Today being Saint Patrick’s Day there’s a surfeit of shamrockery around the web, and I have decided not to post pictures of Guinness glasses.
Yesterday evening, the main evening news in Ireland on RTE at 6pm had a little featurette not on majorettes, but on the National Photographic Archive which now has a significant whack of its collection online. I spent an interesting few hours wandering around it last night, it, and the 1911 Census causing an argument over a mismatch between family recollection of what my great grandfather actually did do in Achill at the time, and what the Census form claimed of him. In between calculating the ages of my grandparents in 1911 and trying work out what addresses in 1911 equated to in today’s terms (given the townland thing in Ireland, this is not unusual), I also wandered around the Photographic Archive out of idle interest. Specifically I looked at photographs for two towns: Charleville, Co Cork and Killarney Co Kerry. Also saw some photographs of Blennerville in Co Kerry.
I know that Ireland has changed immeasurably in my life time, both from how it looks to how it thinks. There’s evidence of major social change every day on the radio at the moment. But it’s easy to forget just what Ireland looked like 100 years ago. When I looked at one of the photographs of the Main Street in Charleville Co Cork, I had some difficulty orienting myself on one photograph because the hotel that was the most obvious feature on the photograph, the Royal Hotel, is long, long gone. I never remember it at all, and I can remember quite a few shops and things that are gone. The Munster & Leinster Bank, for example, is now the AIB – it is painted bright yellow and doesn’t really resemble the stone built building in another photograph. The big one though was the tree planted in front of the Protest Church – you cannot see the church itself but it is now the public library in Charleville. In one photograph, you can see the construction work on the then new Catholic Church – as far as I remember from my local history, it opened in 1902. The photograph is dated 1890-1900. The old Catholic Church which is now a community hall – was hidden down a side street. When I was a child, it was called the Parochial Hall and I was in many concerts there.
It’s worth looking at the photographs from Killarney as well. In one respect, the overwhelming impression I had of the shots I looked at yesterday evening were extraordinarily good photographs given the equipment at the time. In the other respect, my modern mind could not stop complaining about blown out skies. Even then, I guess, Irish skies were frequently unhelpfully covered in white cloud Some of the photographs show change – how Ross Castle and Muckross Friary have been cleaned up to some extent – some seem curiously timeless – the jarveys – sort of – and Torc Waterfall.
It’s hard to know where to start with the exploration of the photographs. A cursory glance has revealed some interesting shots from Cashel and Achill Island amongst others. See here for Patrick Street in Cork with the Paris Photographic Studio right on the corner of Patrick Street and the Grand Parade and a tram in front of what I think is now Waterstones Booksellers. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind, another project involving this is starting to crystallise.
John Williams has been showing photographs of Howth recently, including the marina. Here is a photograph of Howth from before the marina was built.
__________________________________________
I recently saw some outstanding photographs of Paris taken in the 1860s. I am delighted that you can get access to some photographs of Ireland at the time. We have a bunch of photographers – Tommie Lehane springs to mind as does Donncha O’Caoimh who are doing sterling work in documenting our now time. In a quiet corner of my mind, I wonder if I do enough to record now compared to other people.
I’d strongly recommend a wander around the archive if you’ve time. It may not always be obvious how to find things (the amount of information in there can be overwhelming) but there are some serious gems to be found.
Dun Laoghaire. Every time I go there, I hear this line from a song by Bagatelle when I was a kid.
So i jumped on a bus to dun laoire, stoppin’ off to pick up my guitar
Thing is I’ve been there taking photographs a few times in the last few months alright between the perfume, the long exposures and various stuff. It’s getting less foreign to venture to the south side. Today, the choice was basically Skerries, Howth, Dun Laoghaire or Clontarf. In the end I went with Dun Laoghaire because it tends to be busier and I wanted to shoot a time lapse. I have been talking about these for ages and equipped myself to do them about 5 months ago. It was a lovely afternoon, so I went out to do it today.
The time lapse is currently compiling veeeeerrrrrrrrrrryyyyyyyyyyyy slowly but from the individual frames as I swiftly went through the near 700 of them, this one caught my eye.
The camera wasn’t obviously doing anything; just sitting on the bench beside me – I hadn’t wanted to put up a tripod for this one despite owning a shiny new very light and just about able for this camera gear traveltripod from the nice people at Manfrotto. It was shooting off a 10-20mm wide angle at around 16mm I think. If I had been 20 minutes earlier, there would have been a sailing race in the background. But there were kids, loads of kids on scooters and the one thing that astonished me – I was sitting on the end of the bench watching the camera and playing games on my iphone – was how close people came to me. One of them was this kid. I don’t think I could have posed this shot to be honest, and if I had the camera in my hand looking as though I was going to do something. The camera was hidden in plain sight however, on a bench beside me, shooting 700 shots for a crazy little film project as a test run.
