Michael Schitzhofer in Portimao a couple of years ago at a PKRA invitational. I always liked this shot – this is going to sound grotesque but it was the detail of his open mouth. Pretty sure I couldn’t do this. A lot of work went into turning what was a fairly average colour shot into [...]]]>

Michael Schitzhofer in Portimao a couple of years ago at a PKRA invitational. I always liked this shot – this is going to sound grotesque but it was the detail of his open mouth. Pretty sure I couldn’t do this. A lot of work went into turning what was a fairly average colour shot into this. It’s one of my favourite photographs; always has been and I can’t see that changing any time soon.

Anyway.

Capital D ran a special on photographers in the Dublin area last week – you’ll know about this because I wrote about it a few weeks ago. You can currently catch it on RTE Player here – I am told you’ll find me about 14 minutes in (I did not count myself). I don’t know if this is available for you if you are outside Ireland – I think there may be a region lock (sorry )

I didn’t see any of it before I aired. But odd little things came out of it. People recognised me. I was at the Adventure Show on Saturday and people said “oh yeah there was that great photographer on the telly on Thursday – oh wait – that was you, wasn’t it?”. Famous, ma. I got a couple of rounds of applause at work on Friday as it was replayed on RTE Player a couple of times. And I got al ot of text messages and emails and phone calls and twitter. Apparently I’m very smiley on the television, and I gave a good account of myself. I think I sounded like a dork – a bit anyway – but most people think that the first time they hear their voice. And it’s really strange looking at yourself on television for the first time.

I know no one is going to really care about this but the necklace I was wearing – which doesn’t look spectacular – is one I made myself. It features a tiny piece of seaglass which I found on Golden Strand in Achill Island and I chose to wear it because it was something of myself and Golden Strand is a beautiful kite beach. Plus, I was actually sort of nervous.

Andy Warhol had this “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” meme (well that’s how I understood it – I am open to recognition that I may have been wrong about the exact concept). I reckon the internet changes the balance a little (particularly Youtube). But if you’d asked me 20 years ago as I left school to go to college whether I saw myself being on television for any reason other than flashing a guitar around the place, I’d have laughed. I certainly wouldn’t have seen it happening because I was a photographer anyway. And I used to write fairly miserable songs when I did my girl singer/songwriter phase.

So. Firstly. Few people to give the nod to here:

1. Philip Bromwell put the piece together, did the leading questions in the interview, told me I was mad when he saw me wading around water on Dollymount for the first time. Michael Mac Suibhne did some of the camera work on the kitesurfers.
2. The kite community in Dublin who act as my models so often. Francois and Catherine at Pure Magic whose arrived on the beach around the same time as I did. Anyone connected with Pure Magic – and there have been quite a few over the years.
3. Declan who gave me my first/only lesson in a darkroom. All the stuff I can do now…I’m glad I don’t have to try and do it with chemicals.
4. Colm Murphy who was the first identifiable kitesurfer I photographed, nearly 8 years ago. Alexis Ledoux who pretty much – by dint of trying to teach me to fly a kite on regularly wind free days – introduced me to a bunch of people on the beach. Kieran Sammon. All the crew I’d call the oldies, like Brian Magee and Kieran Sammon. From the first time on the beach.
5. Sean and Dermot and Ross
6. Erich at the PKRA.
7. All the people in the IKSA who’ve been helpful over the years. Particularly the ones who chose to give me some rather beautiful jewellery a while back.
8. Tanja in Tarifa, Julien whom I met in Australia at some stage who was the first person to literally beg for a photograph. I haven’t met him since.
9. Tony, Andrew, Cillin, Conskee, Eamon, Dominika, Finn, Sasha, Karl, Carl, Martin, Mark, Ryan.
10. Bryan Elkus and Pieter ten Broek in North Carolina and New Zealand whom I’ve never met but have learned a huge amount from via flickr and the social web. Thanks a lot guys.
11. Sigma for some fairly robust lenses. Hahnel for fixing the biggie when I dropped it a few years ago.

