This stay was my second time there, so I knew what I could expect in terms of photography opportunities. During my first stay I already found out that the best time to take photos is early in the morning. Then it could be either really foggy and mysterious or if you are lucky you can see a great sunrise. So I got up very early each morning and was already outside at about 6am. Then it was still quite dark and I could go an figure out a place where I wanted to take photos. The first morning was really foggy, gray and unpleasant, but still interesting to take photos. On the second morning I observed a really great sunrise and was most pleased with my resulting pictures.  In fact I was so satisfied that I concluded it couldn’t get any better and stayed in bed longer on the other days. It turned out that I was lucky to catch the only really beautiful sun rise during the week.

Now that I am a little more familiar with the HD movie function on my camera, I also took the chance to get a couple of nice videos. I stitched them into a small movie, which you can find on my Vimeo account here.

I took my latest gadget with me, the Gorillapod Focus SLR tripod I recently bought. I thought it to be useful for taking videos and maybe some long time exposures. I got the version with the small ball head on top. The manual says it will keep steady even when loaded with up to 3kg. In my experience it doesn’t really keep still once I put my 7D and a heavy lens on it (but still keeping it less than 3kg). On the photos using long exposure times I can see that the camera moved. But for short exposure times and video shots it is a nice tool.

Panorama from Glasnevin cemetery, stitched from 5 RAW files

On one afternoon there was a scheduled trip from the conference and we visited an old castle a little outside of Dublin. Now I already forgot the name of than place, but here are some impressions.

Another stop of the tour on that afternoon was a short stop at the beach and having a look at (and feeding) the seals in the village Howth. Here some pictures from that part.

It’s a pity that I ruined my feet on the very first day, so that I could not explore so much of the southern, probably more interesting, part of Dublin. Here are some shots I took on my morning way down to O’Connell street, from where the bus would take me to Dublin City University (DCU), which is pretty outside of the center to the north.

Another highlight of the stay in Dublin was an evening reception in the Guinness brewery. After a stroll through what is kind of a Guinness museum we climbed the tower of the brewery on top of which are a restaurant and a lounge.  The lounge is pretty much the highest place in Dublin in that area and features walls completely made from glass, which is a great place to enjoy a fresh Guinness

Summarizing, the trip paid off not only in terms of science but also yielded some nice places to see and good memories to keep.

Below you will find portraits of some students at my university who volunteered in my project. The series has been taken for a project of my university photography group which was entitled “the evil”. Throughout this semester there has been a series of lectures given by professors of different fields on several different aspects of the evil. The organizers of this lecture series attended the opening of the last photo exhibition by the university’s photography group and asked us whether we would be interested to work out some photo ideas for their topic and show them in an exhibition. So we set to work and now we are currently showing the results of our photo project at the university.

My idea was to create a photo series that shows portraits of people where there would be two photos of everybody. One should show the person in a neutral to friendly mood and the other one should show their less friendly, evil side. The goal I set to myself was to achieve the unfriendly mood carried from the “dark” photo not by gestures or mimic means but almost exclusively by different lighting.

So I organized myself a room at the university where I could set up my makeshift photo-studio. It consisted of a few stands to carry my background and several tripods carrying umbrellas and my Easy-Box.  The lighting on the bright photos was done by two flashes at 45° to the sides. The dark photos where done by having the Easy-Box shining downwards from directly above the persons head. This already gives nice shadows in the eye sockets. On some photos a second flash acts as a fill on the hair and the third (geled) flash helped to provide some background fill, to seperate the person from the backdrop.

Everything has been shot with Canon 7D and Canon f1.8/50mm. My 50mm often puzzled me. On my 30D I always had the feeling that it did not focus properly, which matters of course most at wide open apertures. So I mostly used the lens at f/4 and above, where a slight front-/back-focus would not matter that much. Now on the 7D they have these tiny tiny focus-points that really give you control about the focus point and the 50mm did not disappoint me a single time! For the price of about 100$/€ it truly is worth its money.

