a fairly renown wine growing region less than an hour’s drive away. That’s a great thing to have :-) Countless little wine estates and cellar doors to try wine at a decent enough prices. Good fun!

The tour also took us by this little lookout that offered some lovely views over the valley. Unfortunately, it was a semi-overcast day, and the first version of this shot pretty much just had a grey blob of sky at the top. The small little bits of blue sky didn’t come out at all. Thankfully I packed my polarising filter, which was the first thing I tried out. And wunderbar, it did indeed darken down the blue bits somewhat so they they could actually be identified as such.

But there still was a fairly large difference in brightness between sky and ground. So I put on the second filter I own (and that’s the only two I have): a graduated neutral density filter. It’s designed to be used with the Cokin filter system, but I pretty much only used it free-hand (so just hold the square filter by hand rather than with the filter holder). Much faster that way, and pretty much same result, if you manage to coordinate holding the camera, adjusting the filter and operating the shutter at the same time ;-)

What that filter did was bring down the brightness of the sky a fair bit, but leave the ground untouched. As the name suggests, it’s a filter which is neutral density on one side (so just makes things darker), and clear on the other, with the smooth transition (graduation) in-between so you don’t notice it that much (it’s the first filter in this list). A very handy tool to have in your photo bag!

Sprinkle a ton of “Clarity” during raw development on top and and that’s how I got these fairly dramatic skies from the fairly bland looking light grey blob the sky was at the time.

Kids are fun. Swings are fun. Swings (tend to) swing in a very regular, predictable way. Especially if the legs of the person on it aren’t long enough to touch the ground ;-)

Anyway, thanks to the regular motion, it’s quite easy to get the timing right to take a shot just at the right moment. In this case here, it was the point where Sophie was at the highest, so very little motion, but great “upside down” effect (as I shot upwards from very close to the ground).

It was also easy to get the focus right by just focussing once and then switching to manual to prevent the camera from re-focussing. This was crucial as I chose a very shallow depth of field in order to get those trees in the background blurred. I wanted to keep them in the frame as a dark background for bright Sophie, but blurred so they don’t distract and she “pops” out a bit more (which is also helped by the sunset light coming in almost horizontally).

But the gist here is not to take pictures of kids on swings, but generally to watch out for any regular type of motion / timing which can make your life a lot easier in finding that one “perfect” moment.

Sorry, just have to get this rant off my chest.

To Whom it May Concern,

My name is Florian, I live in Newcastle and I went to the Maceo Parker gig last night.

While the music itself was massive (as I expected) the running of the event itself was a huge disappointment and source of frustration: As you can imagine, it is a bit of an involvement driving 2 hours (and another 2 hours back after midnight) from Newcastle, paying for petrol, parking and of course the ticket, and then only have the artist play a mere 55 minutes, without any encores, but with some audacious person asking everyone to leave as quickly as possible.

I assume we pretty much just got to see the “first half” of the gig; with another set of fans having paid for the “second half”. Which is of course a very lucrative way of going about things (I don’t believe that Maceo Parker or his band are stuck for money, so I guess it must have been your idea to sell two sets of tickets for the evening).

In any case, this was the first time I went to The Basement (I have just moved to Australia), and I was very much looking forward to it. But please rest assured that it will be my last time too. If this is how you treat your customers I can only warn people of your business ethics.

Regards,

Florian Knorn

Update: To my big surprise, this wasn’t the end of it. Might have to reconsider my opinion. Check out their response:

[...] I’m sorry that you’re still feeling unhappy about the gig, and wanted to reach out to you as well – in the last month, I have taken on answering feedback that comes in from the website. Usually, it’s great, but every so often we find out that something has gone awry, and we do what we can to rectify the issue.

First up, again, let me apologise for the confusion that lead to you missing the second show. We endeavoured to do everything we could to make sure that it was a smooth experience for all involved, and I’m sorry to hear that it wasn’t a flawless process. The night in question, our online ticketing system was down, which meant that the door person was unable to check the sales manually, and had to rely on the paper print outs that were given to her as patrons entered. I imagine this is why you why you were given the information that it was first come, first served – as a disclaimer in case there were not enough tickets remaining, which we were unable to check in advance that night. To the best of my knowledge, everyone who queued made it back in, but that’s little comfort to you now, I know.

