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Autumn Leafs

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Autumn Leafs, Maynooth, Ireland, 2008

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 ;-)

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Yellow Balloon on Blue Door

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Yellow Balloon on Blue Door (obviously...), Dublin, 2007

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!

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Dark, dark, dark

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Little girl in the Portree Harbour, Scotland, 2008

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. Muaaa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha …

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New lens

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Random Lawn Mower, Maynooth, Ireland, 2008

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 300 mm, at apertures of ƒ/4.5-5.6, so it’s a fairly compact. It’ll replace my lovely old beercan (a classic 70-210mm ƒ/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 ƒ/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 ƒ/5.6, the Sony was wide open, whereas the beercan was stopped down one stop.

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7

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“7”, or Museu Nacional da República, Brazilia, Brazil, 2007

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.

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Spirality

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Staircase of The Monument, London, UK, 2007

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.

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Spoooooooky

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Weird morning mood, Maynooth, Ireland, 2008

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, if you’re interested.

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Pimp My Ride

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Some pimped car in Phoenix (AZ), USA, 2008

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.

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Interesting roofing

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Roof of the Post Primary School of Maynooth, Ireland, 2008

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 (rather strong barrel distortion and chromatic aberrations) 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.

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Guitar Hero

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Guitarist from the Band “Fred”, in Killarney, Ireland, 2007

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 :-)