2013 365-21

Aaaaaaaaaaaand here we go with week 21. It's an all-singing, all dancing photography whirlwind this week so buckle yourself in and get ready for...........no, wait. It's just another week of trying to crank out shots and be a wee bit original. Sorry for building your hopes up there.

20/05/13

The marvellous Hellcat McCloud on the Jam Line during Saturday Night's all-Ireland rookie bout at Belfast Roller Derby. I got into the centre of the track and waited for this, as I had noticed how this particular skater tended to get into the zone before each jam. The facial expression is hard to read and ambiguous - that's a big part of why I like it.

21/05/13

This was shot in a mirrored table in a furniture shop using my iphone 4s and processed in high-key style using PhotoToaster.

22/05/13

Fresh bunches of flowers on the Larne-Belfast road this week. I had passed them several times but today actually had my camera with me and got the chance to pull over and get a shot of them.

23/05/13

My son Conor had shown me a picture of this taken on his phone. Its just outside the back gates into Belfast Met. There had also apparently been a Peppa Pig up there too, but she had departed by the time I got there.

24/05/13

And speaking of my son Conor, this was my favourite piece in his end of year show at the college where he is studying art. Its quite small but just looks amazing. He describes it as a self portrait in the style of the Easter Island statues. I've purchased it from him for my mantlepiece.

25/05/13

Last two pics see me going postal. Above is Royal Mail HQ in Belfast's Tomb Street and below are two leaning post boxes in the Titanic Quarter. I was out and about on my bike and decided to travel light, taking only my little D60 and a Lensbaby and did get some good shots.

26/05/13

2013 365-20

Ah, week 20 lands like a big wet thing in my lap. Happily though, there's plenty to take photos of this week, including roller derby. Hooray!

13/05/13

Nice to see Lilly Zom Bee back on the track and even nicer to catch such an unexpectedly nice shot of her. I was in completely the wrong place, facing down the track and straight into my own speedlight - that's the big flare in the top right corner. The rim lighting works and the other two speedlights lit Lilly pretty well.

14/05/13

These hay bales were parked in a field near Scrabo Tower in Newtownards (the tower is directly behind them. I tried out a very mild HDR preset in Lightroom to see what it would do and this is the result.

15/05/13

Abstract, but I was drawn to the patterns made by the vertical blinds on the window sill this afternoon as the sun started to set at the front of the house. I'm not sure what else I can say about this, other than I really liked the regularity of the pattern and the mix of lines/semi-circles.

16/05/13

It must be my week for abstract stuff. I called up to Roller Derby training this evening and tried out a few slower speed, rear flash sync shots. None of which worked the way I wanted, including this one. I suppose it would be classed as the best of a very mediocre bunch. I do kinda like it.

17/05/13

So, today was officially the one day in Belfast when the sun shone. I spent the day working in the garden and felt strangely compelled to try a flying shot at the front of the house. The problem is, that this looks wrong and I'm not sure why. I think the shadows are all wrong and my outline just looks too sharp.

18/05/13

Good weather meant the chance to try out some portrait techniques with Sarah, my ever willing model. I took quite a few using a mix of ambient sunlight and a very low powered speedlight. Started processing these today and was quite pleased with how they turned out. I had also worked out a very simple user preset in lightroom to give a nice boost to raw files at the time of import and make them less flat. This was pretty much the way the shot was imported into Lightroom with only a very slight crop applied.

19/05/13

I went to town a wee bit more on this shot, trying to produce a softer, fader look while keeping detail in Sarah's freckles and keeping the blue of her eyes. Very pleased with the final look of this one.

2013 365-18

Week eighteen ahoy.

29/04/13

I don't spend a lot of time taking photos like this and certainly don't post them on this blog. But this.....this is magnificent. And that's all I'm saying about it.

30/04/13

My greenhouse. It has featured here before but I spent most of today getting it weeded and cleaned, ready for a new growing season which I hope is better than last year's. Tomatoes, peppers, chillies and some other things growing away on the window sills inside at the moment, ready for transplanting to the greenhouse in a couple of weeks.

1/05/13

Taken some time ago, but embargo removed today. Technically I'm not 100% happy with this shot, but it turned out reasonably well. Orders are being taken as we speak for prints at very reasonable prices.

