In Photos dot org

An Autumn Leaf

I love the colours of nature at this time of year. The browns and yellows of falling vegetation make for a soft rich carpet of leaves that is pleasing to the eye. Unless of course it’s your job to clean them up, or after it rains!

This photo came third in the Mallow Camera Club Patterns Around Us competition, novice digital section. I took notes about the other winners but I don’t know how accurate they are. Congrats to David Lavery for all his winning images!

Looming over the building site

A tall crane looms over the building site of The Elysian, a new high-rise building that will house offices, apartments, a shopping center and underground parking. The main tower of the new building will be 17 storeys high, taller than anything else in the city.

Over a year ago I took a photo of the street-highrise-site/>building site as it was then for the US Book. As you can see, they’ve dug the foundations and started on the main tower.

This picture was taken from the top of a 4 storey car park which gives you some idea of how tall that crane is!

O’Flynn’s Butchers on Marlboro Street.

O’Flynn’s Butchers on Marlboro St. Cork is a very popular butchers serving high quality meat with a friendly smile. We rang in our order early because we knew the place would be bare by the time we go in!

Here are the staff posing for my camera, there’s a huge collection of photos on the wall so I’m not the first, or probably the last to wander in with a camera. In fact Brian O Reilly created a 360 degree wrap around image using Apple’s Quicktime engine.

Thanks for the extra comments yesterday! The encouragement is always appreciated!

I like this: 25 years of the Brown Sisters.

If you’re nostalgic for the days of film read the comments on Why not scanned film? by Mike Johnston. Plenty of people are still shooting film, developing it and scanning it in and doing it well. Film has some advantages over digital in capturing certain aspects of light, but so does digital. I can’t remember what those are, but I think film is better at recording highlights than digital, while digital, well, I don’t recall. It all has to do with exposure curves or something!

I went from a point and shoot film camera to the relative freedom of a digital compact camera and never looked back. I can certainly understand why people love the feel of negatives and chemicals and a process but I can’t see the point of it. Why do you shoot film and scan it in? Why not shoot digital and skip the tedium of scanning? The comments on Mike’s article have several varied and very good answers.

The recently held National Shield competition brought out a huge number of high quality entrants and at least some of that talent has been facilitated by the rise of digital capture. The barrier to entry has fallen and the world changed.

Ade: Buggrit. Maybe my highlights are blocked to hell and the process is tedious as owt and I’m wasting good shooting time that could be spent filling the card on my DSLR before wrestling with monochrome conversions in Bibble. I’m never going to use or care about a traditional darkroom and I don’t yet prefer digitally-captured B&W. So what, I like my inkjet prints from scanned negs. I just need another four hours in the day.

Later… if you must use a scanner, or are in the market for one, then the advice here may be of use to you.

Look through the bars at Alcatraz

Looking down a closed off corridor or street in Alcatraz Prison, San Francisco. I watched a few minutes of “Escape From Alcatraz” last night and recognised a few locations - the canteen of course, and the ventilation shafts behind the cells are visible to anyone who looks.

I wonder how many feet plodded down this street and who was incarcerated there.

Thanks for the comments on my posts too, it’s encouragement to keep posting so if you feel like adding your two cents don’t be shy!

The real prisoners of Alcatraz

Prisoners of Alcatraz mill about in a daze.

The special headsets they wear are mind controlling devices that cause people to stare listlessly into space. They control the actions of people, causing them to walk around the prison, peering into cells and to gaze at features of the streets.

I’ve felt the power of these devices myself and they’re seductive. A gravelly voice telling me to go to a particular cell, or along a corridor. Thankfully an official collected the device off each person at a certain point and we woke up and walked out into the sunshine with happy smiles on our faces.

The streets of San Francisco

San Francisco is rightly famous for it’s hills and steep slopes. The city streets go up and down and, and no matter what the gradient, cars will always be parked at the side of the street. Local bylaws state that a parked car on a slope must have the front wheels pointed towards the sidewalk so the car won’t roll if the handbrake fails. As you can see, not everyone obeys that particular piece of legislation!

I can’t remember what building this was, but I was struck by the sheer lines of it, and the grey gloomy and despondent colour. There are no entrances visible and the building seems to grow out of the hillside as if mocking the gradient of the land by standing tall and straight.

PS. Happy Thanksgiving! It’s a normal working day around the rest of the world but the Internet is much quieter now that US visitors are off work, relaxing and enjoying the day!

Temporary Dwelling Prohibited

A Cork County Council warning sign looms overhead at Garretstown Beach, Co. Cork. Luckily I had left the caravan at home and the rubbish was in the bin!

This photo shows one of the disadvantages of shooting in Jpeg - it can’t cope with the subtle shades of blue in the sky, although the ugly bands of colour are made worse by my vignetting of the image afterwards. Oops.

In other news, I ordered Bibble Labs Pro RAW conversion version using a discount code on The Digital Photography Show. The nice thing is, I can use the Pro edition on Linux and the Mac, which will be useful. It’s also a great piece of software and will encourage me to shoot more RAW images.

I also ordered the Canon 50mm f1.8 lens from warehouseexpress.com (via) who were reasonably priced. Hopefully I’ll get that in the next few days and in time to shoot the IT@Cork conference in a week’s time. Eddie Hobbs and various people from the online world will be speaking there and I hope to get some goot shots.

Seaside Bubbles

Bubbles in the incoming tide break on the sandy beach at Garretstown about a month ago.

I turned this black and white because I love the abstract feel to the bubbles and it makes the grain of the sand beneath more visible. I had to jump up to avoid getting splashed moments later but such are the risks one takes for one’s art!

Carefree on the beach

Shoes off wandering along the beach, the glow of a setting sun and nothing to do but enjoy the moment.

Taken in Garretstown last month on a warm Autumn day.