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.

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!

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).

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.