367-50 Week 49

Returned from a fantastic trip to Venice on Saturday to find that my internet had given up the ghost so I was unable to post any update for last week. Thanks to O2 customer services, I had a new wireless router delivered toady an I'm back up and running. Here's some holiday snaps to bore the knickers off you all.

15/10/12

So, a whole day of travelling via car to Dublin, plane to Treviso Airport, bus to Treviso town and then train to the town of Mogliano Venito outside Venice. Arrived just in time for a storm featuring thunder, lightening and very heavy rain which put the brakes on getting into Venice. I did get this shot on the hotel room balcony. It was wetter outside than it looks.

16/10/12

Armed with a paper map (the iphone Venice Guide app was truly crap and useless) it was off around Venice. Thankfully the storm seemed to have cleared the air and the skies were blue with temperatures around 19 degrees. Walked around the centre of the city, stopping for coffee, wine, food etc. Took a detour to see this rather gorgeous building called the Snailshell - an external staircase with some truly beautiful north african features. Being a wee bit cheeky, I did climb on the fence surrounding it to get a better perspective.

17/10/12

Wednesday was a day for waterbuses and travelling to some of the islands that surround Venice. The first of these was San Michelle, the communal cemetery for the city. Due to space restrictions, catholics can only be buried here for ten years before their bones are disinterred and placed in a ossuary. No such pressure exists in the protestant section, and they can lie as long as they want. Fact. No photography within the cemetery, but I couldn't resist taking a few sneaky shots shooting from the hip with my wide angle. Also got shots of the graves of Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev (buried in the uncrowded Russian Orthodox plot) but couldn't find the grave of the poet Ezra Pound.

18/10/12

Day three and it was off on the hoof again by foot and waterbus. Planned out a day of "lesser seen Venice" and stayed well away from the tourist areas. The day involved an enormous circle around the outskirts of the city, taking in the most far-flung parts of Venice. There are cracking shots to be had everywhere, especially when the light was as good as this. Reflections abound - here's a fairly nice one.

19/10/12

Although today was spent travelling home, I couldn't ignore the island of Burano. Home of lace making, the houses are all painted in bright primary colours and are a dream for photographers and painters. The shot above hasn't been processed at all (apart from a wee crop) and gives a real sense of what this island town looks like.

20/10/12

Having no internet meant I had the chance to get to work processing my pics from the trip on Saturday. I ran a few through the HDR processing and this was my favourite. It's a view of St Mark's from the church at St Georgio Maggiore. Had to wait half and hour before I could get a shot with no people. After this, it was trip up the bell tower of the church for the best view over Venice anywhere. Five euro well spent, although you should avoid it if you're not a fan of either heights or enclosed spaces - the lift to the top is tiny. Also avoid being up there on the hour as the bells still ring and they are deafening.

21/10/12

"Daddy Daddy can we walk up Black Mountain?" I gave in. It was wet, cold and the cloud had closed in really badly by the time we started our walk. I foolishly had taken just my lensbaby with me. This was a bad decision. However, I did come up with this shot of Sarah as she played with some of the local horses.

Ah - only three weeks of this project to go after this one. While I'm looking forward to not being under pressure to take and post a picture every day, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Put the camera away for a week? A month? Carry on? Decisions, decisions.

367-50 Week 40

Week 40 on the project and after this only 12 more weeks to go! By the end of this week I'll have posted 40 weeks of shots, a total of 280 photos. I'm not sure why, but I've returned from holidays with an increased mojo for taking pictures and increased motivation for getting myself out there again. I've been hitting the e-mail hard over the last few days and have turned up some good photo opportunities. Digging pays off and the fruits of said digging will certainly turn up here over the next few months.

13/08/12

It was late on Monday evening and I hadn't taken my shot. Dinner was in the oven and I had about 20 minutes to find something. This was what I found. I shot a few frames but there was something about the texture of the statue, bricks and stones that appealed to me and it seemed to work in sepia. Later that night I sat on a beach and watched the most marvellous sheet lightning storm out over the Irish Sea from a deserted beach on the County Down Coast. I hadn't taken my camera, but it would have been glorious to have gotten a shot of the clouds lighting up from within. It was a damn nice walk and a damn nice evening though, so I'm not complaining.

14/08/12

On the spur of the moment I decided to go into Belfast and shoot the open-top bus celebration for Paddy Barnes and Michael Conlan, two Irish boxers who both won bronze at the Olympic Games. I got some good shots of them but had also heard on the radio that a mural was being painted to celebrate Conlan's win near where he lived. I took a swing by the street and found this, had a chat with the very helpful man who was painting the mural with his son and took this shot, which was my own favourite of the day. I also uploaded the pics and a story to Demotix, the first real news story I've uploaded there in a long time. My story made the front page of the main Demotix website, as least for a couple of hours. That was pretty pleasing. If you want to have a gander at it, you can find it here:

Paddy Barnes/Michael Conlan Story on Demotix

14/08/12

Ok - I got sidetracked this evening whilst looking for props for a photo project with Sarah. I ended up sitting looking through a box of old family stuff - photos, documents, medals, watches etc. There was also a bag containing my late grandfather's orange lodge regalia. This is a detail shot of his sash - as you will notice, it is blue not orange, blue being the colour for temperance lodges. It was quite remarkable that my grandfather was a member of a temperance lodge, given that he was fond of alcohol and whiskey in particular. It's even more remarkable that he decided to leave this stuff to me when he died, given my own particular political and religious opinions. Either that or he had kept his sense of humour right up to his death.