I’m very lucky. I got an opportunity to do very fun stuff that I couldn’t have imagined when I was 18 years old. In fact, I couldn’t have imagined it when I was 28 years old. It got me to Brazil, to western Sahara. It has cost me a fortune that could have been spent on a grand piano but somehow I don’t quite need the piano so much any more…

and

I had planned to go to Oahu in January to a surf photography course and for various family reasons it just collapsed out of my life as a possibility. I don’t know if it’s because it’s spring and life is getting a little brighter, I would love, love to go somewhere I can photograph decent [...]]]>

and

I had planned to go to Oahu in January to a surf photography course and for various family reasons it just collapsed out of my life as a possibility. I don’t know if it’s because it’s spring and life is getting a little brighter, I would love, love to go somewhere I can photograph decent waves.

I love waves. I love the ultimate power of them and maybe because technology, via the internet, allows me to watch so much of the ASP schedule I feel closer to them which, given I live in a largely wave freezone on the Irish sea is quite something, I also feel so utterly frustrated that I can’t reach out and touch them. In 2010, I had also scheduled to go to the Quiksilver Pro in France – if nothing else I really wanted to see Kelly Slater surf before he returned and the sad truth is, I might have gotten to see Andy Irons too. It just didn’t happen.

I’m mainly known for kitesurf photography and in the many, many thousands of shots I have, there are a few gems; the Nightfishing one which is on my desk here almost permanently and when I look at some of what the top surf guys do, I am still overwhelmed by what they do. I can’t – at present – do it.

Shooting the Curl arrived into my life this morning from Carve Magazine. There are a bunch of surf magazines around, but of all of them, the one I tend to prefer Carve purely for the photographs in the same way as I prefer Kiteworld for their photography. I’ve been looking for the best possible action sports photography that includes watersports and to that end I have quite a few books including Xtreme Sports by Simon Fraser, Action Photography by Peter Cope, Adventure Photography by Michael Clark and 50 years of Surfer Magazine, the latest Red Bull Illume competition collection. I’m still looking for something.

I am fascinated by how other people view the playgrounds that I occasionally stray into.

Sports wise, interestingly enough, my first love was windsurfing rather than surfing. Even now, looking at video footage of windsurfing, I can understand just why it engaged me so much.

If you are searching for watersports photography, the big hitter is undoubtedly surfing. Not windsurfing, not kitesurfing, but surfing. Because of the whole kite thing, I know the names of pretty much most of the best kite photographers in the world. But they are dwarfed by the output of surf photography to some extent. It’s almost impossible to keep up with the numbers.

I haven’t had time to more than dip into Shooting the Curl just yet but already a handful of photographs – one in particular from Mickey Smith – have completely floored me. They’re not even necessarily actual pure surf photographs; but landscape photographs from areas that if you weren’t interested in surfing would be landscape photographs.

Because there is such an infrastructure of surf photography around in the sheer numbers of photographers giving it a shot (see Club of the Waves for some very high level examples – they don’t just have photography) there’s a lot of knowledge around which you don’t have to discover. When I started kite photography first, I’d never even seen a kite before and a lot of what I do now I do by pure experimentation. There’s a lot of acquired knowledge out there (see Clark Little’s wave shots for example) that you can just look at and absorb. Every single photograph you look at (but didn’t take) can teach you something.

When I started taking wave photographs first at the age of about 13 (and if you think you’re going to see any of those taken on a little Agfamatic you are unhappily mistaken), all I wanted to do was catch the spray off the back of the wave. Now, I aim more and more to pick up the shape of the wave; the face of it. For that reason, although I’m not per se a surf photographer (not that this has stopped me), I seem to be spending a lot of my time looking at what surf photographers do because a lot of what I need to know, they use on a day to day basis.

This is a small wave from a beach in Kerry called Fermoyle. One of these days I’ll get a great big wave somewhere on the Atlantic.

Jamie Lawrence, a very fine photographer down in Cork, sent me a question today which caught my attention.

why are the photos you most love taken years ago and how can you get back to that state?

I had to think about this, a lot, and a little, and, I must confess, in a few different ways. [...]]]>

Jamie Lawrence, a very fine photographer down in Cork, sent me a question today which caught my attention.

why are the photos you most love taken years ago and how can you get back to that state?

