This is the last shot I'll be posting from my recent trip to Barcelona, and it's definitely one of my favourites. It was taken from just across the road from the Olympic Stadium, a few minutes after the sun had dropped below the horizon, but I'm afraid that I can't identify the building on the horizon. Hopefully one of you will be able to enlighten me.

This is a photograph of Nuria, taken at the Friday night meetup of the recent Europe Photobloggers meetup in Barcelona.

I got an email earlier today from a photographer who had stumbled across my beachcombing gallery. He said that he was pleased to have found it because he now felt like less of a nut photographing stuff that got washed up on his own beach :-)

And my reason for mentioning that is because I was working on this shot when his email arrived. It's clearly not a beachcombing shot, but it is a photograph of something damaged, and possibly abandoned. What I like about objects like these is that each of them has a story – normally one of damage or neglect – a trajectory that leads up to the point at which the shutter is pressed.

This is a shot of a reflection in the sloping front of the maremagnum in Barcelona. As you can see from the shot I've linked below, it was an especially strenuous shoot:

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And in case you haven't seen a shot of me before, I'm the slightly less active one on the right, while the guy on the left is Paul :-)

While yesterday's 'reluctant performer' was shot in an open square, today's was taken in a partially underground area of Park Güell in Barcelona. What drew me to this shot, other than the guy himself, was the instrument he was playing ;– as it wasn't one I was familiar with. It turns out that it's a stick, a two-handed tapping instrument originally designed by Emmett Chapman.

In terms of the shot itself: while I liked yesterday's, I much prefer the harsher contrast of this one. If you're interested, the original is here:

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If you've taken a look at my Black and White: part one tutorial you'll probably have already worked out that this was converted to black and white using the Channel Mixer, biased towards the blue channel. My reason for this was that I really wanted to bring out all the detail in his face, but an added bonus was that his shirt became much darker too – emphasising the detail in his face, the 'stick' and his hands.

And finally, a few days ago I mentioned that the 70-200mm f/2.8L IS wasn't ideal for street/candid photography (it's not exactly an unobtrusive item), but in this instance I wouldn't have got the shot without it as a) I wouldn't have been able to get close enough with a shorter lens, and b) without the IS there's now way on earth I'd have been able to handhold at 1/30 using a 200mm lens.

As always, let me know what you think.

While I don't often feel intimidated when shooting people in public, there is one situation that I do find difficult; i.e. when people make eye contact with you and you can't judge how they feel about being photographed. In these circumstances my instinctive reaction is to look away – much as I would if there wasn't a camera between us. However, a street portrait can be a lot stronger when a subject actively engages with the process of being photographed, so it's often worth staying focussed for a few more seconds than you would normally find comfortable to ensure that you get the shot.

In this instance, I'd been photographing this guy for a couple of minutes before he glanced up, and my immediate impression was that either he didn't want to be photographed or he found my presence distracting. Either way, I shot a few more frames before thanking him for his time and moving on.

Not the best dressed tailor's dummy I've ever seen, but certainly one of the more stylish :-)

In case you're wondering: this is a shot of a photograph (of a bird behind the bars) beneath a ceiling (the bars at the top of the image) with a red wire running the bars.

The 70-200 f/2.8 IS is a great lens for street photography – shallow depth-of-field to isolate your subjects, IS for use in low light, and sufficient magnification to allow you to be a reasonable distance away. But, and it's a big but, it's such a large (white) lens that your chances of grabbing a shot without being spotted are quite small – as this shot clearly demonstrates :-)

Of all the shots I took in Barcelona this is the one that Libby likes least but, for some reason that I can't quite explain, it's close to being my favourite from all the ones I'll be putting up.

This one was taken outside Maremagnum – a shopping centre in Barcelona – and beyond that I don't think there's a great deal I can say about this, other than to tell you it was one of about 15 shots. In the other shots the couple are either looking towards one another, or out over the water, but (for reasons that I can't really articulate) this was my favourite of the set.

When I was in Barcelona last month I shot an HDR sequence of these columns. This time, by way of contrast, I shot them at sunset. And I would write more about the meetup this weekend, but I'm wiped out this evening after getting back to Blackpool a couple of hours ago. I'll post some more details tomorrow.

Paul has posted an alternative view here.

Oh, and this one looks much better with the black theme.

I'm not entirely happy with the composition of this one, but there's something about her expression that made me think it was worth posting.

