While cyclone “Daisy” has large parts of Europe in its icy grip, Ireland is going “tits up” (as a dear friend from Manchester would phrase it) with even the University postponing exams (can you believe it!!), myself and many other people thought — hey, this is a great photo opportunity. Let’s take some photos while it lasts.

So hoping to make the 2010 NUIM Christmas Card again I grabbed everything I needed and went for a little photo tour of the South Campus.

I’ve talked about snow photos before, so not too much to added apart from don’t forget the exposure compensation (I’ve seen plenty of muddy grey snow pictures floating around in Facebook again) and if you want to be fancy — use a polarising filter to blue-e-fy those skies. Or imitate the effect it in post-processing if you can’t / don’t want to use one. Do that in your favourite photo editing application by darkening, selectively, the blue channel.

Here’s a somewhat “street photography” style shot. I took it about two months ago, when I was spending the better part of the day with Steffi and Sophie at Holles Street Maternity hospital in Dublin. One afternoon I went for a short walk to catch some fresh air, and thankfully took my camera with me. That’s when I spotted this lady sitting there, on the phone.

I politely asked her if it was ok to take a photo and she said “yeah, why not”. So I had a quick think about how I wanted to take the photo and how to best capture whatever it was that made me want to take the photo in the first place. My subsequent considerations included small aperture to get those sun “rays”; center weighted metering on the foreground as to expose for the lady, not the (much brighter) sky behind her; manual mode so not to take any chances with the camera’s own automatic metering; low camera position to get the shadow of the fence more prominent into the frame; one shot only as I didn’t want to bother her too much; etc.

So walking over to where I wanted to shot from I did a quick test shot from the hip to double check proper setting of the exposure (insecure me) and then kneeled down to take the actual picture. It was only then that her conversation had turned into shouting — and from what I could her she was just dumping her boy friend …

Wat Luang, Pakxé, Laos, 2008">

How many subjects can you have in a photo? Well, it depends on how you group them, I suppose. Here you could say: “The two cats are the subject”, or you could say: “The cats are the two subjects” …

Well, whichever way you look at it, placing two subjects diagonally opposite in a frame creates a good deal of confusion for your eyes — especially if the subjects look very similar. You will have a hard time settling for one of them, and thus move back and forth between the two points of attraction.

The cats above were two street cats just chilling out in the sunshine at Wat Luang, a Buddhist temple in Pakxé, Southern Laos.

Who’d have thought it. Back in February this year I jumped at the opportunity to take a few pictures of the beautiful NUIM South Campus clad in white.

You see, it doesn’t snow a lot in Ireland, and the snow usually just stays for a couple of hours, so I had to move fast. I grabbed my camera, batteries, a bunch of lenses, gloves, and off I went to take some photos around the university.

And then, about a month ago, the university’s PR office asked me if I had any nice winter pictures of the university, for use on this year’s official NUIM Christmas Card. Well, out I pulled this one and guess what — it made it! You can buy the cards around campus now and see me walk around with a big smile :-)

Well FINALLY. Let me repeat this. Well FINALLY. Adobe got their heads out of their butts and FINALLY revised their RAW conversion engine from the ground up to FINALLY provide some decent raw conversion results, especially for images taken with Sony D-SLRs.

What’s a RAW? Just quickly, it’s basically just the very raw, unaltered data captured by the camera’s sensor, more or less directly dumped into a file with (hopefully) zero processing done in-camera. This means that it’s actually not an image, but really just pure data. Just numbers. These numbers need to be converted later, on the computer, into an actual image before you can actually see anything. Thus the quality of the final image depends to a large part on the software used (and less so — to some extend — on the camera and its processing capabilities).

Since I shoot 100% of my pictures in RAW, it is crucial for me to have a software that does a good job at converting them. Unfortunately, so far Adobe’s Camera Raw, which does this job in LightRoom (a beautiful piece of software in itself), has done it very badly for Sony RAW files (for a number of reason I won’t get into). In any case, this has radically changed with the LightRoom 3 (beta) that was released a couple of weeks back.

Here’s an excerpt of an image that I had to take at ISO 6400 to get short shutter speeds so I could capture the torrential rain. Left: LightRoom 2, Right: LightRoom 3 (beta). Check out the difference in how the colour noise is removed beautifully, to actually reveal that it was indeed raining quite heavily. Also, there’s generally much more detail in the image on the right. So I can’t wait for the full version to come out.

Ireland’s a generally rainy place, we all know this. But every now and then — even in autumn — you get a few hours of sunshine (if you’re lucky).

And so, yesterday, we went for a stroll (the three of us now) around Maynooth to profit from this short window of good weather (which, in the end, only lasted about 4 hours). Of course we went through the beautiful Sound Campus of the university, just because it’s so pretty in sunshine. This took us past this magnificent, incredibly strongly colour tree right outside St. Patrick’s House.

Seeing the blue sky, I also grabbed a polarising filter when we left, which then allowed me to really bring out those colours. They turned out so intense, that the picture as seen here in a browser (due to the relatively small gamut of the sRGB colour space) cannot render the actual saturation of the colours!