2/05/13

Another day, another monument although today I managed to find and photograph four of these. This one is unmarked and consists of a plastic ball of flowers and a t-shirt tied to the crash barrier on the A55 outer ring in Belfast.

3/05/13

 First day of the Festival of Fools today and this lady provided my first spot of audience participation for the weekend. This is Mooky Cornish who made me dress in a wig and frilly dress and sing and dance. The only consolation was that she also caught my 10-year old daughter as well. She did look better in the wig and dress combo.

4/05/13

And this fine gentleman is Grant Goldie, a fine juggler but even better with the diablo. I've seen pretty much all the juggling tricks there are to see, but this guy had diablo tricks that I had never seen, much less even thought possible. Breath-taking stuff.

5/05/13

These are the Chipolattas, whose speciality seemed to be musical theatre and barbequeing each other's testicles. As always, the Festival of Fools provides great entertainment, world class street performers and a great atmosphere. It's really sad to hear that the funding for the Festival has been cut by our local penny-pinching bureaucrats and this made me toss a few extra quid into the hats which were passed round after each act. It's surprising that we can't see fit to fund something that is genuinely cross community, family oriented, a draw for tourists and a mecca for local photographers. It's even more surprising to discover today that our finance minister Sammy Wilson has seen fit to spend £10,000 on erecting five flag poles so the union jack can be flown over some more buildings for designated days each year. Come on Sammy - sod the flags and fund the Festival of Fools. They've already named it after you.

2013 365-13

This week brought some strange and interesting offers and opportunities in terms of photography, sadly none of which I can talk about just now as I need to see how they will progress over the next few weeks. Plenty of shooting this week, and plenty of roller derby.

25/03/13

Promo shoot for Belfast Roller Derby yesterday afternoon, on the theme of Bloctopussy (Octopussy) where we were trying to recreate the origianl movie poster. It all worked out well, although it did take a fair bit of pre-planning and practice to get the four separate shots needed in order to merge them in photoshop. I wrote up a write up of how I did this - check it out here:

Bloctopussy Shoot

26/03/13

Was up and around early this morning and tried this panorama across Strangford Lough to Scrabo Tower. Not 100% happy with the shot of the processing of it, but its the best shot I took today.

 27/03/13

This is John McCullough, taken outside the Duke of York bar in Belfast. John is finally retiring and we met up for one last pint in the Duke. John was my first supervisor when I was a trainee psychologist (25 years ago) and he has had to live with the shame of this ever since. A genuinely nice guy and I hope he enjoys his retirement.

28/03/13

Fishing boat in Portavogie Harbour this morning. It's HDR processing, it's a wee bit over the top but it does bring out the sky really well. Might try this again, only without the big building on the right.

29/03/13

Flag protestor in tragic yet slightly ironic accident. I started playing about with a tube of toothpaste and various different sets of wee men. One thing lead to another and before long the red, white and blue toothpaste got me thinking about flags and this shot just appeared.

30/03/13

Robert suspected he was on a promise. Toothpaste wasn't the only thing I bought in the chemists. I had thought of doing something using a box of condoms and my wee nuns but this ended up being the best shot of the day.

31/03/13

Staying on the theme of wee men in the bathroom, I noticed how the oval shape of the sink would lend itself to some tiny skaters. My bathroom is pretty small and getting a camera on a tripod, two speedlights and a cardboard box of wee men wasn't easy and involved me falling in the bath at least once.

2013 365-6

Week six it is then.

04/02/13

A pack of little skaters and skateboarders arrived today in the post. This was quick try at getting something with one of them, using a bit of black string and a fruit bowl. With the aperture set at 3.5  the background came out black and covered up the string from which the wee man was suspended. Lost detail in the oranges though.

05/02/13

Still cracking on with single light flash portraits. This is my daughter Ellen taken using an SB-700 flash unit fitted with a small softbox and was fired on high speed sync (auto FP on Nikon) with a shutter speed of 1/2000. Nice shot of Ellen - even she liked it and she's a hard audience to please. She was delighted that a lot of her friends saw it on Facebook and complimented her on it. Result all round.

06/02/13

I returned to Belmont Park this evening to try out one very long exposure shot of the wooden statues there. I was aiming for 20-30 minutes in order to get some star trails, but sadly there was too much cloud cover to pick these out . I did capture one star trail in the top right-hand corner but it really just looks out of place. The statues themselves came out pretty well on a 30 minute exposure although I noted some "hot pixels" when zoomed in. Probably why it's recommended to take a large number of shorter shots (i.e. 200-250 30" exposures) and combine them in the appropriate software in post production. We live and learn.

