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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This photo here was taken in the entrance of the Museu Nacional da República (National museum), which looks like a big huge white ball buried in the ground with just the top bit sticking out. I was looking for an interesting angle, with few, clear lines and strong contrast. I first composed the picture so that I wouldn‘t have the lamp in bit, but then decided that including the lamp would give it a tad more balance and something concrete to look at, apart from the shape created by the wall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PS: I posted the LightRoom settings for this picture here.

Couldn‘t find Xzibit anywhere to comment on this one, so I have to do it myself ;-)

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

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

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