When I got to Lahinch on Monday, it looked as though it had been snowing. The whole beach was covered in this foam stuff which consisted basically of sea water and sand from what I can see (look, I got absolutely covered in it). It was fascinating. Because of the way it was blowing up [...]]]>

When I got to Lahinch on Monday, it looked as though it had been snowing. The whole beach was covered in this foam stuff which consisted basically of sea water and sand from what I can see (look, I got absolutely covered in it). It was fascinating. Because of the way it was blowing up over the sea wall, it looked, on occasion, as though it were snowing. Kids had a ball in it, although I’d imagine their mothers was groaning at the mess they were making of themselves.

What fascinated me was the way the foam behaved. It looked very gloopy; a bit like condensed milk.

and it broke like waves.

I mean, look at this for a tube….

I’m off to Cornwall next week. I’m looking forward to it.

There’s usually so much I want to say on this site when I’m conveniently stuck in a traffic jam without any option to type it up, and then I go and forget it all.

Okay. The above is some crashing water near Crab Island in County Clare, taken on the May bank holiday. It’s another of [...]]]>

There’s usually so much I want to say on this site when I’m conveniently stuck in a traffic jam without any option to type it up, and then I go and forget it all.

Okay. The above is some crashing water near Crab Island in County Clare, taken on the May bank holiday. It’s another of “those” photographs. It’s fairly indicative of the power, it must be said. I like it. I’m currently trying to choose one wavy photograph to print on canvas because I think the children in Lahinch are definitely up for large printing. It’s just trying to decide which wave will join them. I’m in love with some of these photographs because they’re the first ones in years that caused me to go “whoa” when I saw what was on the camera. Imagine what I could if things were really cooperating with me.

I spend a lot of time thinking about dreams lately; I am not really sure why.

If you follow me on twitter, you may be aware of this from Sharpy, if you’re not, go click on it; it’s a truly lovely surf photograph.

In the meantime, I’m aware that we’re low on kitesurfers, low on flowers, and low on bits of non-wannabee surf scenery here lately. I would like to say I’m sorry but still….Here, have another colour wave:

We live in a lovely country. I know that we’re supposed to be remembering this, and enticing tourists but I think sometimes we forget it ourselves.

Okay. Moving swiftly onwards. Stephen Holmes is not 365ing this year but he is providing a constant stream of beauty of which this is one.

Donncha has been down on another of my regular stamping grounds, Garrettstown Beach.

Philippe Plisson (still a love affair with his photographs after all these years) has been in Arcachon, a place I love.

Milou’s Buttermere Dawn.

Frankly, lots of nice and beautiful things.

Anyway, back to the dreaming stuff I mentioned above. If you’re interested in surf photography and want to minimise the learning curve, Roger Sharp has a useful collection of pages here. I feel sort of groupyish about this but I thought there was some interesting stuff in there and if you’re the type of person sitting at home thinking you could just make it as a surf photographer, that’s not a bad place to start. An additional place to bear in mind is this from Duranbah, taken last week.

I’m not going to say surf photography never interested me – oh wait – that’s exactly what I am going to say. I always got with waves, spray, white water plus other colours. If there was some dude on a surf board – which, I gotta be frank, there generally wasn’t, I didn’t care too much. Surf photographers seem to own the waves, however so at some stage, when I got bored of freestyling kitesurfers, and started chasing waves again, particularly proper, curling waves, such as seemed to either have surfers on them, or be taken by well known surf photographers, I was going to crash into the surf photography world. It’s been quite an interesting crash. I don’t have any injuries yet. I haven’t tried all that hard though.

One of the things about kitesurfing photography when I started was that I didn’t really have any frame of reference. I didn’t know anyone else who did it, short of looking at the magazines, and I did a lot of learning through luck and fair shooting. In some respects, I’m not sure I have the luxury of all that luck and fair shooting. The competition in the surf world is massive and justifiably so. And entry to that world looks a lot easier than it did, even ten years. ago.

There’s a book on my bookshelf (there are a few actually) about big wave surfing, and in particular, some discussion about people who don’t know what they’re doing having no business looking for glory. It’s from around the time that Billabong had really big money riding on a 100 foot wave. When I look at the vast, vast number of photographers on the web, shooting surf photography, and a lot of them are really, really good (in addition to Roger Sharp I really like guys like Mickey Smith, Sean Davey, Tim McKenna to name just a couple of stand outs. And I love Michael Clark as well as Brian Bielmann – so there are all these great photographers. They make me wish I had found this path 15 years ago rather than now.

So idly I sit and dream about how I could make this happen for me instead of wishing I was born 15 years later than I actually was. I don’t know. And I know that for every one little dream I have about a magazine cover, there are maybe 1000 more people who have a better chance of doing it than me. It’s a sobering thought, and it’s the thought that might depress you if you allowed it to prey on you.