I had to think about this, a lot, and a little, and, I must confess, in a few different ways. I’ve been posting a few older photographs here lately for, well, one reason, and that is I haven’t taken so many new photographs lately and I have some lattitude with the older stuff since the previous site died. Also, I am ever so slowly going through the archive looking for photographs to go into a working book project that will cost an absolute fortune so I’m not really talking about it yet. But the photographs need to be looked at.

So rather than taking lots of photographs lately I’m taking almost none, and I am looking at a lot of older photographs and remembering, or, even Remembering. It has probably distracted me a little from the here and now.

There’s a difference between photographs taken since March 2008 and before it. Anything up to March 2008 was not taken with the a Canon 40D, most things before it were taken with a 350D which was the entry level Canon DSLR at the time I was buying and I never felt that the colours out of the 40D were even remotely as warm as those out of the 350D. I think this is possibly a contributor to my desire to shoot RAW with the 40D – the colour algorhythm for the jpg conversion just wasn’t as good and I thought it was revealing that in general, the jpgs from the 40D seemed to be smaller than those out of the 40D. So there may be a technical reason as to why the photographs out of 2006 and 2007 seem to me to be sweeter some times.

I don’t, however, think it’s even remotely that simple, however. I’ve taken some fantastic photographs with the 40D so I can’t really put it down to that one single technical reason. Part of it is probably something in myself and the way I look at myself and the things I do. I’ve been very stressed over the past 2 or 3 years for various reasons; a couple of house moves, some personal stuff. Littered all over the site here are comments about losing my way, not feeling that things were as good as they used to be, and of course, lots of comments about older photographs. It’s not that I haven’t taken great photographs – I have and at least one person above really liked the photograph above which was taken at the Irish Lead climbing championships. At least 3 photographs last year made TOTD on the pixie site so I guess they must have liked them. But they aren’t talking to me, possibly because I’m not as engaged with the photographs as I used to be. I can’t fault the mind process which created this photograph:

which eventually was the photograph I chose as my photograph of the year after a lot of consideration although I suspect that if I’m honest, a few others I liked a little more although they weren’t technically perfect – this one for example:

which a lot of people liked is still a lot softer than I liked. But on balance, the photograph reminds me of Dannie O’Brien because it was taken the last day I saw him and that is the issue with a lot of my photographs – it’s not whether they are great photographs per se, but what they mean to other parts of my life.

I have no excuses really on the technical front. I have the entire range from 10mm up to 500mm covered. I have a very, very good macro lens. I have a lot of filters. I have a couple of flashes. I do not lack for equipment. In a way, having considered this before, the camera bag of choice lately only has a subselection of gear on the grounds that I’ll have to think a little more about what I’m doing. And familiarity is killing me. The places I go; I know them too well. The kitesurfing? I know it too well. The macros? I’m completely kiboshed by this one:

It was a lucky photograph and there are days I look at it (there’s a print of it in my living room) and I think I haven’t taken any photograph as good as that since the day I took it. I know looking at it that what made it stand out to me was the magnification and the very heavy flash light from what were comparatively new lens and new flash equipment that I really didn’t know how to use at the time. In fact, I think I didn’t have the macro very long at all. But it’s had possibly a damaging impact.

It’s some weight when you look at a photograph you took 2 years ago and the impression you’re left with is that you just haven’t done anything at all of note since. It’s a stand out photograph but the perception it gives me of my own stuff is probably very, very unfair because since then there’s been this:

which really I like a lot and this:

which I really should print.

which I should also print. Even in the macro zone I have some off the wall stuff:

When I start to look at it like that, I think the problem is I never see these things. I never look at them. The ice tear above, I see every single day and it re-inforces the image that I haven’t done anything of note since I took it. Probably, the more sensible thing to do would be to print some more recent shots and make them more prominent. I have printed very little over the last few years so that I see things more often. Or try and get more of them into the digital frame and have it running more often. Just to see what I’m doing so that I know about the more recent photographs that I just seem to forget about because once taken, processed and uploaded to pixie or flickr, I never really look at them again.

_______________________________

Jamie’s website is here by the way.

I took some photographs in Cork on Christmas morning. Some sunrise shots, and also, some of the frosted snow using the macro lens. I would never have seen myself as a macroey person but…Anyway. This is from wild parts of my parents garden; nothing cultivated I must confess.