15/08/12

It's rare that I come up with a title for a shot, but this is "The Mighty Atom" - you know, like some sort of 1950's comic book hero/heroine? Light painting fun in the back garden made easier by the fact that the nights are definitely getting darker. One LED torch waved around Sarah on a 30" exposure at f 11 and ISO 100 and then a blast of rear curtain flash at the end to light up Sarah herself. Some of Sarah's shots of me are better than this, but I daren't post them up here. Make me look bad.

16/08/12

This was the result of another evening's light painting exploits. This was all done after 9.30 at night, just after sunset. The main shot is a long exposure and HDR'ed shot of the round tower in Dundrum Castle with the castle being lit up by a hand-held torch. The light spheres were created in the grounds of the castle by taping led lights to a hula hoop and spinning it. The spheres were then cut and pasted into the main picture and re-sized accordingly. I need to work on the spheres a bit more to try to get some kind of glow effect from them, but for a first effort I'm pretty pleased with this.

17/08/12

A total grab shot if ever there was one. Stopped for coffee and a sticky bun (and a smoke) outside and set the camera on the table. I realised it was pointing at this man and his dog, waited for the dog to turn its head and hit the shutter button and prayed that the settings on the camera would do the job. They did.

19/08/12

I'm not sure why there are so many landscapes cropping up on the blog recently, given that the phrase most associated with this type of shot is "I don't do landscapes." I do like this shot though, taken last night and processed this morning. Maybe I just need to do some more and read around it too, get more of an idea of what to look for when setting up landscape shots.

367-50 Week 3

Into week three and taking a shot each day has started to become a habit. I'm more tuned into opportunities for shots (I think) and spend a lot more time thinking about potential pictures.

On Monday, I set myself a challenge. I had subscribed to Trey Ratcliff on Facebook as I'm a big fan of his HDR stuff. My challenge was to produce an HDR shot of the house as quickly as possible. Three shots taken on the tripod, imported via Lightroom and then into Photmatix Pro. I was quite pleased with the result and in total this took 25 mins start to finish.

28/11/11

On Tuesday I was standing outside my office in Ballymena having a smoke and started playing with a iphone app called Camera+ for taking and processing photos. Apparently Annie Liebowitz has declared that the iphone 4 is now the leading camera for snapshots. This was my first attempt using the app and is a shot of the side of County Hall with an effect called "So Emo"

29/11/11

I was sitting in the dining room working on the laptop when I happened to look out the window and saw the little birdbox at the bottom of the garden catching the late afternoon sun. I garbbed my camera, a pair of stepladders and ran down to try to get the shot.

30/11/11

Thursday was spent in Larne. Those of you who know me will know that this is not one of my favourite places. It was a long day, spent in two schools with two very difficult cases. On the way home I pulled over in a layby to see if I could get shots of the traffic. I was tempted to paraphrase Dr Samuel Johnson - "The noblest thing a Larne man ever sees is the high road to Belfast."

1/12/11

I think Friday evening qualifies as my first ever commericial photo shoot. Trish and I were invited to Katch 27 in Kircubbin with the deal being we take photos and get our dinner in return. This was a great deal, made even better by the production of a bottle of wine as well. Leigh and Davy were great hosts and it was interesting to spend some time in a "real" kitchen to see what goes on. The food was great, with the dessert being the highlight for me.

2/12/11

Saturday morning took me back to Kircubbin, to get some exterior shots of Katch 27, but also to have a wee prowl around the area. Spent some time in Greyabbey and got some nice shots of the old abbey, as well as spotting a red squirrel jumping over the headstones. I also fancied trying to get close to the tower in the shot below - I'd always driven past this but never got round to trying to get up to it. After much driving around up lanes and dirt tracks, I got there.

3/12/11

And finally today - stinking hangover; unable to do much except drink tea and smoke. Trish informed me that she did not want me to come to TESCO with her as apparently I'm a "difficult" shopping partner. Had to get one wee men shot in, so here's Sadie and Agnes planning their next trip.

4/12/11

See y'all next week!

Competition Time

Wednesday night saw the first of the camera club competion rounds. I was happy enough with how it went and was pleasantly surprised by the number and variety of entries. A couple of my own pics did well, but I was more taken with the work submitted by some of the people in the general category. Some of the work by the Shooters gang was outstanding, and a couple of the portraits they submitted were amazing. Seeing my own little dark apprentice getting 1st place for her black and white shot of a couple of orangemen provided a little moment of parental pride.

So far, so good.
Here comes the gripe. Our judge was (surprise) very conservative in his approach to the pictures and I think what shocked me more was his apparent disregard for, or lack of awareness of HDR processing.
I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, but used sparingly and with the right shot, I think it can work well. To describe the HDR pictures by saying "there's something funny about the colours in this - they're a bit over-saturated" of "it looks like someone has applied a funny filter in photoshop to this picture" really shows a lack of knowledge for what is becoming a fairly common technique.
My gentle suggestion that we thank him for his efforts by buying him a copy of Trey Radcliffe's excellent book Stuck In Customs on the process of HDR fell on deaf ears. I might send him one anonymously anyway.