I try not to. I do, however, try to make the best photograph I can at a given point at time, and then…I try to figure out how to build fun stuff for me, instead of the stuff I can’t do.

Some day – soon -  I will make it to the North Shore.

Trish reckons I need to get in the water; the short fact is that off Doolin Point, I’m not sure that would have been a particularly good idea. This is from Sunday’s session. I want to get at an angle to the curl; despite my best efforts, the closest I got was this:

and really, after [...]]]>

Trish reckons I need to get in the water; the short fact is that off Doolin Point, I’m not sure that would have been a particularly good idea. This is from Sunday’s session. I want to get at an angle to the curl; despite my best efforts, the closest I got was this:

and really, after Sunday I can’t figure out which ones I like most.

Okay.

A couple of things. First to the serious stuff.

Anyone who spends time around here will know I spend a lot of time on Dollymount Beach in Dublin with the kitesurfing community. Currently we are holding in our thoughts one of the community who had an accident on Monday and who is still in hospital with some injuries. I wasn’t present on the day and I really don’t know what exactly happened. Right now, however, all we want is for him to get better.

Kitesurfing is not without risks – I have said this – and photographing kitesurfing is not with out risks. It doesn’t make it easier when the risks throw up the wrong result. Best wishes to him and his family. We’re rooting for you.

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In other news, what to do, what to do.

Michael Clarke is running his January surf photography course in Oahu in January again. I had to drop this 2 months ago for family reasons. I’m strongly considering it again but for various reasons cannot book it tonight. I will have to wait until tomorrow evening before I can start thinking that far apart.

Meanwhile, Lucia Griggi is running one in Cornwall, in Newquay and that also looks quite interesting. That, however, is in a month’s time, and it’s roughly around when I was planning to go to North Carolina to Triple S (until the practicalities started getting in the way) .

One of the things which interests me about both of them is neither of them seem to assume much photographic knowledge. In a way, I find that inexplicable – possibly it’s because I am sitting here with 45,000 kitesurfing photographs (and 400 surf related shots).

When I look at the problems I have with this whole thing – the fact that I feel there’s talent there that I’m not really exploiting properly (and definitely not commercially anyway – it tends to be on the networking/commercial side. Part of it is probably a tendency on my part not to shove myself forward.

I’m pencilling in doing both. Lucia’s course is easier to organise because I’ve a reasonable idea where I will be for the next four or five weeks. Unfortunately I don’t know any further than that so I can’t really confirm Hawaii at this stage. Hopefully I know more because looking at Michael’s schedule there are things which really appeal to me there.

All this blew up on me last year in many respects. I do intend to make it not blow up this year. The attraction with the course in Hawaii is I already know that I can ship over to Maui and pull some kitesurfing photographs.

In unrelated comments, I’m starting to think that second photograph is a candidate for Club of the Waves. I love the colours.

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 [...]]]> 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.

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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 like this one. I like a lot of the other shots I took yesterday as well but this one is the (current) standy out one.

Theoretically I was going [...]]]> The May bank holiday saw the kitesurfing bandwagon roll into Rosses Point, a beach I’ve visited, oh, once in my life as far as I can remember.

I like this one. I like a lot of the other shots I took yesterday as well but this one is the (current) standy out one.

Theoretically I was going to write a whole lot about all this but frankly, it’s easy. You point camera at kitesurfer, more or less into sun. You push the curve to the right. You drop a black and white layer down on top and then you get rid of the extraneous space on the side.

Later, you wonder about adding a warming photofilter. Then, 50 odd photographs later, you forget. The boys, for the most part, were complaining about scrappy conditions. The wind on high seemed to be lighter than the wind on low. Not one kitesurfer said anything other than “the wind is lousy”. Hence, not too many of them were doing aerial acrobatics. I was kind of glad I hadn’t lugged the 500mm zoom around with me. It’s nice being able to lift the camera by yourself, really.

The beach itself is really nice and I took a photographs for the purposes of the [I don't want to look at it now] ebook I’m putting together with pictures of Irish beaches in it [no seriously]. It wasn’t what you’d call busy either.

Anyway, 200 ISO so that I could up the shutter speed which left me with horrendously high shutter speeds on occasion. I mean, I don’t often see the 8000.

I’m starting to wonder about the 40D. Possibly I should have started to wonder about it before now. Its colours are very definitely flat. I seem to spend a lot more time postprocessing photograph jpgs than I did on the 350D and no RAW leaves the world without quite a bit of colour correction. That doesn’t matter so much if you’ve taken 80 photographs. On the days that you’ve taken more than 300 (like yesterday) and more than 1000 (regularly on a day in Dublin), that sucks.

I may start investigating the 7D.