The decision to run the late night shows was actually made by neither Maceo directly, nor by The Basement, but by BluesFest, the promotor for Maceo’s tour. It was made when the first two shows sold out so quickly, proposed as a solution that might also allow those with other commitments to catch Maceo, and to give those who wanted a dancefloor experience that opportunity. The intention was truly to give more fans the chance to experience the music.

It’s the first time that we’ve tried running double shows on the same night, and it looks like we still have some fine tuning before we can look at doing it again. While I can’t rectify the experience you had on Saturday, I would truly love the chance to change your perspective of The Basement by offering you a double pass to a gig of your choice, on us. Availability withstanding, take a look at the program, and when you find something you like the look of, let me know.

While it may not have come across this way on Saturday, The Basement cares deeply about giving its patrons a unique and exceptionally high standard of experience. I hope we can show you that on your second visit.[...]

Sorry for the long radio silence, but as many of you may know, I’ve just moved to Newcastle, Australia. Anyway, never promise anything, but having pretty much settled now after probably 3 months of nomadic existence, I’ll try to get back into posting more regularly.

Today’s topic is relatively straightforward. Creative sources of light. If you are lucky enough to have some really bright glass and a camera that isn’t too shabby at higher ISOs (but which camera today isn’t?!), you may actually consider some digital device as light source. I’ve done this a few times already, and it usually turns out quite nice: In darkish, natural light surroundings, capture someone looking at a lit screen.

This beautifully illuminates the face, but rather locally and from a different direction than your regular on-camera flash would do. While you will typically have an issue with mixed white balances (the screen being cold, “blueish”, and the surroundings warm, “orangish”), this should not worry you. That’s just the way things are! But if it does, simply convert your image to grayscale.

As I mentioned above, you’ll usually need some “bright” lenses (i.e. with a nice, wide open aperture of ƒ/2 or below, so small ƒ-numbers) and a cranked up sensitivity (ISO setting). Then: Patience and careful focussing, as with the shallow depth of field and generally little available light for your autofocus sensor to work with you might need a few shots to get in focus what you want (classically the eyes of the subject).

If you want to take this whole idea one step further: There’s an app for that…

Just returned from an assignment today, so this one’s fresh off my camera, the flash units having barely cooled down. I was hired to take some pictures of folks from the NUI Maynooth Rugby Club together with the trophy from the Heineken Cup.

The problem: The shoot had to be fast (the university’s president only had 20 minutes for the gig and 15 odd group pictures had to be taken), the pictures obviously had to be really “nice”, but worst of all: The weather. No, it was not raining — to the contrary — the one-in-a-million thing happened… 100% pure 3pm-sunshine. Great, since the shoot was to take place on the rugby pitch (to get the NUIM post-padding in).

So there I had it: photograph people in plain sunshine. While sunshine is really pretty for landscapes, it’s not ideal at all for people. Extremely harsh shadows on people’s faces and a great deal of squinting are the main issues. There’s not much you can do about the squinting, apart from turning them as much as possible from the sun. But the harsh shadows can be alleviated with some extra gear.

That meant to charge my flash gun batteries to the max, pack two tripods and a reflector. Steffi was kind enough to woman the reflector (which made the squinting worse, but I needed all the fill light I could get). The two flash guns I have were mounted on the tripods, set to 100% power (their are GN 56 and 58) and wireless triggering. Unfortunately I don’t have radio triggers, so I had to go the much less reliable route of optical triggering. Yeah, in bright sunshine. Thankfully, the flashes did surprisingly well and they had a triggering rate of I’d say over 80%. Again, not great, but it had to do.

The setup was the following: I placed the people so that the sun is about 60° to their right; the flash guns and reflector (1m fold-up golden reflector) where set to come in at the same angle from their left, about 2m away from them, as close as possible without getting them in the shots. To get the sky as dark as possible I used a polarising filter, which also allowed me to use a fairly large aperture. But with aperture and exposure time fixed (I set it to the shortest possible value to reduce the ambient light impact on the picture) I brought the ISO up until the image was well exposed. Although the flash units were working at their highest setting, I still had to bring the ISO up to 1250. Yes, that makes the images a bit more noisy than what I would have liked, but there was not much I could do about that.