07/02/13

A long time ago, I ordered some business cards in an attempt to promote my photography. People always ask me if I have a card, website, etc. The cards were, frankly, rubbish and I never actually handed any of them out because I was a little embarrassed by them. This week I finally bit the bullet and sat down to do it properly and that meant researching print firms and thinking about the design of the cards. Moo Print seemed to come out on tops in terms of quality and service, so I went for them. I used one of their existing designs, modified it to suit me and uploaded five high quality jpegs. The cards arrived today (five day turnaround) beautifully packaged and presented. They look (and feel) really high quality, complete with a funky case than fans out to display your cards in all their glory. I love these and definitely won't be embarrassed to hand them out.

08/02/13

Half price Haribo sweets? I'll be having some of these. The fantasy mix seemed to be the most promising in photographic terms - big and colourful. This is my packet of sweets set on a sheet of perspex, suspended between two chairs in the kitchen with a flashgun placed directly underneath.  Colourful enough, almost in a stained-glass window way.

09/02/13

More single flash portrait practice this week. This time using a honeycomb grid to modify the flash and make the light more directional. No backdrop used here - the highly directional light wiped the background out (my cluttered living room) and there was very little post-processing needed with any of these shots.

10/02/13

Fresh meat session (i.e. newbies) with Belfast Roller Derby this afternoon. Always fun to see new people on skates and there was a big crowd turned up today. I was shuttling between the fresh meat session and the intermediates/advanced training. I think I'm now about 95% sorted in terms of using lights with roller derby. This rear view belongs to the fantastic Rosa "Sigourney Cleaver" Hughes.

New Year's Day Surprise

Woke up this morning (i.e. New Year's Day) to find that one of my Roller Derby images from last month had been awarded a third place by one of the judges in the monthly Roller Derby Photo Competition run by the F2.8 Fast Glass group. Only the second time I had entered some shots - mainly because I was pretty intimidated by the quality of the shots which other members entered. I was added to this Facebook group last year and have found it to be just a wee bit inspirational and challenging and I have picked up a hell of a lot of tips and ideas from the group - almost 400 members from all around the world wherever Roller Derby is played.

Although the quality of the other member's work is scary, I really loved this shot which I posted on the blog at the start of December. No excuses for re-posting it again.

367-50 Week 46

Monday was a real wash out. Wet, dark and miserable. Autumn appears to have lasted exactly one week.

24/09/12

An on a wet day, what better than to try a bit of fooling about. It was pretty difficult taking this on a self-timer but thankfully I was able to get the camera to fire off 5 shots in a burst with 1 second between each. The lighting wasn't good as I was cramped for space and only had one working flashgun and no working wireless triggers, but you get the idea.

25/09/12

It's really great to see the massive changes in Belfast's public transport system. Since the introduction of the new bus lanes in the centre of Belfast. a;; traffic in and out in the mornings appears to have ground to a halt. I left my youngest daughter to school and then attempted to drive the 2 miles to the start of the motorway (I checked it on Google maps so it must be right). It took me 1 hour and 15 minutes before I hit the motorway to Antrim. Made some phone calls, sent some texts, read some e-mails. Can you tell how bored and frustrated I was?

26/09/12

Apologies for the watermark on this, but I've been working on adding watermarks to shots in Photoshop using the brush tool and got carried away. Had to go into town to do some birthday shopping for my daughter and I found myself able to sit outside drinking coffee with my camera. Took a few shots looking into Cornmarket and really liked this, especially with the man in the coat walking across the frame. I'm also getting a wee bit fixated with this type of HDR processing and am now processing 4 or 5 shots from each batch of photos this way to see how they look. Yep - I'm liking this.

27/09/12

Big up to my big son Conor. He arrived round last night and showed me the website and a video for an Australian photographer called Denis Smith who specialises in light orbs. Denis' website can be found here:

Denis Smith Photography

Denis' images are possibly the best light orbs I've seen and his locations are awesome. What I learned from Denis' video was that he shot at the full moon with very long exposures (up to 10 minutes) which then produces quite bright images even though they're shot at night time. We tried this out last night and this was our test run. This was taken around 9pm when it quite dark, with a bit of a moon out. The exposure was 4 minutes with the light orb produced in 30 seconds by swinging a bunch of LED lights around. I'm not sure if that was my orb or Conor's in the picture. This is looking like a promising technique, although it would take massive practice to get anywhere close to Denis Smith's shots.

