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

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

In the meantime, enjoy yourselves and be good,

Florian

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

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

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

Update: More autumn-y photos now here.

Same lens, completely different situation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last night, someone privately pointed out to me that it seems that I‘m just making things up as I go along, when I post something here.

That is correct.

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

That is correct too.

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, in the end it didn‘t work out as desired (at least the shots didn‘t really look cool). However, in the process of setting up / configuring the gear I got this interesting shot :-)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some people like Autumn (others don‘t, and yet others have no other choice but to like it, since they live in it 365 days a year). Anyway, I shot a bunch of photos today, involving sunlit spider webs, the cucumber a colleague of mine had for lunch, and a dead tree trunk. But in the end, this lovely coloured leaf made it up here, with its beautiful, well, leaf texture, morning dew, spider web leftovers and even some hair on it (???). Check out the larger view of it.

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

An another one from the contrast department.

At the time I was on my way into town to meet someone, and didn‘t plan on taking my camera along, but then I thought, what the heck, take it anyway. I was still kind of new to Dublin, and being the anxious German I am I hoped off the bus about 3 stops too early. Since I had plenty of time (again being a good German…) / to „punish“ myself / to better get to know the city I decided to walk the rest of the way — and was promptly rewarded: For no apparent reason, there was a screaming yellow balloon tied to a screaming blue door, which gave, thanks to the sun, a beautiful strong contrast.

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

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

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

She already kind of „popped“ out of the darkish murk left behind by the sea, but playing a bit with the grey scale conversion module in LightRoom I manage to make her stand out even more. Eventually I decided this wasn‘t enough, and went on a dodging and burning rampage, until it ended up as presented here :-)

This is a photo for the darker souls among us. Uahahahahaha…