Tomorrow is the last day of 2010. The [...]]]>

I took some photographs in Cork on Christmas morning. Some sunrise shots, and also, some of the frosted snow using the macro lens. I would never have seen myself as a macroey person but…Anyway. This is from wild parts of my parents garden; nothing cultivated I must confess.

Tomorrow is the last day of 2010. The year has been a rollercoaster for various reasons, and as it closes, I’m not perhaps as happy as I could be. Although I took a few lovely photographs, I never felt I quite got into groove. I realise that some people may consider this to be closet insanity but to be honest, it’s been a feature of my life that I never really had a lot of confidence in things I do well. That being said, the good folks at twitter picked a few of those photos out as TOTDs and I am going to be vain enough to nominate one of them as a contender for picture of the year.

I want to dedicate the photograph above to one of my friends whom I’m not going to name but who always seems to be around when I need one, and who actually listens to me when I’m asking for advice before rushing in with said advice. This is such a rare skill that it’s worthy of mention. Hope 2011 is good to you.

In other unrelated news, I’ve a new photography book called The Photographer’s Mind by Michael Freeman who appears to be my tutor of choice at present. As noted above, I seem to be slightly lost on the photography front, so in the best traditions of TG4, I’m in search of Súil Eile if you like. I will, when I get around to it, post a review of it after I’ve read it.

That being said, taking photographs is a journey and sometimes it takes you places, as on a rollercoaster – it is to my camera that I owe trips kitesurfing to Brazil and Morocco in the last few years, also to Spain and Portugal. I owe several very good friends to my camera and they come from both the kitesurfing and photography worlds. One or two even come from the yarn world now also. It is to my camera I owe the ability to stand still for hours on end just watching things, although I’m still bloody useless at wildlife photography. On the other hand, you need similar skills for kitesurfers and with a 2.8 macro lens. Always useful. Sometimes, the journey isn’t that clear, so I find myself thinking of a poem by Robert Frost, along with Patrick Kavanagh my favourite English language poet (I tried to love Emily Dickens as well but somehow she never quite took my heart). It seems odd to be discussing poetry on a photography blog.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Identifying that road is hard sometimes.

In the meantime, I wish the burglar alarm that has been going for the last 20 minutes would shut up. It’s blocking out the music of Keith Jarrett.

Anyway, I idly wondered how they did that. The answer has started to buzz around the photoblogosphere over the last day or two.

I’d [...]]]> Some time ago I linked a couple of videos from RipCurl that used bullet time tech for a new ad featuring surfers. Mick Fanning and Steph Gilmore featured as far as I remember.

Anyway, I idly wondered how they did that. The answer has started to buzz around the photoblogosphere over the last day or two.

I’d love to do this. I don’t, however, have 52 450Ds to play with but that doesn’t even matter. It’s just the whole thought of planning it out, maybe with kitesurfers in one of the west of Ireland lagoons, or possibly…the kayakers. I may need to talk to Kyle about how we could manage this. The software side of things interests me as well.

Yesterday evening, the main evening news in Ireland on RTE at 6pm had a little featurette not on majorettes, but on the National Photographic Archive which now has a significant whack of [...]]]> Today being Saint Patrick’s Day there’s a surfeit of shamrockery around the web, and I have decided not to post pictures of Guinness glasses.

Yesterday evening, the main evening news in Ireland on RTE at 6pm had a little featurette not on majorettes, but on the National Photographic Archive which now has a significant whack of its collection online. I spent an interesting few hours wandering around it last night, it, and the 1911 Census causing an argument over a mismatch between family recollection of what my great grandfather actually did do in Achill at the time, and what the Census form claimed of him. In between calculating the ages of my grandparents in 1911 and trying work out what addresses in 1911 equated to in today’s terms (given the townland thing in Ireland, this is not unusual), I also wandered around the Photographic Archive out of idle interest. Specifically I looked at photographs for two towns: Charleville, Co Cork and Killarney Co Kerry. Also saw some photographs of Blennerville in Co Kerry.

