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.

I had just two ideas going in there. 1) emulate one tiny snippet out of a Ricky Martin video (start of Living La Vida Loca for anyone who is [...]]]> I was at Japfest yesterday, a guest of Mondello Park who invited 21 photographers in on a photowalk to see, basically what they would come up with.

I had just two ideas going in there. 1) emulate one tiny snippet out of a Ricky Martin video (start of Living La Vida Loca for anyone who is really interested) and 2) try and emulate some of the colour work I see in Car Magazine. Well I didn’t watch the Ricky Martin video so wasn’t looking at the back side of the cars really, and the light didn’t really lend itself to having much fun with colour.

Also, an awful lot of the souped up Japanese cars in Ireland are black, and black does not work on a day when the sky is dark and murky. Yesterday it was horrifically bad.

So I took 400 plus photographs and although I’m not all that happy with that many of them, I should be able to pick out about 5 for Mondello’s benefit.

John Fair took care of us while we were in Mondello and I have to say hands up, he did a terrific job for us. I spend a lot of time shooting dangerous sports – not maybe as dangerous as motor racing can be but I know what risk is. The staff at Mondello were really helpful.

I didn’t get that much of the racing. I can’t pan so I have to fake it.

This is about as good as that gets. I much prefer the static stuff. Ironically, Neill Watson is involved in a supercar shooting tutorial the day after tomorrow and there’s a part of me sorry I didn’t make an effort to go. I like shooting cars, supercars and I think that I could have fun with these things.

I took this on my very first photowalk with “other” photographers about 3 years ago, in Kerry. It’s taken from Brandon Head as far as I remember.

I started going through old photographs last night to see what had changed in the way I look at photographs and noticed that the way I look at photographs, [...]]]>

I took this on my very first photowalk with “other” photographers about 3 years ago, in Kerry. It’s taken from Brandon Head as far as I remember.

I started going through old photographs last night to see what had changed in the way I look at photographs and noticed that the way I look at photographs, and their colours in particular.

This one is from Dollymount Strand:

I’ve taken such a lot of photographs over the past 4 years that sometimes it’s hard to remember them all. So this exercise in part is a way to discover old friends languishing on a hard drive and it’s also a way to remind myself what I used to do before the kitesurfing and the filters and the macro lens.

More links:

via Tim Turnbull – open source digital camera in the works from Stanford University.

via everyone I know on twitter, a few people known to myself get reviewed in the Irish Independent.

via Amazing Photos: Sacramento Bee on the earthquake in Java.

the Big Picture at boston.com on the wildfires in California

Nice little list of places to photograph in Dublin courtesy of AnCatDubh on boards.ie.

I threw this up on FaceBook and on twitter earlier. From twitter there was a request to actually do the blog entry I threatened, and on FaceBook I was asked if this was a montage of several photographs. So I thought I’d better do the blog entry.

The photograph is a single shot taken from a [...]]]>

I threw this up on FaceBook and on twitter earlier. From twitter there was a request to actually do the blog entry I threatened, and on FaceBook I was asked if this was a montage of several photographs. So I thought I’d better do the blog entry.

The photograph is a single shot taken from a freak angle with a 50-500mm zoom lens which is sort of soft at the far end. I had wanted to see if I could get a really sweet shot of a kitesurfer jumping above the masts of the Jeannie Johnson when she was a bit further out but none of the gorgeously good looking dudes who are kind enough to pose for me on the water actually jumped in exactly the place I wanted them to jump. But when I was going through the 500 odd photographs I took yesterday, this was there.

I discovered that the ship was too far away to do anything much with – way out of the field of focus, plus the photograph was done in jpg because of the continuous shooting for the sports shots (argghh – no jokes about 1D Mk IIIs) so messing around with the black slider wasn’t going to help here either. There was a layer of salt on the front of the lens at this stage- this is the nature of the beast, and yes, it wrecks my head, and Francois was between the sun and me so I was always going to be exposing for a shadow rather than for detail on his face so I knew instinctively the photograph was going to be a black and white silhouette if I was lucky enough to get anything out of it.

The vaguely film effect grain comes not from a filter but from the black and white conversion artefacts. They seem to be more pronounced with the jpgs out of the 40D or else I am only noticing them more out of that camera – that being said, the compression on the 40D is greater than it was on a 350D in my experience as I got bigger jpgs out of the smaller camera than I do out of the 40D. If the 40D did more than 17 frames in a burst, I’d do them, in RAW but it doesn’t and I lose the ends of jumps as a result so I use jpg instead.

I probably put a brightness layer over this after the black and white conversion and there is probably a curve thrown in as well. After that, I’d have to go back to the psd and investigate. Time wise, the job took about 2 minutes, maximum. We are not talking about a lot of effort here.

What I really like about this photograph is the splash of water at the base of it being so comparatively sharp and clear.

EDIT: This got picked up by pixie for Tweet of the Day. My baby photo done good