I think the end result came out quite nice, I hope the uni will be happy with it. It certainly cost me a few gray hairs…

Why would you wilfully ruin the warranty of a lens? Well, if you’re mad into panoramic photography, that’s just the thing to do.

I’ve stuck for a good while with the Peleng 8mm, but have now upgraded to the Sigma 10mm F2.8 fisheye as I was fed up with removing the lens flares in my images. The 10mm is a very good and still relatively affordable lens compared to the Peleng (a good bit sharper and virtually immune to lens flares). Sadly, it has a fixed lens hood (as it is designed for crop sensors). That means, although the lens produces an image circle that is almost ideal for panoramic photography (on a full frame sensor), the built-in lens hood blocks crucial parts of the image circle — in particular the areas that, with the camera in portrait mode, capture the vertical up- and down areas of the image.

So, some gentleman from Germany by the name of Tobias Vollmer has made a small side business out of professionally shaving those pesky lens hoods (there are several lenses that have this “issue”). Here’s his website. For a very reasonable 50 EUR he’ll do the job — including the promise that if he accidentally ruins the lens, he’ll replace it. And, what shall I say, he did a very good job, with a very quick turn around time (less than two weeks, and that’s shipping to and from Ireland). You can see the before and after above.

I’ve also prepared two comparison shots to show you the effect of the shaving. So, while you get a 180° field of view with the lens before the shave, this only holds true for the diagonal of the image. After the shave, the 180° area is a good deal larger, but — most crucially — includes the zenith and nadir (vertical up and down). With the lens shaved, I can again get a full 360×180° pano with as little as 4 shots. Yay!

Also, since the lens is a 10mm lens I get a slightly larger final output size, and, as I said, the per-pixel quality is much better as the lens is just much sharper everywhere.

On the weekend I got asked by a good friend if I could help digitising some large format artworks.

I knew the rough basics of reproduction photography, so I jumped right into it. Looking for a lighting that is as even as possible, the simplest setup is typically two light sources 45° to the left and right of the camera’s viewing axis. Of course, since you want the lighting to be homogenous, you’d want to use two identical light sources and a perfectly symmetric setup.

The camera itself should be positioned centred and completely parallel to the subject. Since what you are trying to photograph is typically flat, it doesn’t really matter what focal length you use. Hence, if possible, use your best lens at the focal length that it is best at. Close the aperture to the best trade-off between overall sharpness and edge-to-edge sharpness. If the aperture is too large (that’s usually below ƒ/4) you might get soft corners; if in turn it is too small (usually above ƒ/11), the overall image will suffer from diffraction softness.

Here’s an image of the setup that I used, which involved two flash units that I triggered wirelessly. Since the control / trigger flash produces light in itself (and thus ruins the evenness) I used a bit of aluminium foil to block it from shining directly onto the artwork.

PS: Yes, these are nappies supporting one of the flash units. I only have one bean bag ;-)

Here’s a post which is designed to save me a couple of emails per month, so please bear with me.

I often get asked (usually by people who saw my panoramic photography tutorial videos) if they can use a “regular” 8mm or 10mm wide angle lens instead of an 8mm or 10mm fisheye lens (on a camera with a 1.5x crop sensor is used) to produce full 360×180° panoramas.

The answer is: Of course you can, but you will need to take more images to cover the entire sphere. With both fisheye lenses, you can get away with as little as 4 images to cover everything — with the non-fisheyes you need a bare minimum of 12, but more like 16 shots to have captured everything.

Without wanting to get technical, this has to do with the field of view that both lens types offer (due to the different projections): The fisheye typically shows you much more than the wide angle since, grossly simplified, the fisheye “squeezes” things the more you move away from the center, whereas the wide angle lens tends to “stretch” things. In terms of numbers, both fisheyes give you a 180° field of view around the diagonal. The wide angle lenses in turn only give you 110-120°…

Click on the image above to see a quick visual comparison between the different lenses / images they produce. Pay particular attention to what is included and what is not included in the extreme corners.