I know that Ireland has changed immeasurably in my life time, both from how it looks to how it thinks. There’s evidence of major social change every day on the radio at the moment. But it’s easy to forget just what Ireland looked like 100 years ago. When I looked at one of the photographs of the Main Street in Charleville Co Cork, I had some difficulty orienting myself on one photograph because the hotel that was the most obvious feature on the photograph, the Royal Hotel, is long, long gone. I never remember it at all, and I can remember quite a few shops and things that are gone. The Munster & Leinster Bank, for example, is now the AIB – it is painted bright yellow and doesn’t really resemble the stone built building in another photograph. The big one though was the tree planted in front of the Protest Church – you cannot see the church itself but it is now the public library in Charleville. In one photograph, you can see the construction work on the then new Catholic Church – as far as I remember from my local history, it opened in 1902. The photograph is dated 1890-1900.  The old Catholic Church which is now a community hall – was hidden down a side street. When I was a child, it was called the Parochial Hall and I was in many concerts there.

It’s worth looking at the photographs from Killarney as well. In one respect, the overwhelming impression I had of the shots I looked at yesterday evening were extraordinarily good photographs given the equipment at the time. In the other respect, my modern mind could not stop complaining about blown out skies. Even then, I guess, Irish skies were frequently unhelpfully covered in white cloud Some of the photographs show change – how Ross Castle and Muckross Friary have been cleaned up to some extent – some seem curiously timeless – the jarveys – sort of – and Torc Waterfall.

It’s hard to know where to start with the exploration of the photographs. A cursory glance has revealed some interesting shots from Cashel and Achill Island amongst others. See here for Patrick Street in Cork with the Paris Photographic Studio right on the corner of Patrick Street and the Grand Parade and a tram in front of what I think is now Waterstones Booksellers. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind, another project involving this is starting to crystallise.

John Williams has been showing photographs of Howth recently, including the marina. Here is a photograph of Howth from before the marina was built.

__________________________________________

I recently saw some outstanding photographs of Paris taken in the 1860s. I am delighted that you can get access to some photographs of Ireland at the time. We have a bunch of photographers – Tommie Lehane springs to mind as does Donncha O’Caoimh who are doing sterling work in documenting our now time. In a quiet corner of my mind, I wonder if I do enough to record now compared to other people.

I’d strongly recommend a wander around the archive if you’ve time. It may not always be obvious how to find things (the amount of information in there can be overwhelming) but there are some serious gems to be found.

Edit: St Patrick’s Day Parade 1905 just arrived in my twitterfeed via IrishMuseums and the National Library of Ireland.

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.

I don’t specialise in surf photography. In Irish terms, the surf photographer of choice would almost definitely be Paudie Scanlon. I do the odd shot here and there but since I don’t spend much time in the water, it’s almost academic.

This is one of my favourite surf shots that I did take and it’s not [...]]]>

I don’t specialise in surf photography. In Irish terms, the surf photographer of choice would almost definitely be Paudie Scanlon. I do the odd shot here and there but since I don’t spend much time in the water, it’s almost academic.

This is one of my favourite surf shots that I did take and it’s not really a surf photograph at all. It was shot on film about 6 years ago I guess, not absolutely sure. I was shooting full film at the time, it was well prior to the switch to digital. If I took it now, with the sort of standards you expect from digital image production I’d probably reject it because of the grain and the white balance issues. I think this was run through Photoshop after scanning but since that was done so long ago, I’m not sure of that either. I suppose I could check…but why would I?

Today I came across a photographer that somehow I’d never heard of but William Milne describes him as the best surf photographer in the world. William himself is one of the best kite guys so that’s fairly high praise indeed. The guy’s name was Clark Little; he’s just released a very expensive book, but you know what, it’s almost definitely worth it. His website is here. His photographs blew my mind.

I don’t often say that. There are some utterly fantastic photographers in the world, like Art Wolfe, Philippe Plisson, Vincent Munier, Peter Lik, Ric Steiniger, all of whom do something quite above normal. But I’ve never seen anything like Clark Little’s work. I used to love David P’uu’s surf work but it doesn’t get to me quite like this. It is amazing.  If you’re a member of FaceBook, it’s worth having a look at this. And this. And this.

I really can’t praise it highly enough. It’s inspired me in a way that few other things have this year.

