In Photos dot org

Photoheadlines will run a series on the Photography Olympics, the first installment covers three events: Postcarding, Branding and Bragging. I’m looking forward to the rest!

This city’s a drag

Two women, dragged along by a young girl so they won’t stop at the market on Cornmarket Street, Cork. I can just imagine the conversion:
“But I want to go home noooowwwww.”
“No, hold on, we went to all your shops, I want to look at more boots.”
“Ummm, that stall over there has delicious breads.”
“I’m tired!”

Maybe.

I’m really happy with the way this image turned out because we were right next to them and I wasn’t sure if I would get them all in. In the end I had to crop to get the composition I wanted. I duplicated the layer and darken the top one before removing the non-cloud portions of it. I added a slight lomo effect too which did wonderful things to the sky too!

The Yellow Helmet

A father picks up the yellow helmet dropped by his son in front of the Body Shop on Patrick’s Street, Cork last Saturday. I was sitting on one of the marble blocks that pass as street furniture on our main thoroughfare. I had my camera ready to shoot when I saw them passing and within a heartbeat had snapped off a few shots.

I like this: King Corner - great sky and architecture shot. All in your hands…. - keep on smiling!

Courtmacsherry Dead End

The little town of Courtmacsherry in Co. Cork is a picturesque tourist village with pretty looking multi-coloured houses visible on the way into the town from Timoleague.

This makes the attitude of the people we met there all the more confusing. We parked in the middle of the town, Jacinta wanted to check out a pottery shop, and walked with Oscar down the road. We passed by several people, mostly tourists by their clothes, and unusually, they kept their heads down watching the ground and never said “hello” or even commented on Oscar! We’re used to people stopping us and asking about him so this was disconcerting.

Later on we rested on the wall of the harbour and a few people did greet us, but there is a strange ambience and uneasy feeling about the town. Next time we’ll head directly to Dunworley.

The image was processed using two layers. One for the sky and the other for the ground. Sky was burned heavily to bring out the clouds while the ground was dodged and brightened with the Curves tool.

I’ve geotagged this photo on Flickr. Works well enough. It even knew where “courtmacsherry ireland” was!

Denis Murphy, Castle Street

There’s something fascinating for me about old buildings. Perhaps it’s the history they have seen and the memories they hold. Some of the old buildings on Castle Street, Cork are really interesting. I noticed this small building nestled in between it’s larger brethern and when I saw some people walking by I took my shot.

It was processed afterwards with the gimp Wide Angle plugin and I did a little work changing colours but not much else.

I like this: downtown strips, simply because it’s a neat idea I haven’t seen anyone else do yet.

Jill Greenberg’s infamous photos of children crying and upset are in today’s Sunday Times magazine in the article “Taking candy from a baby”. It’s unfortunate that such a reputable publication chose to publish the photos and I can only imagine the horrified response from parents as they sat down to breakfast with the newspaper this morning.

The article doesn’t say much, only summing up what we already know but the last paragraph disgusted me at the implication present in it for anyone who protests at her photography and methods.

Greenberg is appalled that some people even saw a sexual context to the pictures. “It didn’t even occur to me that people might think that. A lot of the people who’ve been upset are men. I don’t know if it’s because they project their own desires on these images and they don’t know what to do with them and blame me.”

Welcome everyone from Net Mums. I’m glad you found your way here!

Staring at me

Am I feeling conspicuous or what?

I tried shooting from the hip yesterday with the strap of my camera over my shoulder and my camera in a horizontal position instead of being wrapped around my hand in a vertical orientation.

It proved useful, but I found that:

1. More of my shots were blurry, perhaps because either the back and forth movement of me walking. I tried shooting in Tv (Shutter Priority mode) and even at 1/200sec and higher there was shake.
2. It’s great getting more of the surroundings in but I miss the feet.

White Sox Hanging On?

How are the White Sox doing this year? I went to see several baseball games in Chicago and they were always a blast, more a social occasion than anything else. I of course had my camera, here are some shots from a White Sox game, and here’s the famous game where Sammy Sosa used a corked bat! That was my first baseball game, watched from a corporate box owned by Fox!

This picture was taken last year. It’s on the location of Donald Trump’s new building, Trump International Hotel and Tower (Chicago) on the site of the old (and ugly) Chicago Sun-Times building.

Photodoto published Making Portraits this morning which got me thinking more about my street photography tomorrow. I wonder will people pose on the street for me? Do I have the nerve to approach complete strangers, make them feel at ease, connect with them and take their photo?

I know I won’t need it when I’m outside tomorrow, but Strobist linked to a professional lighting setup for portraiture in a studio. Might come in handy later.

The venerable Philip Green’s portrait page is of course a good read. It’s been around for years and I’ve read it many times. If you haven’t browsed http://www.photo.net/learn/ yet then you’re missing out!

Finally, Anandtech’s Portrait Tutorial is good, includes examples but I wonder why their second photo was included. The poor girl has stone columns coming out of her shoulders, even when blurred!

Digital Photo School’s latest posting is about the eternal question, RAW Vs Jpeg? It’s a really good read and goes through “what a RAW file is .. compared to a Jpeg” which can be a bit mysterious if all you’re used to is uploading images straight from your camera!

The article was written in response to this discussion on Flickr on the same subject. I skimmed through the thread, but the very last comment pointed me at Raw Studio, a GPL licensed RAW converted for Linux, Windows and Mac and any other OS that supports GTK+.

It’s still rather new, being only at version 0.3 but I downloaded the very latest code from SVN and it worked fine. I pointed it at Matt’s RAW photos of my wedding and a few moments later up popped a thumbnail browser, preview window and side-panel controls. There are no automatic auto-exposure/auto-everything options but the auto-white balance worked perfectly.

It uses dcraw, the RAW conversion engine used by many projects, including Google’s Picasa (and no, there is no virus in the Linux version!) and my favourite GIMP RAW plugin, UFRaw. Linux RAW has a good overview of Linux software for working with RAW images.

At this early stage I’m very impressed!