In Photos dot org

Waves at Couminole

The waves crash on to the beach at Couminole on Slea Head, Co. Kerry.

Standing where I was when I took this image was scary. Huge waves lifting up water to head height before crashing down mere feet in front of me.

Is that Skellig Michael in the background?

The Kerry Flag

Kerry were still celebrating their win in the All Ireland when we stayed in Dingle a few weeks back and flags were flying everywhere!

Shadows on Slea Head

Shadows from the broken clouds above play over the landscape on Slea Head in Co. Kerry. Every moment was a different photo until the rain eventually caught up with us!

Halloween Pumpkin Head

A Halloween Pumpkin Head or Jack-o’-lantern stares off at the community hall where Mallow Camera Club meet each Monday.

I spotted the head after our last meeting. It’s hand-held in low light so I had to pump up the ISO to get a steady shot.

More on this Halloween tradition:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack-o’-lantern
http://wilstar.com/holidays/hallown.htm

Montague Burton the Tailor of Taste

Like the stone laid by Barbara Jessie Burton in 1927, this doorway probably goes unnoticed by most people on Prince’s Street. It’s right next to the stone linked above, but the door is usually closed.
I spotted this colourful mosaic out of the corner of my eye and recognised the Burton name from my previous post.

Dunnes Stores for Better Value

The old Dunnes Stores on Patrick’s Street is now only a shadow of it’s former self. All that remains of the building is the front facade and a small portion of the side walls.
Construction work on the Paul Street development has levelled most of the back buildings in a square block, exposing the internals of other buildings to the elements.
I spotted photos hanging on the rear wall of a room left open to the elements after demolition. Surreal!

If any business person from Acadamy Street is reading this, can I go to the top of your building and shoot the construction site from on-high? Please!

The crow stops here

A crow atop a STOP sign on The Grand Parade, Cork.

Shot using a fairly high ISO but bicubic resizing smudges the noise away!

The new release of GIMP 2.4 is finally out! Sven announced it on the Gimp User mailing list this morning. It seems like forever since 2.2 was released but he has promised that 2.6 won’t be as long in the making.

The roadmap for GIMP 2.6 will be discussed over the next weeks on the gimp-developer mailing-list. We can only tell you so much now: It is going to rock and it shouldn’t take as long to get it done as it took to finish GIMP 2.4. If you want to join the effort, your help is much appreciated.

GIMP.org is fairly slow now but the release notes have the low down on changes since 2.2. Some of the biggest user visible changes include red eye removal, healing tool and a better alignment tool. Plugins and scripts now live in the same place, the “Filters” menu. I’m using the rc3 release in Ubuntu Linux 7.10 and it’s been rock solid for the past few days. I’m sure Ubuntu will update their .deb package in the next few days.

After you update, get the GIMP Lomo plugin I posted yesterday. It’s 2.4 ready!

Trust on the street

Have you ever thought about how you’re manipulated by the brands?

Trust Boots.

This is a slighly modified version of an old GIMP Lomo plugin I’ve used for ages that will now work with the new GIMP 2.4 release thanks to some advice I remembered reading on the GIMP User mailing list. The original plugin is by Francois Le Lay but hasn’t been updated since 2005. It’s a basic script but it’s very effective. Just be warned, if you resize your image, make sure you right click on the Vignette layer and click “Layer to image size” before the resize. Otherwise odd things happen!

Download

Download gimplomo.scm.

Install

Installation is easy. Simply copy gimplomo.scm into your .gimp-2.4/scripts/ folder and restart the GIMP. It will appear as Image->Filters->Light and Shadow->Lomo.

Example Images

Below are two before and after examples of what the Lomo plugin does to images. I have also posted fake lomo photos in the past which should give a really good idea of what it’s capable of.

Before and After Lomo images

Why the change to Script-fu?

Script-fu in GIMP 2.4 requires that variables be defined before using them which has broken a lot of Script-fu scripts unfortunately. In theory it’s a great change because it tightens up on sloppy programming but it hurts the end user!