Enough talk… let’s see the photos! Thanks very much again to all my models, it’s been a real joy to work with all of you!

A few days ago I saw a time lapse video made out of 35 000 single pictures, it was amazing (watch it here). This got me to the idea of taking a series of photos over night. The single pictures had to be dark enough to be clearly recognized as been taken at night and at the same time the stars have to be bright enough to be seen. From a series of such pictures you would see how earth rotates with respect to the stars. I wanted to start my series during sunset and it should last until sunrise.  I calculated for two photos per minute which should give me something like about 1200+ pictures in total. At 20 pictures per second in a video, this should result in roughly one minute of film.

I wanted to use my old 30D for this, since I have a battery grip for it which can be set to time-lapse mode. Unfortunately I found out it only takes 99 photos in a row and then stops. So this would not run the whole night all by itself. Nevertheless, I started my experiment and took a couple of photos, about 300. Obviously there are some factors where some more thoughts are needed. During sunset the brightness of your scenery changes dramatically, hence you have to compensate for that in terms of exposure time. During this first test I did everything in manual, which means that you have to change the exposure settings several times until it’s finally completely dark.

In the end the animated 300 photo long series does show rotating stars, but the brightness problem has to be solved in a more precise way. Even though shooting everything in RAW gives you the possibility to adjust brightness it is by far not enough. You have to get the exposure right. Taking more than 99 photos in a row should be possible by connecting the camera to a laptop.

So the first experiment got me some basic ideas what I have to improve, but it also gave me another nice result. During this night no air planes were aloud to fly, due to the volcano on Iceland. Hence I was really happy to get a great shot of a falling star that night.  I even got another one, but this one is the true gem

The first three photos are from the university itself… It’s a great place, the castle which constitutes the main university building is looking absolutely fabulous!

What a great place have the “Herrenhäuser Gärten” to be in summer? Now, in the winter time you can only imagine how great everything has to look during the summer months. Nevertheless I found my walk around the historic gardens worthwhile. There are many statues inside and the geometry of the garden itself is quite a sight.

Now my favorite photos from downtown:

Directly opposite to the Herrenhäuser Gärten is a Sea Life Center. As I was already close, I decided to go and see what kind of fishes they might have there.  I knew that I would have to push the ISO of my cam quite a way up to get some photos, but I felt confident, since I had my 24-105 f/4 IS with me. In the end ISO 2000 was sufficient in combination with IS, still got only quite low noise for such high ISO.  I would even consider making prints from these photos.

My university photography group show it’s first exhibition! We got the chance to show our work in the lobby of the library building for one month. On one of the photos below you can see Linda from the group, next to her portrait that I  shot. On the wall to the right you can see a tiny bit of four other photos that I present there. It’s been quite a lot of work to organize everything, but in the end, when you see it all getting together, it’s been worth the effort. Below you see some photos I took during the opening of our show. We don’t have an online gallery of the photos yet, but once we might do one and then I’ll certainly refer to it here. If you can read German and want to find out a bit more what this group is all about, go and check out this link. The excerpt from the newspaper is in German only, too, but you knew that already, did you? Never mind though, because not everything is stated correctly in the article… but that’s a different story.

]]> http://www.separatrix.de/blog/?feed=rss2&p=15 0 http://www.separatrix.de/blog/?p=5 http://www.separatrix.de/blog/?p=5#comments Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:52:19 +0000 goetz http://www.separatrix.de/blog/?p=5

… it’s the last time you will.  – For Whom The Bell Tolls , Metallica

My web-hoster had a serious hard drive crash, and in the wake of this I lost all data. Well I had backups from the gallery and of my old blog, but I wasn’t that much satisfied with the old layout and all the stuff, so I take this as a good excuse for a fresh start.

The little tracker I hid somewhere deep in the intestines of the blog code, tells me that I welcome visitors from all over world and I appreciate this very much.  More than before I will try to keep this blog up to date, so you can find something new here every once and a while when you check back with me.