The Author – Bart Busschots
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Mar
17
Photo of the Week 56 – Green-Veined White on Lavender
Filed Under Photography on March 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Without a doubt the most common butterflies in Ireland are the so-called “Cabbage Whites”. These break down into a few related species, but they are all very similar. Just because there are a lot of them around though, doesn’t mean they’re not beautiful little insects. This particular shot is of a Green-Veined White (Pieris napi), and what I love about it is the colours around the butterfly. Being mostly white, there isn’t much colour in the actual butterfly, but with the butterfly feeding on a vividly colourful Lavender flower, and with lots of lush green in the background, the shot is still full of colour.
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 55-200mm
- Exposure: 1/1000 sec
- Focal Length: 200mm
- Focal Ratio: F5.6
- ISO: 800
- Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
Mar
10
Photo of the Week 55 – Benitachell
Filed Under Photography on March 10, 2009 | 2 Comments
This week I’ve chosen another scan of one of my old Olympus OM-1 shots. In this case from September 2000 in Spain on a family holiday. This particular shot was taken within walking distance of my parent’s place just outside the village of Moraira on the Costa Blanca. If you head up the mountain behind the house you end up with some lovely views of the valley below, and with a zoom lens you can pick out some of the neighbouring villages, including the small town of Benitachell. I particularly like this shot because of the layering of the small hill the village is on, and the mountains in the background. I also like the way the church is still the tallest building is the village, just like it was a hundred years ago.
Mar
1
Photo of the Week 54 – The Moon over Maynooth
Filed Under Photography on March 1, 2009 | 1 Comment
I fell in love with this shot the moment I saw it importing into iPhoto. I’m not even sure it’s technically a good photo, but I just love it.
I took this shot from St. Mary’s Square on the grounds of St. Patrick’s College (AKA the NUI Maynooth South Campus). For those of you who’ve visited the campus, that’s the square with the cool water garden in it next to the College chapel. I’ve always loved the architecture of the buildings around this square, and in particular these little sun-roofs. You have these little sunroofs on both St. Mary’s and St. Patrick’s House, but these ones are on St. Patrick’s House. It was quite hard to get this shot without getting a wet foot, but I eventually managed to line everything up correctly and get the shot, even if I was at quite a stretch.
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 55-200mm
- Exposure: 1/400 sec
- Focal Length: 200mm
- Focal Ratio: F22
- ISO: 800
- Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
- Exposure Bias: -0.76
Feb
28
Why Do I Shoot RAW?
Filed Under Photography on February 28, 2009 | 2 Comments
This post is my attempt to organise my thoughts in advance of this week’s Chit-Chat Across The Pond segment on this week’s NosillaCast. This is of course just my initial thoughts for starting a conversation, so this post will be less than half of what you’ll get if you listen to the actual show!
So, what’s all this about then? On higher-end digital cameras (including some point-and-shoot models), you can either save your images as JPEGs, or as so-called RAW files. RAW is a sort of blanket term, it’s not a standard, and it’s different for different makes of camera. RAW files also have different file extensions for the different RAW formats. On my Nikon for example, RAW files are saved with a .NEF file extension. What these formats do all have in common is that they save the raw data that is collected by the camera’s sensor, hence the name.
RAW files are bigger than JPEGs, so that’s the trade-off, there are however many advantages to be gained in exchange for that lost disk space. In this post I’m going to talk about the advantages RAW offers me, and why I choose shoot RAW over JPEG these days. This is not an exhaustive list of the advantages of RAW, and others will have different reasons for shooting RAW.
Feb
25
Photo of the Week 53 – Rounding the Corner
Filed Under Photography on February 25, 2009 | 2 Comments
This is a photo I shot a while ago, but I re-visited it recently and tweaked the crop and the processing and now I’m much happier with it, happy enough to use it as a photo of the week in fact!
This is an Irish Rail class 22001 Diesel Multiple Unit (DMU) rounding the sharp corner on the approach to Maynooth from the Dublin side. The shot was taken from the towpath of the Royal Canal which runs next to the track for much of the line’s length. Because the canal is lower than the tracks, and because the vegetation along the canal and the tack was in full summer growth, you can’t see the tracks at all, giving the image a rather strange feel. I also quite like these new modern InterCity trains. As well as being much quieter and more comfortable than their predecessors, these new trains also look quite stylish and modern.
