Anyway, I took a [...]]]> This weekend was the annual Battle for the Bay which is generally afflected with a massive lack of wind. There was less this year than last year, which is saying a lot. The sun shone on Saturday though; it did not on Sunday so there was dancing in the rain and stuff.

Anyway, I took a few photographs; not too many, just a few to play with.

One of the major sponsors of the event is Red Bull and they have a fleet of Minis. And a big tent. They also have a big Dodge too but I’ll come to that in a while.

I like messing with cars. Not Minis so much but I had a ball at Japfest last year. I didn’t really know quite what to do with the Minis – there were 4 Red Bull Minis and 3 Spin 1038 Minis and apart from getting down on your hands and knees with a 10-20, there’s not a lot else of interest. At some stage though, the clouds caught my eye, and I lined up the pyramid behind it. The Dodge was nowhere to be seen but that’s just a small price. The biggest hassle was realising the Mini had a dent on it. Darn it anyway.

I wanted a slightly more ominous cloud so I poured a pile of sepia paint onto the sky and bumped up the contrast a little. Had to undo that for the car which got overly dark after that.

I seem to wind up photographing these things in the rain. I should possibly have tried the day before but at most I got a couple of the Spin girls in front of their Minis and while the photo is nice, it’s not cover of a magazine nice. I’m heavily influenced by the cover of car magazine, basically, and maybe a little TopGear thrown in now and again. If I were doing this again, I’d try and get the front wheels of the car turned out a little.

Here’s the Dodge.

I’d love to know where they got it. I saw it for the first time last year or the year before, can’t remember which now and it’s amazing what they’ve done to it. Megapimped up. I love it. I pushed this as far into the high keys as I could so it’s a bit burnet out looking. I’m toying with painting out extraneous stuff in the background and then seeing if I can get more of the sand back in to a floor texture. Could be fun. Not doing it now though.

Right. Now for some pointing out of nice things that other people are doing.

Richard is recreating Jack Vettriano scenes. I’ve known about this for a while but since I haven’t been posting myself I haven’t actually flagged it. Today’s one is really lovely though so here’s a link to it.

Triple S is on in Hatteras at the moment. I planned to get over to it this year but for various reasons, a short trip to North Carolina just wasn’t possible. Day 2 looks like it was a stunner – certainly Bryan Elkus has a few really hot shots from yesterday.

I used to do the singer songwriter evenings in the International years ago, at the same time as Damien Dempsey in fact. Which is why this one of Tommie’s caught my eye. That being said, I wouldn’t go so far as to say Damien Dempsey gives me hope…per se.

Another place I might have been had I not been in Dublin is Galway for the powerboat racing. Count on John Smyth to pick up something nice there, however

I’m also slightly behind in my feedreader which is why I missed this diving special from Big Shots. I’ve tried springboard diving. Respect; that’s all I’ll say.

Update.

I haven’t been in here much, but this is the retouched version of the RedBull Dodge above.

I am biased of course, but I like it….

I know when I first met Danny. I was a stressed out boardsie at People’s Photography who’d only agreed to do this 2 days beforehand and had all sorts of fun and games getting ready to try and flog some of my – I thought – fabulous photographs to the world at large. Boy did [...]]]>

I know when I first met Danny. I was a stressed out boardsie at People’s Photography who’d only agreed to do this 2 days beforehand and had all sorts of fun and games getting ready to try and flog some of my – I thought – fabulous photographs to the world at large. Boy did I have a lot to learn. I knew Valentia because you couldn’t not. But I hadn’t met him. He was, Al Higgins told me at the time, an awfully nice person. Al wasn’t lying. When I met Danny that day, he was sitting in a deckchair saying “oh I’m Valentia.” Wouldn’t have known him otherwise.

Danny took one of my all time favourite photographs. It blew my mind as soon as I saw it. He gave me a print of it following the boards.ie photography exhibition last year and everyone I know who’s seen it is similarly affected. You couldn’t argue with the talent. Amazing, amazing photographs.

But an amazing man too. The last time I saw him, a few weeks ago on a phototrip out to Trim, he was in great form. I’d missed him. And I talked to him at the weekend about possibly going to the balloons. It would have been a tall order for me – I was in Mayo for most of the weekend. But somehow…you felt it could be worth it. It was for him. The last I heard from him, he was slagging me on twitter. When I heard he had died, it came as an enormous shock to me. These things are not supposed to happen. You could add, not to Danny, but then, who should they happen to?

