Light from the Bay Bridge in San Francsico shimmers in the waters of the harbour. To the left one of the fire fighting boats of the SF Fire Department can be seen.
Posting this landmark of San Francisco today as most of the rest of Automattic make their way to Mexico. Here’s another shot from another night near the bridge.
Swans rush to the bank of the Lough looking for bread from the crazy guy hanging over the water with a large black object…
This shows off one of my favourite night-time techniques. Long exposure with a flash. The long exposure captures the background while the flash illuminates the foreground objects, along with some nice movement blur.
It works really well at parties when people are dancing, especially if you’re lucky to capture a laughing face while the body is in motion.
The shipyards in Rushbrooke, just outside Cobh are still active although much quieter now than during their heyday. The cranes make for great photography against the moonlit sky.
This was shot from across the River Lee in Passage last November.
FRLinux asked about settings so here they are, including post-processing:
Flickr’s exif data for this is a bit wrong - gthumb says the exposure was for 5 seconds, aperture was wide open at f4.5, and lens set at 28mm, which you can probably multiply by 1.6 for the crop factor. ISO was 100.
Post Processing was done in the GIMP using 3 layers:
1. Top layer is transparent with a black gradient at the bottom. Layer mode is Overlay.
2. Middle layer is black and white, and blurred and with added noise. It’s set to screen mode, and opacity of 51%.
3. Bottom layer is the colour image, slightly saturated and darker.
Hope that helps!
Traffic along the Mallow Road hurries past on a cold and foggy December night. This was taken from the bridge near Rathpeacon and Killeens.
The bridge itself as you can see from the map above is much wider than the one in this picture but I wasn’t going to stand in the middle of a dark road at risk of being knocked over for my art. At least not this time anyway!
Traffic from the right is coming from Cork, while traffic from the left is coming from the direction of Mallow or Blarney.
PS. Nominations for the Irish Blog Awards are now open. There are several categories and you can nominate your favourite Irish blog in whichever one fits. In Photos won Best Photoblog last year but this is the only time I’ll mention the awards here unlike last year when I did the dog on it a bit! (Not that I wouldn’t mind winning again of course!)
I like these: Snow Squalls! and Palm House - I wish more photoblog software understood trackbacks and pings. It’s hard to start a conversation with them.
Studs on the ground lead down to the traffic lights on the South Mall, Cork.
In this long exposure shot a couple of cars passed by providing a nice light trail in the background. The twinkling of the street lighting is from the narrow aperture. Setting the aperture as small as possible is definitely the best thing you can do when making long exposure shots at night.
This was taken while out with Mallow Camera Club last December. More to come from that night too!
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!
A brooding, dark sky threatens to swallow the setting sun over Drake’s Pool near Crosshaven in Co. Cork.
A sign blazes it’s message above our heads in San Francisco. The Diet Coke logo could be seen from the end of the street so I had to snap it as we got closer!
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!
An Fear Marbh, an island off the coast of Co. Kerry, Ireland, with the setting sun lighting up the cloud over the Atlantic.
“An Fear Marbh” translates as “the dead man” and is so named because of the obvious shape of the island - that of a man lying on his back.
This was taken last September but because today is the Winter Solstice, and the shortest day of the year, I thought it was the perfect image for the day. Days will get longer now, little by little each day.
On the day this was taken we had dinner in Dingle. I watched the sun set and the light travel down the mountains near the Conor Pass. After eating, we quickly drove west to the coast to watch the sunset. Driving down a small road we spotted a car pulled over and someone standing outside watching the sunset so we stopped and got out. Turns out it was another photographer shooting the setting sun! We stayed there chatting for a few minutes before heading off. A few moments later the road turned a corner and this beautiful scene presented itself. I had to stop and shoot a few dozen shots.
Last night we called to the crib in Ballyvolane. Fr. James McSweeney has put together a wonderful crib with chickens, pigs, calves, goats, sheep, lammas, a pony, 2 donkeys and 4 young puppies. I’ll post a photo or two tomorrow, and the crib is definitely worth a visit if you live in Cork.
Visitors are asked to give a donation, and this year money raised will go to the St Patrick’s Church renovation fund. The crib is located 200 metres from St Oliver’s Church in Ballyvolane on Kilmorna Heights.
Fr. James has a photography site at Today is my gift to you.ie where he posts a new photo every day. I’ll be converting it to a WordPress blog in January when things quieten down again!
