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.

I really haven’t been out taking many kite photographs much for the last year or two, and most of what I have done has been fairly easy for want of a better description with a few key exceptions. This, however, is one of the older photographs, and it dates from about 2007 or 2008 when [...]]]>

I really haven’t been out taking many kite photographs much for the last year or two, and most of what I have done has been fairly easy for want of a better description with a few key exceptions. This, however, is one of the older photographs, and it dates from about 2007 or 2008 when I bought a 10-20 mm lens. The weather was mixed on the day, blazing sunshine interspersed with mad clouds. There weren’t too many kitesurfers out, mainly because there wasn’t too much wind. Francois spent most of the day launching off the outflow pipe on Sutton Beach that day and that’s what allowed me to do things like this.

This is one of my favourite photographs and one of my friends reckons it might be the best photograph I’ve ever taken. I’m not so sure I agree but I have to say that there are things I like about this photograph and it’s one of the few hanging in my house at present. I like the extremes of contrast in it.

I got some great photographs that day mainly because the light was so absolutely fantastic. From a kitesurfing view though, there isn’t much to run around about; there was so little wind.

I’m in the process of looking at putting new portfolios together- this I think will make it in.

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.

This was taken on a flickr photography trip in Dublin two or three years ago. It’s one of those photographs which seems to have caught people’s attention. I know for example that there are three copies of it gone to Poland and it has caused discussion the one or two times it hit People’s Photography. [...]]]>

This was taken on a flickr photography trip in Dublin two or three years ago. It’s one of those photographs which seems to have caught people’s attention. I know for example that there are three copies of it gone to Poland and it has caused discussion the one or two times it hit People’s Photography.

It’s the Millenium Spire in Dublin with reflections of Clerys and Clerys itself in the background. I like the photograph because it has somewhat of a film noir atmosphere about it. I can’t remember exactly how I did it but selective use of film grain looks like it was an option and I must have applied some filter at some stage because there’s a slightly cartoonish hint on the roof of the department store. I honestly can’t remember. It was processed with Photoshop Elements 5.0 because at that stage I had given up on constant memory issues with the Gimp – yes Donncha and Richard I know, it should work but at the time it didn’t – and I know that I never really knew PSE anywhere near as well as I now know Photoshop CS3. I suspect posterisation and I suspect selectively applied.

I have a yen to do this to the clock in Saint Stephen’s Green.

I missed an opportunity to do a fantastic timelapse last week because I just didn’t know something was going to be erected. I’m considering looking for clearance to do a timelapse of it coming down. My fingers are crossed.

This was taken in my parents’ backgarden yesterday. It’s one of the first photographs I took for 2010. Although it didn’t really yesterday, it’s pretty close to how I feel right now. Tired and a little colourless. I drove from Cork today and although it didn’t take as long as it could have done given [...]]]>

This was taken in my parents’ backgarden yesterday. It’s one of the first photographs I took for 2010. Although it didn’t really yesterday, it’s pretty close to how I feel right now. Tired and a little colourless. I drove from Cork today and although it didn’t take as long as it could have done given the forecast, I’d have preferred not to hear RTE complaining about how ice covered the M7 was in Kildare. All it did was serve to wear me out before I got to the M7 in Kildare, which, when they were still complaining about it being completely iced up, wasn’t, actually, completely iced up. No matter. I’m here now. M50 in Dublin, on the other hand, and the carpark at the local Tesco…well they left me a bit cold.

The original plan was to write a piece on how wonderful Peter Lik is, but I left the book at home so that will have to wait for another day.

She cost 6.99 in Atlantic Homecare, bought when I expected to use her as fodder for experimenting with the 50mm 1.8 that everyone apparently should have. She is a mass produced dust gatherer currently living on my mantlepiece because I haven’t found it in my heart to dump her or find [...]]]> So, okay, here’s the mermaid.

She cost 6.99 in Atlantic Homecare, bought when I expected to use her as fodder for experimenting with the 50mm 1.8 that everyone apparently should have. She is a mass produced dust gatherer currently living on my mantlepiece because I haven’t found it in my heart to dump her or find a box for her in the so called hobby room. Today, I decided to take her out because I was playing with DSLR Remote Shooter on the iPhone. It apparently has an intervalometer. I had visions of also being able to tell it to leave the camera open for oh, 15 minutes at a time – star trails, don’t you know and the moon is pretty funky tonight.