I would be willing to bet that Barcelona has more nice legs than any other city in the world. I may be wrong of course, but it definitely has more than its fair share :-)

I'm back in Barcelona again, for the 2008 Europe Photobloggers meetup which starts this evening. I travelled over yesterday, with Paul Hargreaves, and we took a trip to the Palau Nacional (the home of the National Museum of Catalan Art). I didn't get any particularly good shots, but do like this one – a shot of the waterfall in front of the building.

We have various photo-walks planned for the next couple of days so I should be able to get back to posting a bit more regularly.

I did say that I thought that yesterday's would be the last one from my recent trip to Barcelona, and this one isn't especially striking, but there's something about the shoes under the bench that I like. And in case you're wondering about the location: the building in the background is the leftmost edge of the main building in this shot.

This is probably the last shot I'll be posting from my recent trip to Barcelona, and while I know that this style of HDR image isn't to everyone's taste, there was something about the composition of this one that made me think it was worth posting. I did try to produce a straight shot, but if you take a look at the original you'll see that there wasn't a great deal I could do with it:

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The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that all the shots I've posted from my trip to Barcelona were taken with my 24-70 and 5D. This is because I was travelling light and didn't want to take a huge amount of kit with me. One other lens that I did take though was my Holga on a lens cap as it weighs next to nothing and doesn't really take up much room. I didn't use it much, but thought it might work well with this scene. Personally, I'm happy with how it turned out, but would be interested to hear what you think.

And I should probably add that other than a minor bit of colour and contrast tweaking this is pretty much a straight shot.

This is a shot of one of the many street performers in Las Ramblas, Barcelona, and I initially thought that the shots I'd taken of this woman probably wouldn't work out. If you take a look at the straight shot you'll see why (processed with the default settings in ACR):

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So, given that the straight shot wasn't up to much, I decided to try a pseudo-HDR version (tone mapping a single RAW file using Photomatix Pro). As I hope you'll agree, this version is a big improvement.

If you ever wondered what the footprint of a world champion skier looked like, now you know. This was taken outside the Olympic Stadium in Barcelona, alongside a range of other footprints, and if you're interested the original is here:

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As you can see, I exposed to the right, to maximise the amount of data in the original capture (as described in my digital workflow tutorial), then used a couple of masked curves to bring out the details in the plaque and the surrounding concrete.

And finally: this one looks much more dramatic with the black theme.

This is the second HDR image from Barcelona that I mentioned yesterday. This one was also processed with Photomatix Pro using the Details Enhancer method, but in this case it was created from a single initial exposure rather than a bracketed sequence of shots.

As I mentioned yesterday, I prefer this one, but would be interested to hear what you think.

This is the first of two HDR images from Barcelona. This one was taken near the Olympic stadium and the tall structure to the left of the image is a communications tower. Of the two Libby prefers this one but I think that tomorrow's has the edge.

As with most of my recent HDR images this was processed with Photomatix Pro using the Details Enhancer method (as described in my HDR images: part two tutorial, but in this case I used a three shot rather than seven shot sequence (the 5D will only auto-bracket three shots while the 1Ds Mark II can shoot seven).

This was taken in Las Ramblas (Barcelona), a 1.2km promenade running through the centre of the city. As for the subject matter: I'm not quite sure why he was offering free hugs, and judging by the expression of the guy on the right, neither were most of the people walking past, but he did seem like a genuinely pleasant guy.

If you read my last entry you will know that I was trying to be a bit mysterious about where the shot was taken, but Guillermo let the cat out of the bag within twenty minutes of me posting my entry. In fact, not only did he identify the location as Barcelona, he knew the exact square in which the image was taken :-)

So, yes, yesterday's, this, and the next few images I'll post were all taken in Barcelona. I flew out there last Tuesday, provided a couple of days of training for Xavier – my host for the trip – walked the entire length and breadth of Barcelona (at least that's how it seemed), burnt the top of my less than hairy head, went sailing on a catamaran, ate great food, drank great wine, and had a thoroughly wonderful time. Thanks Xavier.

As for this one: it was taken down at the port, but beyond that I can't tell you much more about the location. All being well Guillermo will stop by and tell us the exact grid reference ;-)

My apologies for not posting this week but I've been working away since Tuesday, and when I wasn't working I was enjoying some great hospitality. I'll tell you where I've been in a day or so, but in the meanwhile I'd be interested to hear if anyone can guess. I've got some shots that give it away instantly, but I'll post a few less easily recognisable ones first :-)