Summer in Dublin – let’s pretend anyway

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.

Okay. Enough about me.

Richard was up early this morning.

John Smyth was up early during the week.

I have never managed to see Balbriggan quite like Darren does.

Louise is currently posting Austria.

Ronan’s blog had its birthday during the week. But of the week’s shots, this is the one I liked most.

John Williams has been in Howth.

There’s a distinctly nautical theme developing here I think.

Shane fecked off over to New York and bright back this beauty.