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 365-7

Week 7 is upon us, or at least upon me. Another week sadly lacking in inspiration for photography, but I'm coming to realise that I go through peaks and troughs in terms of my own creativity and productiveness. It may be something to do with the three photoshoots I tried to cover on Sunday just past - three very different events, three very different sets of demands and problems, three very different atmospheres. Maybe I just got burned out?

11/02/13

One from last night's wrestling action, processed today. Like the way this turned out, and was one of the few times when my timing was actually right. Definitely great fun, and I'd definitely go back if I got the invite.

12/02/13

You have to admire Warhol, if not as an artist then as a shameless self-promoter. The MAC in Belfast has an exhibition on at the moment and it is, being quite honest, very good indeed. A couple of galleries of prints and some video stuff would let you put in a couple of hours. This is the wall of the main staircase, between the two main galleries.

13/02/13

My eldest daughter Siobhan, who was kind enough to come round and get her little sister started on some knitting this afternoon. Stitches were dropped on more than a couple of occasions but I did press Siobhan into posing in front of the speedlights. She hates it - I'm amazed that she still agrees to do it, although it does involve some complaining and then some post-shoot criticism of my photos and processing. I like this one and there was no complaints or criticism. Is that a good sign?

14/02/13

Pictures of my favourite skaters' butts is not something I'm going to take on as a full-time project, but they do wear pants that make me laugh. I was abut to say sometimes, but lately its been pretty much every week. This comes in the same week that a campaign by derby photographers in the USA led to the shutting down of a Tumblr site dedicated to just that topic, due to the amounts of photos posted on it that broke copyright laws. Whoever started the site must have been tired of reading takedown notices.

15/02/13

I have to take more landscapes! It annoys me that I just don't get landscape photography so I've decided to make more of an effort with it. I had read an article on panoramas, got my hands on some nice software and took a swing past Scrabo to test it out. I'm quite happy with how this turned out, although the more I look at it, the tower seems to be leaning ever-so-slightly to the right. Am I imagining this?

16/02/13

A while back, I started to get interested in roadside memorials. I'd recently started driving more in work, and visiting places I hadn't been before with the result that I was passing more of these memorials. I started carrying a spare camera in the car in case I saw one and started pulling over and taking a picture of each. This is the first of two "ghost bikes" in Belfast to commemorate the death of Michael Caulfield. Mr Caulfield was a 56 year-old cyclist and father of four killed after a collision with a lorry on Friday the 15^th April near this spot on the Ormeau Bridge. The bike was placed by an unknown woman. In June 2012, the original ghost bike was stolen but was replaced at the end of June. It has remained there since.

17/02/13

I'm not even going to start to explain why this shot is here. It just had to be here.

367-50 Week 14

Welcome to the all-action photofest that is week 14 of my 367-50 project. I've just had the visual image of me sitting behind a desk in a suit like one of those American newsreaders. And now............. or perhaps, "and finally........"

13/02/12

I thought I'd run with some of Ciaran de Bhal's ideas from his talk last week and specifically still life shots using light painting. This is one of Trish's old cameras alongside my grandfather's old half hunter pocket watch. The camera was set for an 8 second exposure at f11 and 200 ISO. The room was dark and I took two shots; in the first I played a little hand torch over the watch and in the second I ran the torch over the camera. I then blended the two in Photoshop and converted to sepia tone using Lightroom. A little bit of burning was needed to tone down the highlights on the watch. Overall, not a bad little still life.

14/02/12

Happy Valentine's Day! I got a funky new shirt and my dinner cooked for me. We also got Couples Trivia cards. Just for the record, Trish is the better driver, is better with money and is much less childish than me. I, on the other hand, am more spontaneous and have more bad habits. Hooray!

15/02/12

Back to iPad portraits, since I had Ellen calling round for the evening. I'm still trying to figure out what you could with this type of shot, hence I'm basically repeating myself. What else could a man do with an iPad? That wasn't dirty.

16/02/12

For a good few years, while living in the cultural wasteland that is Carrickfergus, I drove past this every morning and evening. It sits on the shore at Jordanstown village and I have no idea what it is or was. Today I happened to be driving past and knew I had my camera and tripod in the boot of the car, as well as a pair of boots. I decided to give it a brief detour as the tide was out and it looked like I could walk pretty close to the water's edge. Anyone who knows what this used to be, I'd be delighted to know.

17/02/12

This is my very talented son, Conor. We spent the day at a Street Art Workshop in a semi-derelict building near Belfast City Centre with Conor spray-painting things and me taking photos. The event was being filmed by the BBC World Service as part of their English Language output - apparently it's big in places like Azerbaijan. This was Conor posing (or being posed) for his talking head segment. The room at the top of the building has these amazing semi-circular metal rafters/beams - I'd love to do a few more shots there if the opportunity arose.

18/02/12

A day of being out and about around "the Ards" today. Ballygowan (picking Trish's car up), Comber (lunch with Sarah), Scrabo (take photograph) and the new shopping centre (biggest collection of shit shops anywhere in western Europe). 

19/02/12

At Trish's suggestion we went off to St John's Point this morning to photograph the lighthouse. It was cold enough and an interesting spot. I have to admit that Trish found this rockpool (and her photo will probably be much better than mine) but I had to carry my camera and tripod all the way over the rocks to get this. 8-stop ND filter, f22, 200 ISO and a shutter speed of 2" - I even remembered to shoot in Raw format and to turn on the exposure delay mode on my camera (that's the D90 version of mirror lock up). A quick sprint up the Mournes later and some nice pics from Ben Crom/Silent Valley. Put me in the notion to do a bit of walking down there if the weather keeps up.

Next week will see me taking and posting photo number 100 (Wednesday I think) - it'll only be another 267 after that then!