Lenses used: Peleng 8mm ƒ/3.5 fisheye and Sigma 10mm ƒ/2.8 fisheye on a 1.5x crop sensor, and a Sigma 12-24mm on full frame sensor (to simulate 8mm/10mm on crop).

I’d like to quickly report a great customer service experience.

About 4 years ago, I got myself a PANTONE huey to colour-calibrate my monitors. This is particularly important for photographers as it ensures that your monitor accurately reproduces colours. It comes in two version, the regular one, and the PRO version.

Now sadly there was a bit of an issue with mine, and sometimes the calibration would result in a slightly pinkish monitor image. Only sometimes however, and it was relatively easy to detect. Anyway, I read on some forum that you can write to PANTONE about it, and so I did, about a week ago.

Today UPS dropped off a brand new huey from them… No questions asked, and they even upgraded me to the PRO version (which costs a good bit more than the regular version I originally purchased) for free — not sure if this was a mistake or intentional.

In any case, that’s what I call decent customer service, and because they made me so happy, I’m writing about it here.

Here’s another weee trick that I came up with a couple of years back (but I’m sure other people must have discovered this too).

I stated earlier that it’s usually great fun to use wide angle lenses to photograph your little ones. It requires you to get in really close (otherwise the kid would be lost in the image) which in turn gives a great sense of “participation” or “immediacy” potentially leading to some captivating shots.

But there’s a problem: The corners of the image get stretched the more wide angle you go. This can lead to some rather unappealing distortions the further your subject (or parts of your subject) is away from the image centre. Have a look at this image for instance, which is the unedited version of the picture shown above. Yuk!

That said, fret not, there is a fix: The fisheye / barrel distortion. In LightRoom/Camera RAW just go to the lens correction section and play with some negative values in the “Distortion” field (in the manual tab). For instance, in the image at the top, I used -60 — and I think it looks much better than the original! If you didn’t shoot raw, you can still do this in Photoshop using the built-in Lens Correction plugin, or, alternatively, fiddle with the “Spherize” effect (or whatever it is called in your photo editing software).

As always, there are some downsides, mainly two. Fist, you lose some of the wide-angled-ness (again, compare the above shot with the original), and it’s a question of taste whether the artificially introduced distortion is acceptable (this is not very obvious here, but it will be much more noticeable when you have straight lines in the image).

Here’s a trick that I heard about a couple of years back and that I use every now and then.

Have you ever had a nice “keeper” image but that was ever so slightly out of focus? If you took it without using a flash and if there are some eyes in the image, here’s what you could try.

To make the image appear a bit sharper (this is going to be really dodgy…) add a small white dot just above each pupil of the main subject’s eyes, imitating what you would see if you had used a flash in the image. In LightRoom for instance, use the local adjustments tool, choose a very small brush size and set the exposure to +3EV. Then zoom all the way into the eyes and try hard to make out the reflection of the person with the camera. Then add a bright dot right there.

The reason for that is that you’re trying to locate a common reflection in both eyes in order to make your hack look more realistic (careful, our brains are extremely good at detecting any manipulations in the face, and in particular the eyes).

Clearly, this hack only really works if you’re not aware of it. So if you look at Sophie’s image real close, you will see that it is not 100% in focus — but only because you just read this post ;-)

I was recently asked by a young father about some recommendations regarding camera lenses. I know, gear talk is dry, but then, if you don’t have the right gear for the right job, you may be disappointed with the image you get otherwise.

If you remember my tips from a while ago, I like to use a macro lens to photograph little babies, as this allows you to get some really nice up close shots of your tiny little gem without it being lost in the frame (here’s a good example of a frame filling macro shot). Well, the young father already had a macro lens, so what next?

I’d say, get the “nifty fifty”. That’s a 50mm lens with a very bright aperture (typically in the ƒ/1.7 to ƒ/2.0 range) which costs you no more than a hundred bucks, in any camera system (of course you could also get ƒ/1.4, ƒ/1.2 or even ƒ/1.0 versions, but those will set you back much, much more). In any case, with these wonderful lenses — really the first additional lens you should be getting beyond your kit-lens — you will be able to achieve some extremely shallow depth of field, nicely separating your little smilies from potentially distracting backgrounds (here’s one such shot). Also, again thanks to the wide aperture, you will be able to take photos even in darkish lighting conditions without having to destroy the ambience with your onboard super nova.

