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.

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).

I still haven’t gotten around posting any photos from our recent weekend trip to Cork, a lovely city in the south west of Ireland.

On our sightseeing walkabout we also went past the campus of the University College Cork (UCC). When we came past the student residences, I couldn’t believe what I saw: In the centre of a circle of buildings was this “christmas tree” of no less than six CCTV cameras…! [By the way, CCTV stands for “Closed Circuit TeleVision”].

Well, let’s hope this much surveillance is really necessary, and helps prevent oh so many crimes…

In terms of photography, this was pretty straightforward thing. Shot at an angle to create some more tension, I processed it to sepia tones as it was a grey, unspectacular day. I underexposed carefully not to blow out the sky, and had the aperture closed down to ƒ/10 to get a maximum amount of detail and reduce lens flare in this backlight situation. Finally a few selective dodge and burns here and there were needed to bring out the cameras a bit more.

PS: More photos from the Cork trip here.

On Steffi‘s 25th birthday I surprised her by taking her not into the office (like every morning), but rather to the Aran Islands. This is a wonderful place in the west of Ireland that I had visited about a year and a half ago and always wanted to come back to.

As we were outside the tourist season the island was pretty much in its original, raw, barren state — that is no trees, only bare rock and hundreds (if not thousands) of kilometres of stone-walls to keep the wind from blowing the few inches of sand off this otherwise bare rock. We were lucky that one of the bicycle hire shops was still operating and lend us two bikes with which to explore the island.

Unfortunately the weather wasn’t too much on our side (ok, it could have rained more), so in terms of photography I decided to pretty much just stick with black & white: Punchy blacks and strong contrast can make even the grayest of days and places look wow. The best photos from the trip can be seen here.

The above picture, however, had too much dynamic range (that is how far the darkest tones are apart from the brightest), so I had to resort to a fairly new trick: exposure fusion. Basically, first you take several photos with different exposures, and then you combine or “fuse” these into one picture.