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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, on our trip we also made a stop in Salvador. Its historical centre has been declared a world heritage site, and rightly so. Strolling through the city, we walked up one street, and there I saw some kids kicking a ball back and forth just in front of these massive steps leading up to a church (you can‘t see the boys in this picture, they‘re just outside to the left and right of the frame). Since they didn‘t seem to mind me pointing my camera at them, I took a few pictures up the stairs and they kept playing. In one of the shots the ball just bounced off the fence and came flying past me. For a while I preferred that shot, as it was on of those lucky snaps.

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

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

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

The photo came out surprisingly good, well exposed, nicely focussed and sharp — the girls really did freeze well :-) Given the rushed nature of the shot (didn‘t want to bother them too much) and the amount of alcohol I had in my blood I really like the result. Post-processing basically just involved the somewhat aggressive B/W conversion and the „chemical“ split toning (blueish highlights, greenish shadows) plus some vignetting, all done in Lightroom.

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

So many people (ok, 1 or 2) have asked me to revive this blog. I just haven‘t found the time or the energy to get back to posting regularly again, and of course — the longer you wait, the harder it gets. Interestingly enough though, I started this blog by posting daily for a good while (back in 2006). Posting frequency has decreased since then significantly, with the last post before this being about 8 months old (!).

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

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