I don’t do street photography – there are people who are far, far better at it than I could ever be – but this really appealed to me. I’ve a handful of over shots that I’ve lucked into getting in the past – when I try to do this, it really doesn’t work.
The hard part about all this is that because I was shooting a timelapse, and needed an uninterrupted run on a 2gig card, I shot it in jpg to get as many shots as possible. So there is no camera RAW file for this, just the jpg. I don’t usually regret it but it would have been nice on this occasion.
Going back a little bit with this one. I’m pretty sure it was the macro lens, and I have no idea what I was doing playing with fire. Trying to light the gas fire I’d say; it typically took three to six attempts most days.
This was up on Dancing Shades of Light before that site died last year. I was idly looking at stats on flickr and I discover it’s still the most viewed photograph I have there, now 1500 views plus. I remember when it hit about 800 and I thought, fantastic, nothing is going to beat that ever.
Looking at it now I can see various technical issues – I hadn’t done that many of these, and actually, this is still the biggest one I’ve done. Depending on how many frames you’ve got and and far off the end of the zoom you are they take a greater or lesser amount of time to complete. I think this took about 4-6 hours. It’s still the biggest I’ve done.
It was shot with a 50-500mm zoom lens and stitched together painstakingly in Photoshop. At the time I didn’t use layermasks much (although I use them ubiquitously in the photomanipulations now turning up on the DigitalFX site) and I didn’t have a graphics tablet. The big challenge with this too was the sheer number of frames. I think I had 23 separate frames to glue together. The ones I did before typically maxed out at 12 and because the time lapse between frames was twice as long, there tended to be more space between the kitesurfer in each frame, so less painstaking painting to be done across bits of body, lines, bar, board.
It got a huge reaction at the time. Typically, when Eamon saw it, he pointed out the imperfections on the kitesurfing front. Kite not low enough.
The second most viewed shot on the flickr stream is this one:
which was done sometime later for Francois. While it’s probably technically a better stitch, I had no room to straighten the horizon and so for me, it’s always the one that could have been the greatest of them all.
And I lost a frame out of this one some how.
When you do something like this for someone who doesn’t see it coming, their reaction tends to be great. That reaction is what makes you do it again, and again, huddled over a computer, lining up horizons, trying not to swear about where a wayward hand lands versus a brightly coloured board.
After a rather trying time with a composite work, I was advised by Richard to go out in the sunshine. So I did. All the way to Wicklow.
I didn’t have any real plan in mind but wound up as far south as Brittas Bay. I kept hearing about Brittas Bay but really and truly, all it is is a huge beach and today it didn’t do Beach for me. So after looking at it for about 5 minutes and idly wishing the wind turbines were a touch closer, I got back in the car and drove to Wicklow. Where I passed this.
According to my reading of the map, this is Wicklow Head Lighthouse. You can walk a good part of the way to it past some sheep (and little lambs – some of which were black and very cute but very running away) and some cattle. You might be able to get closer but I was playing chicken with the sun which was on its way down behind an inconveniently located Wicklow mountain. So I went for the lighthouse.
Anyone who knows me at all well knows that Philippe Plisson is probably my favourite photographer in the world and he is particularly well known for some superlative shots of the lighthouses in Brittany. There is also some really hot stuff by Jean Guichard but what both of them have in common is a lot of photographs of lighthouses. I like lighthouses. I like them a lot. There’s something lonely sentinel about them. This one is a bit like that. I’d like to have a go off it at dawn when the sun is arriving rather than when it’s disappearing, and also from a bit closer with a 10-20. But I like this; there’s something warm about it.
A little while later, after I’d played with a castle and some filters, I had a look at the harbour light and this is what I got.
I think there might have been one filter left on – it was getting dark enough to stretch the exposures without using the filters anyway.
I quite like both of them to be honest; they might be the nicest lighthouse shots I’ve done. While I was in the harbour area in Wicklow a man told me I should have been there 2 weeks ago, the sky was an amazing pink. Que faire?
Anyway, this is from my big day out today. I wound up in Wicklow with the objective of adding to the Abandoned Boats collection but that just didn’t happen because I was distracted with ruins and lighthouses.
The blue cast comes from the plate that the melting ice cube was sitting on. It was lit with one on camera Speedlite.
One of the nice things about spring springing up like it is in Dublin at the moment is the world looks a whole lot better. I don’t know about you but the winter seemed to be particularly grey this year. Now, the music sounds happier, the photographs look brighter, the evenings are longer. It’s all good on the photography front provided I go out and take some photographs
This is a sunset over the Bay of Angels in Nice. The airport is off to the left as you look at the photograph, and I’ve been told the cloud looks a bit like a UFO. I didn’t really notice that at the time.
