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).

Tommy has also been in Kerry.

Donncha is flagging the photowalk in Cork – today is the last day for the hotel room draw.