We – a number of his friends – went to Trim today where some of the hotair balloons were taking off again. I took the photo above with my iphone – didn’t have my camera with me. You can just about see a black flag flying on them if you look carefully. I got myself completely covered in mud this evening.

When you look at the tributes to Danny that are popping up around the place, on various weblogs, on boards.ie/photography, you get a sense of a great man and he was that. But more than anything, once you had met him, Danny was your friend. Not because he was a great photographer, or a terrific actor, or heavily, heavily involved in working for the good of his community. But because he was a lovely, lovely man. I will miss him for occasionally reminding me of obscure music I haven’t listened to in years, for reminding me that there are places to go in this country, and things I don’t often see.

Some tributes:

Tommy Kavanagh

Ronan Palliser

The photography community at boards.ie

Barry Delaney

I know I’ve missed out lots.

For some reason, this extract from Coronach is echoing through my mind:

HE is gone on the mountain,
He is lost to the forest,
Like a summer-dried fountain,
When our need was the sorest.
The font reappearing	5
From the raindrops shall borrow,
But to us comes no cheering,
To Duncan no morrow!

Dun Laoghaire, Sunday afternoon. from Treasa Lynch on Vimeo.

I chose to freeze it a couple of times. Based on this I have ideas for how I would do some in the future.

This is a sunset over the Bay of Angels in Nice. The airport is off to the left as you look at the photograph, and I’ve been told the cloud looks a bit like a UFO. I didn’t really notice that at the time.

I’m planning the purchase of a new camera bag and a new [...]]]>

This is a sunset over the Bay of Angels in Nice. The airport is off to the left as you look at the photograph, and I’ve been told the cloud looks a bit like a UFO. I didn’t really notice that at the time.

I’m planning the purchase of a new camera bag and a new tripod. I saw a tripod I liked last week and I quite fancy it. It’s not for my heavy lenses – I am using the zooms less and less anyway – but for the macro lens in particular, the 50mm to play with DOF and stuff.  The camera bag is an effort to deal with something which I learned last week which is that I hate lugging loads of camera equipment around. Really hate it and what’s more I don’t especially need to lug it all around. I figured this out last week when I realised I only used 2 of the 5 lenses I brought with me and never took out the flash at all. I did, however, use the filters, quite a lot.

But basically I am a wimp and find the lugging of the gear around rather too much.

Now for a couple of other vaguely photography related matters.

Someone passed this link from the Daily Mail to me about a South Africa based photographer who went to rather great lengths to get some – admittedly outstanding – wildlife photographs.

Having spent about 30 seconds considering it, I have decided that no photograph I could ever take is worth contracting malaria for.

Passing the Ball by Ronan Palliser

Big Shots for 25 February via Boston.com. The first photograph, the surf shot is one of the best I have ever seen.  The beauty is I was watching Mavericks online via their ustream feed and it was brilliant but the screen was just too small.

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.

The way I do this – on this occasion – is to use the multi-fire functionality of my flash. And also I wish I had a master unit to use the flash [...]]]> So I have this vision inside my head of a piece of jewellery that flashes points of light, a black background, and multiple exposures.

The way I do this – on this occasion – is to use the multi-fire functionality of my flash. And also I wish I had a master unit to use the flash remotely. I don’t, and the ones for the Canon cost more money than I really wish to spend on photography gear in the present times. Improvisation is the name of the game.

In the absence of a ready supply of diamonds or cubic zirconia, I have an opal which has starred in photographs before. I also have a lack of black backround stuff. Improvisation continues to be the name of the game. Work skirt called into duty.

What I really wanted to do was use a very wide open aperture so mega shallow depth of field, swing the pendant over and back and have the flash fire 10 times or whatever. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that trying to keep a swinging pendant within the DOF on a 50mm lens open at 1.8 when you can’t see what you’re doing is a physical impossibility. I dropped that idea and rammed it up to 8 so that I’d more room to manoeuvre on the swinging of the shiny blue stuff front. I eventually took 23 photographs out of which I extracted 4 that I felt I could *something* with. Then I discovered that one of them was pretty much dead after I got it up loaded.