But apart from that, go wide! Get a wide angle lens. With these lenses you are forced to get in close so that you’re right part of the action, and not just a by-standing observer. Robert Capa once said “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” He was a very wise man (and brilliant photographer)…

Apologies for slowly loosing track of what I’ve mentioned so far and what not, but in case I’m repeating myself — “Repetition is the mother of all learning”, or so it goes, right?

Anyway, here’s a lovely autumny shot from last year. It’s main feature; Side-light, also known as “rim light” (but I think the latter term is more used in portraiture).

In this present picture, the wonderful lighting really brings out the colours in the leafs, which also contrast beautifully against the blue sky (remember, blue and orange are complimentary colours…) and the dark shadows behind the church.

Quite a lot of fill light went into this (to bring out the details in the cathedral too which otherwise would have been left almost black due to the high contrast in the scene) — all major photo editing applications allow you to do this. However, as I keep saying, you have significantly more leeway for such manipulations if you shoot RAW.

The title of this post refers to somewhat of a hype of recent years — use a bunch of small, portable flashes to light a scene in an interesting, unusual way.

Well, calling this a “hype” is probably too pejorative as there are tons of brilliant images coming out of this philsophy. Just check the blog of the “father” of strobism David Hobby.

So I wanted to try it out at some stage, and decided to do so with this group shot of last year’s university volleyball team (that I used to be in, but not anymore for lack of time). I used two flashes situated about two meters to the left and right of the camera, and triggered them wirelessly from the camera. As this is probably the simplest setup imaginable, I don’t dare calling this a great stobist set-up, but at least it’s in the spirit ;-)

Happy New Year to you all! High Five for another good one!

This is just a quick snap, lil’ Sophie on her mom’s back, on the way to the crèche, one beautiful autumn morning. Nothing too special, except a cute shot to get us all started into the new year. And a blatant application of the Rule of Thirds.

Resolutions? Well, of course. Finish Ph.D. and blog more ;-)

How about you?

=> Chapel, St. Patrick’s College Maynooth in NUI Maynooth.

Quite fitting to my three-part interview with the German Podcast “Happy Shooting, here’s my second-highest resolution panorama sofar — the inside of the beautiful College Chapel of the St. Patrick’s College in Maynooth.

This was shot with a regular lens, set to 24mm. This meant taking 29 images, three rows of 9 plus one up, one down.

It took a bit longer to shoot than expected… The place is typically empty — you can just walk in, if you know where to go and when the doors are not locked, but since it isn’t heavily advertised and Maynooth doesn’t really have hundreds of thousands of tourists running around, you hardly ever find someone else in the chapel. But that one day when I wanted to shoot this panorama, people out of nowhere constantly walked in and around. And asked questions. And tryed to not be in the picture, while, well, still being in the picture… But anyway, it all went well in the end and after a couple of hours of stitching, it was done!

Yay :-)

PS: Apparently, this place has the largest number of choir stands around. Everything needs a superlative, doesn’t it?

PPS: Merry belated Christmas!

I think I mentioned this in the past, but (provided you shoot RAW) you can save a lot of images. Take this one for instance, which was badly underexposed (I wanted to take this picture quickly, but the camera was still in manual mode and the exposure was set for an outside scene).

Anyway, usually I delete pictures like that right away in camera, but when the little one’s in it, I try not to be too delete-happy — you never know.

And indeed, bringing the exposure up three stops (!) and thanks to the amazing dynamic range of modern digital cameras, there she is. Of course, pushing the exposure by this much brings in a ton of noise, but remember the old trick of turning the image black and white in such cases, and it usually won’t be that bad. To the contrary, it gives this lovely “analogue” charme to the picture.

I will post a few more pictures / notes about backlighting, but like in this shot I’m a big fan of a strong light source (read: sun) peaking from behind the main subject, producing some light spill / flare and, more importantly, some a nice, defining rim light.

… or should I? Well, yes and no.

