|
||||
|
|
I’m slowly working through the back catalogue. It’s a weird experience. Anyway, a handful of photographs got out of this trip but I never really looked at the rest in too much detail. Here is Alberto Rondina during one of the heats for the invitational freestyle in Portugal. I enjoyed that week but the wind was somewhat limited.
I actuall looking through the archive for other purposes but so much of it is kitesports related…it’s almost scary. It rained yesterday. I have a macro lens. and a clothes line and a large population of spiders in the garden.
I like this. ETA: and so did the nice people at Pixie where it has been voted TOTD. Yay. Yesterday was the third annual Scott Kelby World Photowalk. I’d forgotten it was coming up. Anyway, this time, John Williams took us west rather than east. I tend to prefer east – probably because it takes me towards my more natural stomping ground of the sea. We wound up in tourism heaven, Temple Bar and had a walk around there, around the food market. I had a lot of fun with Faye. When the dust finally settled and I took everything back off the camera, two photographs caught my attention somewhat unexpectedly. This was one.
The reason for that was that I had been trying to collect an image for something like this. I was out on the 50mm at 1.8 but wasn’t quite getting the crowd with one individual in the razorsharp DOF so basically abandoned the idea until I got home. The photograph has taken some composition by way of motion blur. It’s not the first time I’ve tried this – see here also:
although obviously I fired in some halftone filtering here also. I’m currently looking for a photographic project to grab me. I don’t quite know what’s wrong – it may be the lousy summer I had last year which left me with very few standout sports photographs, it may be the lack of challenge in the kite photographs at the moment – short of moving a camera onto a board, there is little for me to play with now that I have the wide angles working for me and stuff. So yesterday I spent in Easons for about a half an hour before the Photowalk wandering around the magazine and book section. By the way, Easons are flogging Ocean by Philippe Plisson for 6.99 at the moment. It is definitely worth getting. (but that’s by the way). I’m looking at larger projects at the moment; there’s a book project in the offing for which I have to go through the archive and pick 145 photographs and then start work on writing the accompanying text. But that will largely be based on historic photographs. Amongst the things that have caught my attention lately is this piece that James Bowden did for Driftsurfing. Actually there are some nice things in that magazine altogether. I did look at the photography magazines but they are not talking to me much at the moment so I went back to my first love, which is the surf magazines. I picked up two I think (meant to pick up Surfer Girl as well but forgot). There’s a very retro style about some of the surf magazines at the moment – you can see this in the James Bowden piece (and by the way, James Bowden blogs here). It’s not so common in some of the kitesurfing stuff which I suppose could be considered understandable since kitesurfing has a far shorter history than surfing. So in addition to the book which I’m slowly putting together, and trying to find some of the lost photographs for (the loss of the dancingshades site has caused a lot of photographs just to get forgotten) I’m looking at putting some other smaller projects together. Again, the problem with them is they don’t call for much in the way of new photographs but amongst the interesting tools which I think I might use – which I’m shamelessly borrowing from someone else’s research – is issuu. In other news, picked up a new book yesterday which, much to my surprise, Easons had – and they hid it in the computer section where they stash all the Photoshop bookage. It’s called Digital Masters: Adventure Photography and it’s by Michael Clark. I hadn’t heard of Michael Clark – I suppose it’s a sad reflection on my introverted little world that I know mainly the kitesurf photographers – but his website is here and I picked up the book because leaving through it – all too briefly – the photography in it was impressive enough, even in sports I’m not so au fait with (ATB for example) and I noted that he actually did have a piece on how to handle being an adventure photographer in terms of extraneous equipment you might need….Anyway, there’s some impressive stuff on his website and I’m looking forward to getting stuck into the book. Okay. Under the heading of community projects worth looking at, boards.ie/photography have been busy again. You’ll find their 24 hour magazine here. (and you wonder how I have heard of issuu).
I’ve come to the conclusion that other people are better at selecting jewellery for me than I am. This is from one of my friends who thought a necklace that featured some element of the sea was suitable for someone like me. The blue piece of glass is seaglass. You can collect seaglass on most beaches; it’s broken glass rounded by the action of the sea. Based on what I see by way of broken glass on local beaches to me, I won’t see to much in the way of this beautiful blue as clear glass and brown glass is favoured for “breaking on the beach” purposes in Dollymount. The necklace also features a silver starfish and a freshwater pearl. It really is very beautiful. This got taken because I was playing with light and a macro lens this afternoon. Today is an auspicious day. It’s the first day in about a month that no one else is screaming for me to do stuff for them. It’s a nice feeling, although I feel guilty that I’m not doing all the housework, but lounging around dreaming up excuses not to go swimming. I did, however, do two things today. I broke a wine glass, and I bought cherries.
and I combined them into a photograph taken with my macro lens. It’s pretty obvious that I haven’t been taking photographs much lately, sorry about that, and all that jazz. I’ve not been carrying the camera around which is a bad thing. Cherries rock.
They formed dessert today. I haven’t read my feedreader lately so no interesting links to pass on at the moment,. I’ve been quiet of late for various reasons. But to tide over the tedium, two shots from Howth.
Dublin Bay from Howth Head, lost one day.
Harbour life. ___________________ Because I’ve been busy, SOFOBOMO didn’t happen for me. It did, however, happen for Jamie so see here. Via the syco on boards: this from Charleville Castle - Do not load this on dial up. Stephen’s on a date. Shane is in Clogherhead. John is at the fairground. Strangely enough, it seems like all I have been doing lately is shooting pictures of people. So, from the last month or two, here are a few.
