Here’s another photo from our South-East-Asia trip. The gist of today’s post: Ask first before you take a photo.

While sometimes it is not possible — or desirable — to ask a person for permission before taking their photo (e.g. when the person is too far away, or when you’re going for candids, meaning you want to capture the “natural” situation, without the awareness that a photo is being taken), it should be done as often as possible. This could be as little as making eye contact, smiling, pointing at your camera and putting a big question mark on your face, or as much as introducing yourself, getting to know the person and explaining why you would like to take a photo.

That way you’re not only being polite, but you also pay respect to the person’s private sphere and their feelings. Do take “no” for an answer. But more than often — you’ll be surprised — people will be flattered that you want take a photograph of them! Ask them politely, and be honest why exactly you would like to make them the main subject in your picture. For instance, let them know that they look great, interesting, funny, or that you are amazed by what they are doing, etc. It does take some amount of “courage”, but do give it a shot! And make the world a better place in the process ;-)

Coming back to the photo, it shows a gold smith in Vientiane (the capital of Laos); I just thought he looked really cool with his sunglasses and just the general expressing in face, doing his crafty job in the smouldering summer heat. And — he didn’t mind.

Last bank holiday weekend, Steffi and I went to Stockholm, for a change. With the cheap RyanAir flights nowadays a quick weekend away to some random European city is easily done, and a great way to get a small time-out from the everyday life of Maynooth.

What a wonderful city. We really, really enjoyed our time there — which was also helped by the fact that we had brilliant weather, and everybody was out and about because of that. We were surprised by how clean everything was, making it possibly the cleanest city we’ve seen so far. Also, the prices aren’t as bad as people say, at least if your pain barrier has been lowered over the years by life in Ireland.

Apart from the usual tourist stuff you should see (like the narrowest alleyway in the city), we especially liked the Rådhuset (“city hall”). It contains a number of very interesting halls and chambers, such as the famous “Blue Hall” (which isn’t blue; this is where the Nobel Price banquets are held every year), the “Council Chamber” with its amazing ceiling and colours, as well as the “Golden Hall” completely covered with a gigantic mosaic. There’s actually a funny story about that mosaic: Apparently, the artist had to do it in such a hurry — and some plans had been changed during his work on the mosaic — that in the end one of the most important figures in the mosaic got “decapitated” by the ceiling…

As you can see, a fun place to visit. Honourable mentions also go to the Royal Palace (try to be there for the change of guards), the Vasa Museet, Gamla Stan (the old city), the amazing Nordiska Museum as well as this warning sign next to an elevator about how not to kill yourself.

For a full pictorial run-down of our trip, see this flickr set.

Let’s play some catch-up. About a month or so ago, a friend of mine and Steffi’s (Nancy) came over from Austria to visit us and Maynooth again (she was here on Erasmus last year).

We all agreed that we wanted to use the Easter days off to see the a bit more of Ireland and since none of us had seen much of the (geographic) north of the island it was quickly decided that we hire a car and follow the compass needle on a trip from Sligo along the coast of Donegal all the way up to Malin Head.

What magnificent landscape up there, I must say! We really enjoyed it! But I guess, the great weather also played part in that ;-)

Coming back from a little detour to see beautiful Mullaghmore Castle there was this strange lighting situation that happens every now and then where the sun shines on the ground before you and making it look almost brighter than the sky in the background. And as if someone had staged it, there was this bright white swan on the lake (a tad too far away though).

In post processing I just cranked up the blacks a good bit and desaturated the colours ever so slightly to compensate for the increase in saturation (that occurs when you raise the black point). Done.

PS: A selection of my best photos from the trip can be found here; the bulk of them is up on flickr.

Helix, Dublin, 2009">

Sorry it took me so long to post something new. But we’re all super busy these days, aren’t we?

I’m particularly excited about today’s photo; let me tell you why. When I was singing with the NUI Maynooth Gospel Choir(and a bunch of other choirs as well as Irish stars) was singing at a fundraising Gala Concert last week, I obviously brought my camera along and shot a few photos surrounding the event. Unfortunately I didn’t pack my wide angle lens and was stuck with “only” 24mm (which is still quite wide, compared to the usual 30mm or even 35mm+ you get with compact cameras).

Being up in the choirs stalls we had this great view of the venue (the Helix in Dublin) and I desperately wanted to capture it. So I tried something I haven’t done in a good while — a panorama shot. As I didn’t bring a tripod either, I had to do take it handheld. So I set the camera to manual mode, adjusted the exposure and took 5 photos (in portrait orientation in order to get as large a vertical field of view as possible).

I then remapped the photos in Hugin — a wonderful but slightly technical open-source, cross-platform panorama stitching software — and blended them together in Photoshop. Basically the remapping step “distorts” the images so that the overlapping parts match on top of each other, and the blending step, well, blends the pictures seamlessly into each other.

When the whole process was done I was absolately amazed by the result, considering it was done hand held in a quite challenging light situation, with people moving and all. I’ve experimented with panaromas quite a while now. It started on our New Zealand trip five years ago, continued in Iceland and culminated in me buying a panoramic tripod head, which produced (among others) these panoramas (1, 2, 3). However, I’ve taken less and less panoramas lately because they are rather time consuming to make, and also hard to print.

But seeing the constant progress of the panorama making software and how well this latest one worked out, I’ll definitely try to do more (partial) panoramas in the future! Also, because of the very wide angle of view, this would hardly have been possible with a traditional camera lens — and if so, the rectilinear projection happening in such lenses would have heavily distorted people especially in the corners of the frame, which is not the case here (thanks to the equirectangular projection used here). If you would like to find out more about these technical term, start with this great overview of the different projections.