Saturday was a beautiful autumn day here on the east coast of Ireland. As Steffi wanted to get some baking and cooking done, I took lil’ Sophie for a walk (well, ride in her buggy). As I came up towards Carton Avenue and this beautiful scene opened up in front of my eyes, I started kicked myself: Why did I not bring my camera?!

Well, I just forgot. And I decided I was too lazy to go back and get it. Instead, I grabbed my phone and tried my best to capture the scene. Of course, you don’t have things like RAW capture on your phone which could have easily dealt with the somewhat larger but not too large dynamic range of the scene. I didn’t have a modern enough phone to have HDR capture right built into the the phone either, nor did I have an app like that installed…

So, I tried to do it manually: I tried to hold the phone steady and took three photos, first focussing (and thus taking the exposure measurement) at the brightest point (the sky), then middle brightness (trees on the left), and lastly in the shadows (bottom right). The resulting bracket of three photos (each roughly one stop apart, judging by the EXIF) was then thrown into my favourite free software: ImageFuser which after some minor fiddling with the parameters produced something close to the above. Some more post-processing in Photoshop (increase saturation and contrast, add vignette) and the result ain’t too bad!

Only thing missing: resolution. I guess I just have to bring a “proper” camera next time…

Up for grabs today are colour profiles for all my lenses (technically peaking, they are camera profiles, but colour profiles is more to the point), both measured on two different camera bodies, the Sony Alpha 900 and Sony Alpha 55.

What are they for? Well, they are meant to create rather neutral and consistent colours among all the different lenses (with their different kinds of glas, coatings, etc.) in my camera bag. I use them all the time and they have served me very well.

All profiles were measured using a Gretag Macbeth® Color Checker® under both day light and tungsten light, in conjunction with Adobe’s free DNG Profile Editor. The lenses included are:

You can read more about installing these profiles here. And now, for the download:

As always, I’d like to ask for a small dona­tion for the time and work involved in cre­at­ing these pro­files and pol­ish­ing them for pub­lic release.

Thank you!

Ok, one more no-so-artsy but rather technical post.

I recently got a new camera, mainly to shoot video with it. However, this camera (the Sony Alpha SLT 55) has generated quite some stir due to its unique and somewhat novel design, and apart from that, as always when there’s a new camera and sensor folks on forums have shown themselves quite controversy about its noise performance.

To see for myself I decided to shoot this ISO series. The setup is not ideal (in hindsight, I should have had some more darker areas in the frame too) but it should do for now. It shows a bunch of toys lit indirectly by rather dim light (a 40W incandescent light bulb lamp shining up a wall about 2m away). To give you an idea of the dimly-ness of the shot, the EXIF reports a brightness value of -2.75 EV, and the ISO 800 shots for instance needed a 6s exposure at ƒ/8. All pictures were taken from a tripod, from the same position, but at different focal lengths to get identical crops, with a 2s timer and SSS off to get as sharp pictures as possible.

The series shows the photos from the α55 and the α900 right next to each other at equal ISOs, running the ISO from 200 to 12800. Since the α900 only goes up to 6400 I shot an extra frame at ISO 6400 but one stop underexposed and then raised the exposure again by one stop in post-processing to simulate ISO 12800 that way.

Speaking of post-processing — all images were shot in RAW mode and then converted with Adobe LightRoom 3 (with the 2010 process version) with zero noise reduction and zero sharpening applied. All other sliders were also left alone, except for the white balance which was set to 2600. Then I reduced the size of the α900 pictures to the exact pixel dimension of the α55 to make for a fair comparison. In other words, all strips are taken from 16 megapixel images.

Phew. So much for the experimental setup. The result? Well, see for yourself. But in my eyes, both cameras are pretty much identical in terms of noise performance, provided you take the different resoultions into account! (That reminds me of the α900 vs Nikon D700 debate back in the day…). And, guys, it’s really not as bad as many pixel peepers are trying to make you think.

Ok, one last one more …

Here are some profiles for the Peleng MC 8mm F3.5 Fisheye, profiled on a Sony Alpha 900 (DSLR-A900) body. For some reason, the lens, when mounted to my A900, is somewhat decentered, that is the image circle it creates is offset a little bit to the right, and also cropped ever so slightly on the long edges.