This is a drag, really. In some shape or form, it’s not too far from what I was looking for but I really need a fabric that absorbs far, far more light. I just don’t know if I can get it; that’s the problem.

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.

This is actually my favourite photograph from last weekend’s session on the beach.

A lot of peopleare coming to the beach shooting the kitesurfers now, so, yeah, there’s more competition. One of the things I started doing at an early stage was trying to make the shots stand out from the crowd of shots around them [...]]]>

This is actually my favourite photograph from last weekend’s session on the beach.

A lot of peopleare coming to the beach shooting the kitesurfers now, so, yeah, there’s more competition. One of the things I started doing at an early stage was trying to make the shots stand out from the crowd of shots around them but you can’t always do the same stuff to similar photographs.

Typically, in a two hour period, I will take around 600 photographs. Typically I stopped uploading that many photographs about a year ago and will upload around 10% looking for the better shots. Every once in a while, something left of centre pops up.

I got into social networking through Flickr. Prior [...]]]> Sometime ago, one of my contacts posted a question up on his twitter page about why people would use pix.ie over flickr. I know other people have answered this question (see Phil O’Kane’s comments here) but I wanted to put a few words together on the subject myself.

I got into social networking through Flickr. Prior to it, and people commenting on my shots, I didn’t even know the concept existed. For me, interaction on the interweb was basically through message boards, particularly special interest ones. I wound up on Flickr I don’t know how but it probably had something to do with the early days of blogging and a desire to post photographs to what was then my blog on blogspot. I believe this was the first photography I put online:

For photography nerdiness, it was taken with an Olympus OM10. Anyway, shortly afterwards I got a digital compact to make the uploading easier (all that scanning wrecked my head because there was always – literally always – one tiny little hair I missed either on the photograph or a speck of dust or something) and then I went on holidays in Australia, bought a 350D and the whole photography thing snowballed in such a way that 15 rolls of film after a holiday was somehow tame output compared to 2,500 photographs after 10 days in Morocco, for example. When I was in Australia, I pro’d up the Flickr account and joined the photography forum on boards.ie where I already knew the then moderator, a dude called rymus.

I still use the flickr account a lot but sometime later, pix.ie got flagged through boards.ie and I wound up having a look at it just to see what it had, didn’t use it much for a while, and then started to use it more recently.

On the face of it, pix.ie lags behind flickr in certain terms but it has certain advantages which have led to me deciding to host nearly all the photographs on this site on pix.ie rather than flickr which would have been the case for the older site, Dancing Shades of Light (now defunct).

Plus points in favour of Pix.ie

• 800 pixel wide images
• easy access to the support team in pix.ie who host a forum through boards.ie
• access to corporate events (unexpectedly in my case) such as the Saint Patrick’s Day Festival and they have also done things with Ruby, World Street Performance

Pix.ie, however, lacks a number of easily usable features which are taken for granted on Flickr. I am pretty sure that they are on the plan for Pix.ie.

• Groups
• Protection of large sized images

the one thing that I dislike about Pix.ie above all else is the inline advertising. I realise they need to pay hosting and network bills and I know that they have huge infrastructure. However, I’d willing pay for pix.ie in the same way as I pay for flickr if it meant I didn’t have advertising on my page.

Flickr, on the other hand, has

• the groups
• the image protection to a greater extent which means I can use the site pretty much as an offsite back up.
• larger community which has given me access to some very, very talented photographers world wide

But

• responses to problems take longer
• their image size selection goes from 500px to 1084. I’d appreciate the 800 in the middle for blog and forum posts.
• there is a lot of dross in some of the groups
• the animated trophy gifs drive me up the wall.

It’s clear to me that the flickr product is currently the more mature and developed offering but that being said, pix.ie has been doing a lot of work in the background lately. However it’s also clear to me that pix.ie is better for some of the stuff I use it for (namely the blogs and the fora) and flickr is better on the storage and also, currently, audience front.

Pretty much everyone I know who has a pix.ie account also has a flickr account. The same is not really true for everyone I know who has a flickr account.

I know, from having spoken to the people behind pix.ie that they have some nice ideas about what they want to do in the future. I am not sure how close they are to fruition per se but given that I derive some benefit out of the accounts as they exist at present, I’m not really in the business of choosing one over the other; only that when the dust settles and pix.ie eventually comes out of beta, they will probably complement each other in terms of how I use them rather than anything else.