Posts tagged with swans
2 July 2008 - Kinsale at Night
The quiet, residential part of Kinsale as photographed from the busy touristy part across the harbour! This was a long exposure shot that came out quite nicely but it did show up the dead pixels on my sensor again. Good thing I don’t have time to shoot many of these types of photos nowadays.
The fight against comment spammers never ends. This blog is listed on a few “do follow” listings and I caught someone this morning leaving a comment after they came here from a “site:inphotos.org” Google search. The comment is delinked but even if I hadn’t, his url still wouldn’t have shown because I only show it after a certain number of comments have been made. It’s my thank you to the regular commenters here. The pagerank you get from that link isn’t diluted by the spammers.
PS. Phil O’Kane will be in Cork next weekend from Friday to Sunday. I’ll be meeting him at Robodock at 3pm and hopefully before but maybe we can get a small photomeet together at some stage on Saturday or Sunday?
26 March 2008 - Swans on The Lough
Swans swim past on The Lough in Cork City. This was one of the first photos I took at the recent photowalk there. Despite the clear blue sky and lovely light it was quite cold with a biting wind!
25 March 2008 - Three’s a crowd
Some of the swans at the Lough a few weeks ago during the photo walk. Got a few more shots from that session to post!
15 March 2008 - Heads up at the Lough
This was shot from a precarious position. I jumped up on one of the concrete posts dotted around the pond and very carefully snapped a couple of shots. I just about managed to balance there for a few minutes! See the two black swans everyone else was shooting?
From left to right: Donal, Ryan, Kevin, Katie and Sean spotted me and started shooting the biggest birdbrain there ..
12 March 2008 - Feed the swans at the Lough
Girls feed the swans at the Lough on Sunday afternoon.
Urban acid 
Will posted his first photo from the day on his blog. He did arrive late, but he made up for lost time!
11 March 2008 - The Swan’s Wings
You really only appreciate how large and imposing a swan is when they rear up out of the water and spread their magnificent wings. While at The Lough on Sunday there were a number of fights between swans. Guess it’s that time of the year again, eh?
The swans were fairly tame towards us humans, and allowed us to shoot quite closely, but I’ve had run ins with swans before and I’m always suspicious of them!
Katie caught me as I lay on the ground to get a shot of The Lough Church. Embarrassed? Me? Never, I’ve been in many other more compromising situations just to get a shot!
Ryan posted a whole set of photos from the day and Kevin has posted his first shot.
30 January 2007 - The lonely swan
A solitary swan swims on the calm waters of The Lough as the sun disappears at the end of the day.
Believe it or not, this is a 10 second exposure that turned out much better than I could have hoped! I balanced my camera on the edge of the Lough, set it to Aperture priority mode at f/11, dialed the exposure down two stops, flipped up the camera flash and took the shot.
How does this work?
- By setting the aperture to a fairly high value little light is let into the camera sensor.
- By setting the exposure down two stops the whole scene will be underexposed but bright areas will be exposed mostly correctly.
- Given the above settings, any dark moving objects will be completely invisible so when the flash fired it picked out the swan swimming past and even created a nice reflection in the water.
Hope that helps!
16 January 2007 - The swans they are a coming
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.
A mother swan and her young offspring. There was a lovely sunset causing a deep red reflection in the water. The mother swan was very protective and aggressive and reared up and spat at me a moment after I took this shot!
Edit: This photo is hosted on Zoomr! Thomas Hawk is appealing to the greed and curiousity of bloggers and giving out pro accounts to those who host a photo on their site and blog it. Hey! What can I say? I bit!
14 June 2006 - The Swan Gang
Tough looking swans gather for bread at the Lough in Cork for bread.
The problem with shooting dangerous wildlife with a wideangle lens is that unless you stick the camera in their faces nobody will believe you were risking life and limb by leaning down right next to them when shooting. Well, I was that close. *gulp*
See how the swan in the background is lunging for his neighbour with a wicked looking snap? He wasn’t the only one doing that!