I shot the following series: 5 Apertures [4.0, 5.6, 8.0, 11.0, 16.0] x 1 focus distance [0.40m], resulting in a total of 45 pictures used in the calibration process. Again, the ZIP file contains a two different files — one that contains the lens profile and one that contains the DNG color profile to give you more accurate colours. Since this purely manual lens does not exchange any information with the camera, in order to make these profiles work for you, I recommand that you manually set the aperture for this lens. I’ll might write a post on how to do this further down the line.

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

Thank you!

For now that’ll be it (all the other lenses I use have been profiled by other people already) — the last lens in my series of Adobe Camera Raw Lens Profiles is my favourite “portrait machine”.

It’s the Minolta AF 85mm F1.4 G fast prime, profiled on a Sony Alpha 900 (DSLR-A900) body. However, this profile should also work well for its other Minolta versions as well as when mounted on an Alpha 850 body.

I shot the following series: 8 Apertures [1.4, 2.0 2.8, 4.0, 5.6, 8.0, 11.0, 16.0] x 3 Focus distances [0.85m, 2m, 6m], resulting in a total of almost 200 pictures used in the calibration process. Again, the ZIP file contains a bunch of different files — one that contains all the sub profiles in one file, as well as three separate files for the different focus distances (since you can’t select sub profiles in LightRoom at the time of writing).

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

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

Thank you!

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

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

Yet, it’s fun, fun, fun!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you!

Here’s a new “category” of posts I want to start: SOOC. This funny acronym stands for “straight out of camera” and means just this — unedited pictures as created by the camera.

While you can do alot in-camera when it comes to colours, contrast, etc., you have to nail the framing when you take the picture as you’re not allowed to touch it once it’s on the memory card… [And you should clean your sensor, see the top left corner of this picture ;-)]

In order to get this picture, I used the “sunset” mode on my camera (yours should have this too) which renders said lighting situations in a particularly nice way with warm colours and strong contrasts (but I also dialed in a -1EV exposure compensation to get even more detail and saturation in the sky). I can’t emphasise enough the importance of knowing the “scene modes”, “creative styles”, or whatever it is called on your camera. Know which ones you have, what they do exactly (either the manual or some in-camera help will tell you) and make sure use them in the appropriate situations!

One could be tempted to think this shot was taken somewhere special (like Africa), but no, it’s just good old Maynooth. This is what we get to see every day whenever the weather permits it.

Here’s another new series of posts. I’ll be posting Adobe Camera Raw Lens Profiles that I’ve created. If you don’t know what this is, don’t worry ;-)

The first one is the Sony AF 35mm F1.4 G (or SAL-35F14G) profiled on a Sony Alpha 900 (DSLR-A900) body. However, this profile should also work well for the two previous Minolta versions of the lens as well as when mounted on an Alpha 850 body.

I shot the following series: 7 Apertures [1.4, 2.0, 2.8, 4.0, 5.6, 8.0, 11.0] x 3 Focus distances [0.35m, 1m, 1.7m], resulting in a total of 126 pictures. The ZIP file contains several files. One that contains all the sub profiles in one file, as well as separate files for the different focus distances (since you can’t select sub profiles in LightRoom at the time of writing). Update: The file now also contains a DNG color profile for the lens! The following link will attempt to open a popup window, so please allow this.

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

Thank you!

Phew, long time no post. That’s mainly due to all my panoramic activities of late… But well.

Here’s a quick snap I took this lunch time, just walking home to cook dinner. This was shot again with my cellphone, and post-processed a little in-phone as well (using the rather handy “Photogrene” App).

All I did was adjust the levels (increasing the black clipping point) in order to boost contrast, raise the colour temperature a little (the picture felt rather “cold” with what the phone’s automatic white balance had chosen) and add the almost obligatory vignette.

The reason I took this pictures is obvious — a beautiful mixture of lights and darks as the (rare) sun light was filtering through the trees above. I tried to be as symmetric as possible with the composition as not to distract from but rather support the main subject of the image: the ligth patches. I framed the two bigger blobs at the lower end of the frame as to give a starting point to the eye. It’s typically drawn to them, but then wanders off down the path…

=> St. Mary Square in Ireland

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

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

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

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

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 (35x45mm, 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).