If it does that, I haven’t figured out out yet. I could use it as an intervalometre to do a timelapse but as I need a computer nearby, that rules out some of the time lapses I have in mind. Anyway, tonight, I took down the mermaid and her sister the fairy to play with my flash, my remote wireless shooter thing (the iPhone that requires the computer and the camera to be connected so the next thing I want is some sort of a wireless connection between the computer and the camera – dang it this is expensive), and got the 580 Speedlite and the box of gels.

That turned out to be a fiasco so after half an hour, I was playing with a maglite torch instead. The picture above was lit using the Maglite torch and it probably had a green gel on it at the time.

Here is the fairy – lit with the maglite -

and lit with the Speedlite.

Oh yeah, that probably had a pink gel on it.

From this experiment I have learned things. Namely, the fairy sucks as a model. Her face is really at the wrong angle to get anywhere near an adequate bit of light on it. As 6.99 goes, it was not, I fear well spent.

Also, when I am doing these things, I need to wear black clothes. I destroyed something like 60 photographs by appearing in them – very blurry – myself.

The intervalometer doesn’t quite work as I expect it. Having coughed up 19.99 for it out of my birthday iTunes vouchers, this is a touch disappointing. You can control the whole camera with it, however, so at some point in the future when I feel like experimenting with self portraits again, I might feel it’s more worth the money. It managed to convince itself the camera was on burst mode so typically took about 5 photographs without my input either. That added to the wastage.

Sometimes twenty euro worth of torch is a better lighting tool than 500E worth of Canon Speedlite.

There are elements of the flash lit Fairy that I like. I hate the fact that the angle of her face screwed it up big time. For that…hmmm. I could never quite get the light from behind her head to work properly without the thing looking into a giant Fail at lightpainting. But my favourite of the three shots is the Maglite lit mermaid.

Would I do this again? Well, it’s hard to say. My living room sucks as a studio and I had to block off all the standby lights using remote controls.

All told, I’m sorry I didn’t take one of the tiny lighthouses and go to Poolbeg to do some forced perspective on lighthouses instead. The fact that it’s freezing cold may have something to do with it though.

This is just by way of something to decorate the walls of this post.

Joe McNally – who is fast becoming one of my favourite photography bloggers – has a piece here which I’d be hard pushed to describe. It’s a story of looking at life from the direction of a photographer who – basically – [...]]]>

This is just by way of something to decorate the walls of this post.

Joe McNally – who is fast becoming one of my favourite photography bloggers – has a piece here which I’d be hard pushed to describe. It’s a story of looking at life from the direction of a photographer who – basically – just stumbled through life without any Grand Design and ended up where he is because he is who he is. It’s a letter to a young photographer. It’s worth reading from two perspectives; the letter itself, and secondly, the comments – of which there are a large number – from readers.

Joe McNally caught my attention because of this book. He sort of works in an area of photography that I can’t get my head around, but he is a super writer (see the rest of his blog) that makes everything feel very accessible. He pops up with Strobist quite a bit as well.

Anyway. The interesting part about this is that people keep suggesting that I might like to go into photography full time. The really interesting part about this is that when I was 14 years old I wanted to teach English in French secondary schools and now that I’m 20 years older than that, I know I don’t want to teach English in French secondary schools (I know this because I did this) and no one would have forecast when I graduated DCU in 1994 that I’d be a) in Dublin b) working in IT.

Life has an odd way of ignoring the plans you make for it. And your destiny is not set in stone at the age of 19.

I’ve mixed feelings about this. I can’t see myself doing the money stuff in photography – namely weddings and football – and yet, the odds of making a living doing the stuff I love – kitesurfing and quirky little things that you’d never see coming like Newbridge silver lighthouses (for which I’ve another plan ngngngngnh)

and pianos. I haven’t worked out how to make a living out of these things yet.

The hard part is that working at something you love – particularly when it brings a load of paperwork – is hard going.

I don’t know if I have the guts to do it.