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Reflections of the city

Cork City Hall and the urban lighting on both sides of the River Lee are reflected in the water at night.

I took this back in October 2006 when the Elysian hadn’t reached it’s glorious present day height. I venture to say that a photo of this scene now would feature at least a part of the Elysian buildings blocking the sky in the top right of the photo.

Grand Parade on the Lee

This is the Grand Parade in Cork, from across the River Lee on Sullivan’s Quay. It was the graffiti on the river wall, “Tek”, that prompted me to shoot this image and I like how it came out.

It does lose something in this resized version because of the distant detail but it’s going to be a while before everyone has 20″ monitors and even longer before I put full size images on display for public consumption.

City Hall at night

Cork City Hall at night as viewed from across the river. It was all lit up for the Modern Homes Exhibition and as it was such a calm night the reflection on the River Lee was beautiful.

If you watch the RTE news at 6pm or 9pm tonight, watch out for the photo on the weather forecast. A friend of mine, Catherine Cotter, sent in a few entries to their photography competition and one of her photos will be shown tonight! I must set up the Sky+ to record it just in case. I might be able to get a screen capture somehow!

The River, The Brewery and the Cathedral

The River Lee rushes by the Beamish and Crawford Brewery on one side, and O’Sullivan Electrical on the other with St. Finbarre’s Cathedral in the background.

I have discovered there’s a dead pixel on my camera’s sensor. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to show itself much but when I take long exposure shots like the one above a little red dot appears in the top-right of the image. It’s easy to get rid of with the clone tool but also annoying.

The Wacom graphics tablet is great fun to play with but I haven’t got it working fully in Linux yet. Ubuntu thinks it’s simply another mouse device and GIMP doesn’t see it as an “extended device”. I spent quite some time on the Ubuntu forums trying to fix it yesterday before giving up and trying it out on a few images.
It’s a little fiddly to begin with, but I think that’s par-for-the-course when using a new tool. I do find that when dodging and burning large sections of images the brush can get stuck and won’t follow the cursor but I’ve read that once it’s properly configured performance is improved so I hope that is fixed then.

Hope you had a nice Christmas Day!

Steps down to the river

Steps lead down to the River Lee in Cork City. Railing stops people going down them but in times past fishermen and other boat users hauled goods up these steps onto the quays.

This was taken a few yards up the quay from a previous shot.

Technique: To increase the dynamic range of this photo I made copies of the original layer. The bottom of the photo was quite dark and that had to be brightened and the sky was too bright so darkening that helped significantly. I used layer masks to isolate my changes to those areas of the photo that needed it.

The new Digital Journalist is out!

I like this: Ramadan in Beaumont. Love the second image here.

Is it Bank of Scotland(Ireland) or Halifax?

Bank of Scotland(Ireland) are changing their unwieldy name to the much shorter “Halifax”. The bank is a major player in the UK market, but the name change could yet backfire because Halifax isn’t very well known in Ireland. I presume a slick marketing campaign will take care of that.

The building across the river is the Cork branch of the bank on the Grand Parade. I love how the sun picked out the bright white of it’s walls and the bike in the foreground was in shadow beneath a tree.