Then go take a look at this image on flickr by swingking85.

Modern Life is…went up onto boards.ie in their random thread and caused some debate in the thread.

Yesterday I get a message from swingking85 – and yes I know [...]]]> Take a look at this post:  Modern Life is a mobile phone and coffee on the run.

Then go take a look at this image on flickr by swingking85.

Modern Life is…went up onto boards.ie in their random thread and caused some debate in the thread.

Yesterday I get a message from swingking85 – and yes I know his name but I am never sure how much people are protecting their identities online – to say he’d done something inspired by my coffee shot. And that he’d remove it if I wanted.

I suppose I could have said, yeah, pull it. I mean, the coffee and mobile phone idea was mine. But…I couldn’t. I mean, take all the photographs of Yosemite that have been taken since Ansel Adams’ day…and it’s not like the photograph was a carbon copy of mine. The photo is extremely different even if it has the same subjects – a cup of takeaway coffee and a phone. Mine is very obviously the poorman’s phone (look I haven’t upgraded yet) and the coffee brand has a different caché to Starbucks. The context is utterly different – this is more life in the office than life on the run.

And when all is said and done, if someone comes and says “I created this because of something you did”, that’s a great feeling.

So no, I wouldn’t be issuing a take down. I’m fascinated though by the possibilities of getting a bunch of photographers to shoot exactly the same subjects – freely – anywhere – so that context is from the photographer alone – and seeing what they come back with. What the differences are.

Taking photographs when the sand is blowing like this is kinda of difficult.

Okay, a couple of things to run down at the moment.

Red Bull Illume is running again. I am under severe pressure for it because I did not realise it was coming up, need to check deadlines and select photographs. I can think of [...]]]>

Taking photographs when the sand is blowing like this is kinda of difficult.

Okay, a couple of things to run down at the moment.

Red Bull Illume is running again. I am under severe pressure for it because I did not realise it was coming up, need to check deadlines and select photographs. I can think of just two photographs so far that suit any particular category for that competition. I can enter up to 50, 5 per category.

I don’t enter very many photography competitions – I am not competitive by nature but Red Bull Illume is specialised for extreme sports and it is the one competition I will enter any time I get a change. Photographs must be taken after 1 July 2007. Bork. The last two summers have been horrible for me.

If you are interested in extreme sports photographs and have a portfolio in that area, it might be worth a look.

While we’re on the subject of Red Bull Illume, this story is worth a look. Having looked at the clip I have to say I am very interested in the whole concept of the shoot, I’m just slightly underwhelmed by the photographs that came out of it. However, a few of my friends see it differently, so…people’s tastes vary.

Have to add that I’m intrigued by their use of FaceBook and Twitter this time round.

Last night I went and visited Offshoot Photographic Society. If you’re in south Dublin, it’s a very good photography society to get involved with as they have a very interesting collection of talks coming up and they are also very web savvy. Doing a lot of things right in my opinion. I am tempted to join them as I like what they are up to. Last night, they had Peter Cox come and give a talk.

On balance, I found the talk interesting, although in different ways. Peter Cox takes some wonderful photographs – there is no doubt about this – but the overwhelming impression I walked away with was “I can do that”. I spend a lot of time having doubts about myself and the photographs I take but following last night, I have some feelings that some of those doubts may be misplaced and that confidence is what I need to trash around with.

Strangely enough, twitter is helping on that front.:-) He’s one of the best kite photographers I’ve come across.

Back with last night’s talk, there was some discussion of it on twitter after the fact with some disappointment that some of the photographs lacked that wow factor. I have to confess that I’d agree to some extent with that sentiment while recognising the view that consistency is important.

In part, I think it’s because I think the consistency should be wow all the time. Take a look at guys like David Noton and Charlie Waite for example. Even in Irish terms, I would have preferred the colour work of Liam Blake and Peter Zoller for example.

Offshoot are also on twitter if you are interested.

Schedule for the weekend – kitesurfing in Mayo. Winds are light so that may convert into landscape photography in Mayo.

Flickr versus Picasa and all I am thinking is DUH.

Stephen has been in London.

Danny has been in County Down.

Okay I think that’s it for the moment.