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The Cork County Hall and the web

Early one morning I visited the County Hall in Cork and took a few photos. In fact, this one is from the same shoot.

Webs covered a tree behind the building, and the early morning dew sparkled in the sun. I was hoping for an ominous feel to the photo but I failed, and instead I have something that mixes nature with our man made presence on this world.

I quite like the way the strands of the web stand out too!

Many faces in the crowd

A crowd of Alcatraz sightseers prepares to disembark from the ferry back at San Francisco. From the expressions on a few faces I think they were wondering what that guy was doing with his camera held in the air!

I love the patterns in the roof and the contrast with the metal grill, you can’t take me anywhere that I won’t take a photo!

The Photo Critic is looking for nude and glamour shots to critique next week.

Would you be interested in having your risque photos reviewed / critiqued? I can’t offer payment, but if I use one of more of your photos, I’ll add a link to your blog, web site or Flickr stream, like I did for the previous photo critiques I did…

He’s quite serious, here’s a previous critique and he has written an introduction to nude photography. I wouldn’t know where to start if asked to to critique a nude. Shooting portraits is hard enough but nude is much harder by all accounts; clothes hide blemishes, spots and other imperfections. The lighting is very important as a shadow in the wrong place can ruin the image. The introduction above goes some way to explaining the problems associated with the format so you can expect some good advice if you submit photos.

The broom at 187

Walking through the urban environment the seemingly normal assortment of rubbish or objects can make an image that bit more interesting. This was taken in August, but guess who forgot to bring in the Christmas lights?

Oh yes, a small tip if you’re adding noise to an image. You’ll need to do it twice. Once for your full size image, and a second time when you resize. After resizing noise, it gets blurred and is nowhere near as effective.

PS. I really like An Incidental Shot - the photographer who’s quick off the mark will get the shot!

PPS. Micki has finished blogging on Shutterbug Underexposed and she’ll be missed. Many blogs have fallen by the wayside over the past 2 years, but it takes time and it’s not always easy to find that time.

The red and white man

A street entertainer on stilts entertained the crowd at the Midleton Food and Drink Festival last September. I took photos of him in Cork too and I think he recognised me and my wife as he made a beeline for us and stopped to chat.

This was shot from below as he was towering over us, but I cropped a much larger shot. I used flash to illuminate his face against the bright sky.

San Francisco DPT on the job

The San Francisco Department of Parking and Traffic (DPT) have painted the kerb of the sidewalk in the city to designate different parking areas in the city.

Wandering around the city I was struck by the startling paint job on the ground, especially the “warning” colours used. It didn’t stop people double parking though, but I didn’t spot any traffic cops around either!

Caution Children

A sign at the entrance to my estate warns motorists to watch out for children playing on the street.

Just to prove that you don’t need a big digital SLR to take interesting photos, this was taken with my Panasonic FZ5. I saw the great cloudscape in the sky and illuminated the sign with the onboard flash.

Alcatraz Staircase

A lonely staircase on Alcatraz is off-limtis to tourists but not to the eye of my camera.

Sailing In San Francisco

A yacht sails past the waterfront in San Francisco Bay. There was plenty of activity on the waters with ferries, yachts, kite surfers and even helicopters fly overhead.

RTE Radio 1’s Flux ran a programme on the treatment of a community following the death of a woman and her two sons in Firhouse, Co Dublin. last year.

Local community members were interviewed almost a year later by Flux to find out how journalists and photographers treated them. Some of the stories are shocking, others have been discounted as pure fantasy, and the newspapers are defended by a member of staff from the Irish Daily Mail.

I’m writing this from memory because the sound on my desktop box is broken and the sound on my Macbook is just too low for comfort. I used mplayer to record the stream using the following command, mplayer rtsp://streaming2.rte.ie/2007/0129/29012007rte-flux.rm -novideo -ao pcm. That dumps the realaudio stream to a file called audiodump.wav. I wish mencoder worked on audio streams…

It’s well worth a listen though.