In Photos dot org

Blue doors in Bantry, Co. Cork.

Adam is 1 tomorrow so we went out for lunch this afternoon. I really shouldn’t have had that chocolate cheescake. Yum though. Blarney was full of tourists wandering everywhere. The infamous “invulnerability zone” all tourists feel around them makes driving very hazardous, especially in the grounds of Blarney Woollen Mills.

We had a party for Adam later and our families called over to celebrate. I finally played 4 player Mario Kart on the Wii with Donal, Cathal and Mike and it was great fun!

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Sunrise over Blarney a few days ago. There was a thin layer of cloud on the horizon that nicely blocked out much of the light of the sun allowing me to capture this early morning sun.

It’s amazing to think that the light we see takes 8 minutes to travel the immense distance between the Sun and Earth. What’s even more remarkable is the thousands of years a photon can spend zinging back and forth inside the Sun before emerging as heat and light.

This is an experiment. I am hoping to post (almost) every photo I take as small 400px wide images using the new gallery function in WordPress 2.5.

These posts won’t appear in the feed because of the number of thumbnails Feedreaders won’t see the gallery, and only an excerpt will be shown on the homepage if I’ve got my snippets of code right. It’s not polite to shove 90+ images down the throats of subscribers IMO! You’ll have to view the actual post to see the thumbnails.

Out of these images, I think there’s maybe 2 or 3 that I’ll work on and post later. Hopefully this gallery may provide a context to those photos I work on and publish later. At the very least you’ll see that I take a lot of photos of nothing in particular!

Oh yes, I got my Sigma 10-20 lens back today. Only took 5 months to repair! Thanks Sigma!

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A water tap on the quay in Cobh, Co. Cork drips slowly into the sea.

This is a favourite photo of mine.

On November 15th 2007 I took my Sigma 10-20 wide angle lens into O’Learys Camera World in Cork to be repaired. (I found out they were using some of my photos without permission too, but that’s another story. Read the linked post above!)
Several phone calls followed over the weeks after that. Eventually I was told that parts had to be shipped from Japan.

Roll on 5 months later to April 15th 2008. I rang O’Learys Camera World and got on to Andrea. She had to check my docket number and was gone for quite a while, during which time several members of staff tried to make phone calls. Beep, beep, beep and I’d wait for them to put the phone to their ear before saying, “I’m waiting on someone to check a docket for me”. After what seemed like an age, Andrea finally came on the phone again. She couldn’t get in touch with anyone and rattled off the same old story about shipping parts from Japan. She’s said she’d ring me back in 5 minutes after speaking to the repair shop in Bandon.

Oh, and that took almost 11 minutes to find out. Grrr.

A few minutes later she rang back. The repair guy is off today, she’ll be off tomorrow, but she’d leave a note for Declan to ring them again. Hopefully he rings me, and I have to wonder at the inventory system of a repair shop that doesn’t have a database a secretary can check ..

If I didn’t have Matt’s old lens I’d be really pissed, but as it is I’ve been without an expensive piece of equipment for too long.

O’Learys Camera World - you screwed me over by using my photos to sell your digital photo frames without asking my permission. Now you’ve kept my lens for 5 months. Please don’t expect any business from me in the future once this debacle is sorted out.

Hopefully a few members of Mallow Camera Club will read this and pass the word along. I gave a talk at the club last night on educational websites. Here’s a list of the sites I covered. If you’re new to blogs, it’s a good starting point for any budding photographer.

The Cork County colours fly on the quay at Ballycotton Harbour in Co. Cork in 2006. I’ve been looking at this image for so long I’m almost certain I must have uploaded it but it’s been sitting in my output folder for all this time!

A rainbow brightens up the dark clouds threatening Cobh in Co. Cork in late 2006.

You can see Cobh Cathedral in the background, and I’d swear the boats in the foreground are still there in the same position all these years later ..

Bertie Ahern, who recently announced his resignation as Taoiseach or Prime Minister of Ireland was well known for opening all sorts of events and buildings.

Plaques with his name dot the country.

PS. This image is now hosted on my own server where I have some referrer checks. If you don’t see it in your feed reader please leave a comment!

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.