Taking pictures of people is not something that necessarily comes naturally to me. Most of these were done, I think, with the 50mm 1.8. There may be a couple of 17-85s thrown in there as well. In links, what do I have. Julie has little treats. Phil has handprints. Jennifer is on Moore Street. Darren’s abandoned farmhouse. Tommie…well…words as usual not adequate. Stephen’s weather is altogether different. Louise’s puffins. Okay, that’s it for now. This weekend was the annual Battle for the Bay which is generally afflected with a massive lack of wind. There was less this year than last year, which is saying a lot. The sun shone on Saturday though; it did not on Sunday so there was dancing in the rain and stuff. Anyway, I took a few photographs; not too many, just a few to play with.
One of the major sponsors of the event is Red Bull and they have a fleet of Minis. And a big tent. They also have a big Dodge too but I’ll come to that in a while. I like messing with cars. Not Minis so much but I had a ball at Japfest last year. I didn’t really know quite what to do with the Minis – there were 4 Red Bull Minis and 3 Spin 1038 Minis and apart from getting down on your hands and knees with a 10-20, there’s not a lot else of interest. At some stage though, the clouds caught my eye, and I lined up the pyramid behind it. The Dodge was nowhere to be seen but that’s just a small price. The biggest hassle was realising the Mini had a dent on it. Darn it anyway. I wanted a slightly more ominous cloud so I poured a pile of sepia paint onto the sky and bumped up the contrast a little. Had to undo that for the car which got overly dark after that. I seem to wind up photographing these things in the rain. I should possibly have tried the day before but at most I got a couple of the Spin girls in front of their Minis and while the photo is nice, it’s not cover of a magazine nice. I’m heavily influenced by the cover of car magazine, basically, and maybe a little TopGear thrown in now and again. If I were doing this again, I’d try and get the front wheels of the car turned out a little. Here’s the Dodge.
I’d love to know where they got it. I saw it for the first time last year or the year before, can’t remember which now and it’s amazing what they’ve done to it. Megapimped up. I love it. I pushed this as far into the high keys as I could so it’s a bit burnet out looking. I’m toying with painting out extraneous stuff in the background and then seeing if I can get more of the sand back in to a floor texture. Could be fun. Not doing it now though. Right. Now for some pointing out of nice things that other people are doing. Richard is recreating Jack Vettriano scenes. I’ve known about this for a while but since I haven’t been posting myself I haven’t actually flagged it. Today’s one is really lovely though so here’s a link to it. Triple S is on in Hatteras at the moment. I planned to get over to it this year but for various reasons, a short trip to North Carolina just wasn’t possible. Day 2 looks like it was a stunner – certainly Bryan Elkus has a few really hot shots from yesterday. I used to do the singer songwriter evenings in the International years ago, at the same time as Damien Dempsey in fact. Which is why this one of Tommie’s caught my eye. That being said, I wouldn’t go so far as to say Damien Dempsey gives me hope…per se. Another place I might have been had I not been in Dublin is Galway for the powerboat racing. Count on John Smyth to pick up something nice there, however I’m also slightly behind in my feedreader which is why I missed this diving special from Big Shots. I’ve tried springboard diving. Respect; that’s all I’ll say. Update. I haven’t been in here much, but this is the retouched version of the RedBull Dodge above.
I am biased of course, but I like it…. I apologise for the lack of updates (ish) lately. Been busy.
This was taken at a kite competition a few weeks ago. When I say that it was freezing cold if you came off the water, I’m not joking. Her hands were freezing cold. Hence the image. This sucked in colour; worked a lot better in black and white, so I can’t complain as I blew out the back highlights in exposing correctly for the neoprene and shadowed faces. _______________________________________________ In other news, my camera is gone to camera hospital somewhere in Hertfordshire. It’s a 40D and I have had it about 15 months. On Sunday, the shutter started giving problems – not responding 20% of the time. It got very frustrating inside 10 minutes to be honest. It arrived at a Canon service centre in the UK this morning after I wound up jumping through some complicated hoops including An Post, the Irish postal service, and DHL yesterday afternoon and I am told that for a consideration of X amount of money, the camera will be repaired along with a couple of problems on my flash which I sent back as well because it too had been causing trouble. As I don’t do a huge amount of flash photography, that hadn’t been so urgent, but since I was packing stuff up, I thought, two birds, etc, etc. I’m not altogether happy about this. It’s my second 40D as people who know me are well aware and while this one isn’t yet dead, it’s a bit not nice to have a second one in hospital. I have to say that in fairness, the service agents have been exceptionally helpful on this occasion (tip – bypass ISS). Anyway, the net impact of that is that I miss the next photowalk which is in Clare, boo, and am hoping that the volcano doesn’t delay the return of my baby to me. I now have an ebook up on the site which has 25 pictures of Irish beaches. The link is here and you are more than welcome to have a look at it. It is in pdf format and as advance working, it is a 31 MB file. As a taster, here is a look at Inchydoney in Cork.
It’s a beautiful day in Dublin today but by way of stuff to do I am sitting here building new websites and trying to sort out a few online details. There will be a new gallery going up on my main official website later on today and at the moment I am sorting out some other blog related details. But I think the garden is calling quite loudly. |
|||
|
Copyright © 2010 Living for Light - All Rights Reserved |
||||
Recent Comments