Next one up. This time, it’s the window shades of our guest room.

Oh boy, what did I do with this image? Well, first of all I cranked up most of the sliders I could find in LightRoom, I boosted the saturation and sharpened the hell out of things. That’s how I got this very strong chroma noise. It’s the noise that is produced by the sensor (the picture was shot in pretty dark conditions at ISO 3200, and Sony cameras are still anytthing but famous for their noise performance).

Apart from that I really messed around with the colour sliders as well, saturating this, desaturating that…

Something that’s quite interesting is the fact that, as I said, it was rather dark when I took the photo. But with ISO 3200 + wide open ƒ/1.8 + 1/15 s exposure I eventually got the brightness I wanted. I didn’t use a tripod (too lazy), but instead relied on the in-body stabilisation of my camera (something very useful to have — and unique to the Sony D-SLRs, at least when it comes to full frame sensors). As you can see it worked very well — this is the only shot I took (no burst-trick this time).

Please don’t try to find any pattern in my posting. After that rather serious post yesterday here’s something more photographic, or shall I say “abstract”.

If you haven’t peeked yet, what do you think it is …? Exactly, it’s a lamp just outside our apartment (there is a few of those lighting the path). Today I thought: Florian, you need to take more photos. So, I randomly decided to focus on shapes for the next couple of days to come. I poped my 135mm prime on my camera to make things a bit easier, as the long focal length helps to focus on one thing at a time).

I took this shot only a few hours ago, coming home tonight after work. It’s main feature relies on an old trick to make things more dynamic: Place things on one of the diagonals of the frame. Apart from that, there’s those lovely smooth curves.

Although it looks like I’ve messed with the colours, I haven’t at all this time. Just a deliberately wrong white balance (the camera was still set to incandescent light; when I imported the picture into LightRoom I decided to just leave it as it was as it looked kind of interesting ). The slight vignette came naturally from the lens (shot wide open on a full frame camera…), so I didn’t do that either. A very raw RAW so to speak ;-)

Ok, what else is there to say? Well, the extremely shallow focal plane (mathematically, it amounted to 2mm depth of field!) was placed off-centre as to get the point of interest away from the middle and thus make things more interesting to look at.

This is one of the tougher pictures to digest from our recent South-East-Asia trip. Normally I ask people before I take a photograph of them. That can be by actually talking to them if possible, or just by gesticulation, pointing at the camera and smiling with a question mark in my face.

In this situation here thought — Steffi and I were waiting for a bus in one of the busier areas of the Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh, Ho Chi Minh City or just Saigon — I didn’t work up the courage to ask the man. And I still feel ashamed for not having done that. Sure, I shouldn’t be showing this picutre, but I have other motives for doing that.

I would like to share my disgust for the atrocities of war. Although I don’t know the story behind this sorry soul, I’m certain it is one of utmost pain, be it physical, emotional or social. The problem with war and trying to achieve usually unachievable objectives (when people shouldn’t have gotten involved in the first place) is that the war is not over when it’s over. Deep rifts in the population remain, the catastrophic psychological damage carries over and affects many generations, and apart from unexploded ordinance or mines that bear lethal surprises for many years to come, there was Agent Orange…

There, in that street, sitting on the steps of a travel agent, waiting for the bus, was just one of those moments (and there were several on that trip) where you just froze and where a terrible, bottomless sadness hit you. Add a good dose of anger to that, and hope that you’ll never meet the people responsible for all those countless tragedies.

Here in Ireland so-called “Pantomimes” seem to be a bit of a Christmas tradition. In any case, the Drama and Musical Society of the small little town next to Maynooth appears to be quite famous in the country, having won several prices for their stage productions. And rightfully so, I must say — I was blown away when I went there on Saturday to take some photos.

The story was an adaptation of “Robin Hood”, with a somewhat different storyline, tons of great little jokes and gags, but still very well staged so that small children would also be able to understand what’s going on, as a panto is meant to be for the whole family. The music was brilliant and the band was amazing too. My good friend Eimear did a great job there, as musical director of the production. (However, I still don’t quite understand what makes pantomimes so much different from musicals.)

With regards to photographing the show, three things were most important: Bright lenses, tons of memory, and a tripod. Clearly, bright lenses were needed to achieve fast shutter speeds (dancing people never hold still ;-)) at not too high ISOs, memory cards as you want to be zapping frames like a madman (again to capture the best moment when people are dancing and acting, plus you want to be shooting RAW in those difficult lighting situations), and a tripot so you don’t get tired (my 70-200/2.8 lens + camera + battery weighs in at about 2.5 kg, something you do not want to be holding for alomst 2 hours…).

My best shots from the evening can be found here.

Happy New Year everyone, sorry this new post took so long. This one was taken on the famed “Bamboo Train”. It’s a Cambodian invention (one of the kids told me proudly) and consists basically of three parts: A motor, a very light bamboo flat bed, and a pair of axles. This modular built allows it to be assembled and taken apart again in a matter of seconds, even by a bunch of kids. Those trains used to run between the official train service on the national railway network, and there is only one simple (and obvious) rule: The lighter train gets out of the way (off the tracks) first…

I love this picture with those cool kids enjoying the freedom of speeding down the twisted rails while making a few bucks off random tourists that made it out there. Photographywise it was shot with a polarising filter for increased saturation and colours, with an elevated shutter speed as it was shaking quite a bit. I chose a rather wide angle of view in order to capture those converging lines from the bamboo platform as well, which kind of intensifies the whole picture.

PS: Here’s a short video over on YouTube where at about 2:00 the guy talks about this crazy form of train.