28/09/12

I finally got see one of my guitar heroes last night, courtesy of the Ards Guitar Festival. I've been a fan of Martin Simpson for many years since coming across him on television coverage of the Cambridge folk festival. Since the passing of the great Doc Watson earlier this year, I think he is now my favourite living guitarist. He played a set that was way too short (for me anyway) and he was obviously suffering from a cold, but it was worth seeing nonetheless. This guy does things with a guitar that I don't even understand. Simply magical. As was local boy Gareth Dunlop who opened the show - I think he's now on my watch list to go and see play.

29/09/30

Roller derby last night and although this might not look like a derby shot, it is. The hard core fans of the Belfast Roller Derby team are the BRD Ultras. Last bout they came along dressed in poncho's and somberos. This time, it was ninjas. There was something so off the wall about seeing half a dozen people in the crowd dressed as japanese assassins. This is Barzo, who gamely offered to perform some spin kicks for the camera.

30/09/12

And here are my favourite Roller Derby team of all time. A nail-biting bout, tied after full time and needing an overtime jam to separate the two teams. The Belfast girls came out on top, and the excitement was amazing. A well deserved win after all the hard work they've put in this year. Dedication and drive abound, and they still find the time to hug me from time to time.

Update - Vandal Lisa (front row, far right) was rushed to hospital on Sunday after suffering a blood clot on her brain. Vandal skated like a star in the bout on Saturday night and for the smallest skater on the track, she played out of her skin. Latest news is that she's out of danger and doing well; everyone's thoughts are with Vandal and for her recovery.

367-50 Week 25

This should be an interesting week. Delivering the training on dull psychometrics this week as well as (in one's role as el presidente) MC'ing the City of Belfast Photographic Society annual exhibition. The weekend brings the Festival of Fools in Belfast City Centre and there's talk of a potential photoshoot with the Belfast Roller Derby ladies on Sunday morning.

30/04/12

This is my big son Conor in the back of my car, shot with a 10-24 zoom at it's widest. It makes for an interesting shot. It also makes my car look like a bloody limo rather than the small sporty convertible it actually is.

1/05/12

I discovered this religious comic sitting on a table in a school staff room today. It tells the story of the amazing Mr Harper who was apparently on the Titanic. It's pretty turgid stuff and comes complete with a range of incredible puzzles. However, what caught my eye was Mr Harper's declaration to his daughter. What exactly was the good news he was giving out about Jesus? I suspect it was either that Jesus wasn't on the Titanic or that if he was, he could walk home when the boat sank. I apologise to any of my readers who are religious, but I find this type of thing moderately disturbing. And vaguely amusing.

2/05/12

After all of last week's complaining, I got to deliver my training on psychometrics to a small group of SENCO's this afternoon in the Antrim Board Centre. Nice bunch of people, and not one of them fell asleep. The old joke about the Rorschach Inkblots went down well. Everyone went home armed with a big box of test gear. Good help those children.

3/05/12

This is Milly - living proof that when one door closes, another one opens. Or as my grandmother used to say, when one door closes, another slams in your face.

4/05/12

The Festival of Fools opened in Belfast with two big shows yesterday and today in St Anne's Square. Apart from being good craic, there's millions of photo opportunities to be had for the keen togger. This the lady who was conducting the band and singing for the show tonight. Shot with the big beast of a 70-200 f2.8 Tamron lens in case you're interested.

5/05/12

More Festival of Fools today. This isn't the best shot of the day but this was one of the better juggling acts at the festival - Haggis and Charlie. Lively and funny - I would have liked to have seen a bit more variety and a bit more juggling with fire but hey - you can't have everything.

6/05/12

8am Sunday morning, Belfast City centre. 4 hours of shooting the Belfast Roller Derby girls in action during the making of a promo video. This tired me out, even if I was already knackered after a poor night's sleep. It was an amazing morning and we were able to get some excellent shots. Several re-takes were needed due to my exceptional ability to stray into the shot when filming. I'm looking forward to seeing the finished product.