Well that’s the title anyway. It’s not strictly speaking accurate as I know this surfer lives in Dublin and I know this photograph was taken in Morocco. But we did fly home the evening this picture was taken.

I’ve a yen to go travelling again. I’ve had it since about September to be honest but things [...]]]>

Well that’s the title anyway. It’s not strictly speaking accurate as I know this surfer lives in Dublin and I know this photograph was taken in Morocco. But we did fly home the evening this picture was taken.

I’ve a yen to go travelling again. I’ve had it since about September to be honest but things kept getting in the way. Holiday plans in November got hammered from several different quarters, at Christmas also. I own a ticket to Fuerteventura and should hopefully get there sometime in the next week or two. I’m looking forward to it on several grounds – my mind really needs a holiday from Ireland at this stag. Also I need different things to photograph, different places, different aspects of life. I know Fuerteventura is like European but I’m trying to toss up an ambition of making the ordinary look extraordinary and finding beauty in the mundane things we take for granted. It’s very easy to be impressed by photographs taken in exotic places; less easy to find a way of making the things around us seem special. This means I will probably spend most of the summer trying to find the photographs I have not yet taken of Howth and Clontarf with the odd foray as far as Dun Laoghaire.

The photograph above I did all sorts of things with it. My file copy suggests I applied duo tone processing to it and knowing my taste in such things I probably used yellow and black. And then converted it to black and white again. I imagine I messed around with the contrast and the curves considerably as well. I’m still debating whether I could not have gotten a similar effect with a lot less work. I suspect so.

I sometimes like to burn out the highlights in black and white shots just to emphasis contrast. I’m sure this is probably not best practice but someone once told me, with respect to Picasso or someone, that until you knew the rules you couldn’t effectively break them.

But what the hell. Here are some burned out highlights for a kitesurfer in Dublin.

The photograph was taken in June 2006; it was taken the first day I went taking kite photographs in Dublin that year (I’d taken a few in Australia a few weeks’ earlier) with a brand new, as I thought, last lens I was going to buy, 70-300mm Sigma DG APO. It cost me 199E in Conns and was a shocking amount of money to spend on camera equipment I thought at the time. By the end of the year, a 50-500mm costing 1249E had joined it more than doubling the value of my camera equipment and since then, things have gone very wrong altogether. 200E is now laughably little for a lens.

Incidently, if you’re in the market for a value for money zoom and have a Canon, the Sigma DG APO is probably the best value for money lens on the market bar none. And yes, I own the 50mm 1.8 variously known as the nifty fifty and plastic fantastic. The 50mm is cheap and feels cheap. The Sigma is cheap but has survived being dropped and soaked more than a few times. They both, if you’re competent, can be used to take great, great photographs and they both teach you to be competent. Right, enough with the lens dictatory. The weather no cooperata with LivingForLight these days as in it’s perfect while I am doing the day job and lousy when I am not doing the day job. This is very regretable.. As a result, my pink dawn plans fro the morning are probably in deep trouble.

There’s nothing very pyrotechnical about this photograph and in that, I think lies the reason I like it so much. It’s easy to make a kitesurfing photograph look great when your kitesurfer is dangling upside down in the middle of a newstyle trick. And once you have bells and whistles like autofocus and continuous shooting [...]]]>

There’s nothing very pyrotechnical about this photograph and in that, I think lies the reason I like it so much. It’s easy to make a kitesurfing photograph look great when your kitesurfer is dangling upside down in the middle of a newstyle trick. And once you have bells and whistles like autofocus and continuous shooting they are not necessarily that hard to shoot.

The mundane can be a lot harder to make interesting and maybe this is not so interesting; but for some reason I’ve always loved it.

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Links for today (sorry – they are late)

Golden Gate Bridge at Sunset by Kevin Dobler.

Yellowstone West Thumb and Canyon revisited by Laurie

Playing with High Noon – Moose Peterson

Boards by milou

The Eagle Hunters – Art Wolfe

and

PHOTOWALK.IE – if you are based in Ireland you really should give a look at this.

I’m not sure what to say about this. It was taken with a 350D and a 70-300mm Sigma zoom. I’ve always liked Sigma lenses. There was a lot of haze for this photograph.

I have this yen to do lots of black skies but it’s difficult to find a balance when you have a volcanic mountain [...]]]>

I’m not sure what to say about this. It was taken with a 350D and a 70-300mm Sigma zoom. I’ve always liked Sigma lenses. There was a lot of haze for this photograph.

I have this yen to do lots of black skies but it’s difficult to find a balance when you have a volcanic mountain to deal with. Not that it’s any excuse. Sometimes I’m just looking to create an atmosphere.

I’m back to the Canary Islands in about 2 weeks’ time all going according to plan. I do want to have some fun there with the travel photography; I hope I get a lot more clear blue skies. Given some fortune I could get some startling things. I’m looking forward to it.