I’m planning the purchase of a new camera bag and a new tripod. I saw a tripod I liked last week and I quite fancy it. It’s not for my heavy lenses – I am using the zooms less and less anyway – but for the macro lens in particular, the 50mm to play with DOF and stuff. The camera bag is an effort to deal with something which I learned last week which is that I hate lugging loads of camera equipment around. Really hate it and what’s more I don’t especially need to lug it all around. I figured this out last week when I realised I only used 2 of the 5 lenses I brought with me and never took out the flash at all. I did, however, use the filters, quite a lot.
But basically I am a wimp and find the lugging of the gear around rather too much.
Now for a couple of other vaguely photography related matters.
Someone passed this link from the Daily Mail to me about a South Africa based photographer who went to rather great lengths to get some – admittedly outstanding – wildlife photographs.
Having spent about 30 seconds considering it, I have decided that no photograph I could ever take is worth contracting malaria for.
Big Shots for 25 February via Boston.com. The first photograph, the surf shot is one of the best I have ever seen. The beauty is I was watching Mavericks online via their ustream feed and it was brilliant but the screen was just too small.
Way back in the days I used to shoot film, I had a small Tamrac camera bag that was a backpack, carried my camera, the two lenses I had and an insane quantity of film. When I got the 70-250mm, it taxed things a little but this is life. I got over it.
Now, I have a couple of Lowe camera bags; the big one and the small one. The small one is bigger than the Tamrac; but it’s smaller than the big one. The big one goes everywhere with me; if I’d any sense I’d bring the small one as well and decant. But it’s hard to pack two camera bags when you’re paying attention to airline luggage restrictions. The big one is already a battle.
At the moment, it has in it – if you haven’t seen it – a 40D, a 100mm 2.8, a 50mm 1.8, a 70-300mm, a 17-85mm and a 10-20mm, a 580 EX II and an array of filters. And it is heavy. It would be heavier still if I didn’t happen to leave the 50-500mm zoom at home.
I hate carrying the camera bag. I never actually realised just how much I hated it until this morning. I picked up the camera, and tossed up between the 17-85 and the 50. The 50 is sharp yes, but it lacks range, and it was bright outside. I was not likely to desperately need the speed of the 50 although I might regret the depth of field. I spent the day shooting with the 17-85 and just one memory card. And it might be the best fun I’ve had in ages. I walked miles, something which is soul-destroying with the full camera bag. I can understand why a lot of Art Wolfe’s photography is coming out of an iPhone lately. It means you don’t have to lug a full camera bag around.
The 17-85mm is a very useful range. I would like it to be a little faster and so am toying with a 24-70mm. I’ve been advised that on a crop sensor, this is not really wide enough at the short end. Unfortunately the alternatives, the 18-55 for example, are nowhere near long enough at the long end. If Canon or someone produced a 2.8 17-70 or so I’d be quite happy with them.
I didn’t take any great photographs today, the one above notwithstanding, but I got more on average out of the day which given the weather conditions (bleh and cloudy) was nice. And okay I had to fake the tripod and filters lark with the waterfall and still blew out the sky highlights, but I managed. Sometimes, it is no bad thing to walk away from all the gear and actually take photographs within some practical constraints like “this is the only lens I’ve got with me”.
The one above, I am thinking about putting into black and white although there’s something about the warmth of the colours that appeals to me. More than anything the toy cars appealed to me. They are a very nostalgic shape.
Today, a little faster shutter speed than last night. Although…I had ideas…I just didn’t have a tripod or a filter with me and to be frank I was running out of card space as well.
Met a young photographer, well young, I guess he was 10 years younger than me, or else his plastic was very good. He had a 450D and he had a problem with it. He was glad I had a Canon; he thought I’d be able to answer his question which was why, on continuous shooting, in aperture priority or fully manual would the wretched thing only shoot 2 shots at a time consecutively. As mine would do 16 RAW and I’ve never used a 450D I was at a loss to help him; in sports mode he said it would do 3.5 per camera spec. I’d be miffed. I tried to locate a manual for the 450D online but the EDGE network in that part of Nice sucked. Losers all round.
Plus it’ll cost me a fortune in data roaming charges.
Anyway.
Today I did interesting things like take a camera up in the Ferris wheel and got this:
which usefully has some snow coloured Alps in the background. I like snow covered Alps, particularly in the background. When I was in snow covered Alps on Tuesday they were damn cold.
Some of the photographs show change – how Ross Castle and Muckross Friary have been cleaned up to some extent – some seem curiously timeless – the jarveys – sort of – and Torc Waterfall.
Recent Comments