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 55-200mm
- Exposure: 1/1600 sec
- Focal Length: 200mm
- Focal Ratio: F11
- ISO: 800
- Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
- Exposure Bias: -1.0EV
Feb
18
Photo of the Week 52 – Fire & Ice
Filed Under Photography on February 18, 2009 | 5 Comments
It’s hard to believe I’ve been doing these weekly posts for a year now! I’m so glad this idea worked out, it’s really helped my keep blogging and keep taking photos.
This shot was taken in St. Joseph’s Square on the St. Patrick’s College Campus (AKA NUI Maynooth South Campus) in Maynooth, Ireland. It was taken later the same day as the photo I used for Photo of the Week 50. After it stopped snowing we got a really dramatic sunset over the freshly whitened landscape. It was an amazing sight to behold. The shot was taken from the middle of St. Joseph’s Square looking west towards St. Patrick’s House, and shows two of the campus’s best known landmarks, the President’s Arch (the door between the two towers), and the Gunne Chapel (AKA the College Chapel).
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 18-55mm (D40 kit lens)
- Exposure: 1/160 sec
- Focal Length: 18mm
- Focal Ratio: F8
- ISO: 800
- Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
- Processing: This image was generated from a single RAW file converted to a pseudo-HDR image and then tone-mapped with Photomatix Pro. You can see the un-tone-mapped version here.
Feb
11
Photo of the Week 51 – Marsh Willowherb
Filed Under Photography on February 11, 2009 | 2 Comments
I’m a little bit late again this week, though I’m a day less late than I was last week … so progress at least 🙂
Anyhow, the photo I’ve chosen for this week is one I shot last autumn along the towpath of the Royal Canal near Maynooth, or, to be more precise, between Pike’s Bridge and Deey Bridge. This is a closeup of a single Marsh Willowherb (Epilobium palustre) flower.
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 55-200mm
- Exposure: 1/200 sec
- Focal Length: 200mm
- Focal Ratio: F8
- ISO: 800
- Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
- Exposure Bias: -0.67
Feb
7
Quick Review of Maperture
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Photography on February 7, 2009 | 2 Comments
Maperture is a free geo-tagging plugin for Apple’s Aperture photo management and editing software. This plugin will not be of interest to everyone. Unless you care about inserting latitude and longitude information into the EXIF data of photographs, you will have no interest in this what-so-ever. In fact, I’d go even further, I’d posit that this initial version of Maperture is only for people who care about embedding location data into their photos, but who don’t have a GPS device. Future versions (one of which is in beta ATM) will be of more interest to more people, but right now Maperture is for those of us who need to use Google Maps to find the co-ordinates of our pictures because our cameras can’t do it for us. This software really feels like a 1.0 product though. You can see it has massive potential, but right now it’s still rather rough around the edges.
Feb
5
Photo of the Week 50 – Braving the Snow
Filed Under Photography on February 5, 2009 | 2 Comments
With all the excitement of moving to Aperture I forgot to post a Photo of the Week last weekend, and I’ve only just noticed my oversight now. Better late than never I guess!
Normally I don’t choose very recent photos for Photo of the Week because I want to be sure to only pick photos I really and truly like, and not just ones that I like at the time. If I still like a shot a few months after I took it, chances are it really is good. However, today I’m breaking that ‘rule’ and posting a shot I took only two days ago. I’ve been in NUI Maynooth for about 11 years (first as a student, then as an employee), and in all that time it has never snowed while I was on campus. Until Tuesday afternoon that is, when the place was blanketed with snow. I didn’t even wait for the snow to stop falling to get out there with my camera, and I’m glad I didn’t, or I’d never have gotten this shot!
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 18-55mm (D40 kit lens)
- Exposure: 1/60 sec
- Focal Length: 18mm
- Focal Ratio: F8
- ISO: 400
- Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
- Exposure Bias: +1.0
Feb
1
Aperture 2 – First Impressions
Filed Under Photography, Computers & Tech on February 1, 2009 | 12 Comments
As those of you who follow me on Twitter, or listen to the many Podcasts I appear on may well know, I recently got a copy of Apple’s pro photo editing program Aperture 2. (Thanks again Allison, it was a great Christmas present!) In case people don’t know what Aperture is, it’s a tool for sorting, organising and editing your photos – a very advanced version of iPhoto if you will. It’s really designed for people who shoot RAW and who shoot a lot, but it’s not a pixel editor like PhotoShop. The closest analogue would be Adobe’s Lightroom. Also, for context, I’m moving to Aperture from iPhoto’08, so I’ll be using iPhoto as a reference point a lot while explaining what I do and don’t like about Aperture.