I was there too
The water is just underneath the pavement in this image made in Blarney last month.
What do the initials SV stand for? I don’t know, it’s too early on a Monday morning to figure that one out.
| Aperture | ƒ/5 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 10mm |
| ISO | 200 |
| Shutter speed | 1/50s |
A vintage 1940’s truck with the license plate number, “2E 53 45” sits under an archway on the Island of Alcatraz. It’s a beautifully restored vehicle that attracts the attention of all tourists as they walk past.
Here’s a few more pictures of the truck but I’m surprised nobody has posted the registration plate of the truck! I love the variety of textures in this image.
First snow of the year fell today! It’s not sitting on the ground, but it’s nice to watch from inside. It’s not so nice walking about in it. Even Oscar didn’t want to go out, but the call of nature won out on his reluctance!
| Aperture | ƒ/4 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 10mm |
| ISO | 800 |
| Shutter speed | 1/15s |
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.
| Aperture | ƒ/4 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 10mm |
| ISO | 200 |
| Shutter speed | 1.6s |
A girl steps away from the maddening crowd on a busy street.
This was a bit of an experiment for me. I blurred the background by making a duplicate layer, blurring, adding a layer mask and then revealing the girl through the layer mask. It’s not perfect, and in fact, the closer I look the more imperfections I see. Unfortunately I never saved a .xcf file preserving the layers so this is the final product.
I like it. The blur successfully separates the girl from the backgrond and even the zone of sharpness takes in some of the ground around her which exaggerates the effect!
Taken on St. Patrick Street, Cork last October.
| Aperture | ƒ/4 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 10mm |
| ISO | 800 |
| Shutter speed | 1/800s |
I live in a city where the tallest building is one that will be 17 floors high so when I travel to far off lands it’s always great to see tall skyscrapers looming over the streets.
This might bear a striking resemblance to a previous image but it is a different one and was one of my entries in the Patterns Around Us competition at my local camera club.
I have another 3 or 4 similar images but I’m not going to bore you to death by posting all of them unless I can come up with a nice montage effect or something. I’ll have to think about it.
| Aperture | ƒ/11 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 10mm |
| ISO | 200 |
| Shutter speed | 1/320s |
John asked what did he original Ready to go! look like and I’ll oblige now. Showing what the original photo looks like is akin to showing what the first draft of a written essay or post reads like. Sometimes the image comes out perfectly in the camera but that’s rarely the case. At the very least light levels have to be balanced and if resizing for publication online then the resized image has to be sharpened.
Hover over the image below to see what the original shot looked like. Hopefully this will work for RSS readers but if it doesn’t, visit the blog and leave your mark here!
Notice how I rotated the image? I had to reconstruct the bumper on the right of the picture, as well as filling in the gaps at the other corners of the photo. Tree branches and leaves are easy enough, as is the relatively solid black texture of the tar on the road, but the bumper was difficult, and the shaded area of the building on the left presented me with a few extra minutes of clicking to get right.
Want to see more “First Draft” posts? I can’t promise to do many, but if you have a compelling reason why you’d like to see the original of a photo I’ll do my best to help!
PS. Bryan – you might recognise the CSS. I took it from the button of doom you did! Hope you don’t mind!
PPS. Treasa has posted a tutorial of how she worked on two photos with steps in Photoshop to get the desired effect. Nice!
Look up for unusual perspectives on ordinary scenes. I was quite happy with this image of a lamppost in Parnell Place, Cork when I took it. The signs are clearly visible and the upside-down Guinness logo catches the eye!
You have to wonder, what’s more important, Guinness or parking?
| Aperture | ƒ/10 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 10mm |
| ISO | 200 |
| Shutter speed | 1/200s |
Tourists in the town of Dingle walk along a street in late September.
I love the contrast between white and red and yet the two houses mirror each other in other ways. This was another entry in the Mallow Camera Club’s Patterns Around Us competition.
| Aperture | ƒ/9 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 72mm |
| ISO | 200 |
| Shutter speed | 1/1600s |
Yellow boxes on the junction of Bridge Street and Patrick’s Bridge in Cork. It’s illegal to enter a yellow box if you can’t exit as has happened with a few cars here.
This image was entered in the Patterns Around Us competition along with my Autumn Leaf but this was my favourite one because of the strong colours and unusual contrasting effect.
How I did this: take an ordinary photo and clean it up, fixing levels and all the usual things. Duplicate layer, then play around with the top layer and the curves tool, creating a curve with two waves. You’ll see unusual rainbow hues and the colours will be distorted in other ways too. Now, change the mode of the layer. Each mode will make the image look different, but I settled on “Grain Merge” for the final effect here.
PS. the Blogger’s Dinner last night was most excellent. Luigi’s staff did an outstanding job at creating a tasty meal!
| Aperture | ƒ/4 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 10mm |
| ISO | 200 |
| Shutter speed | 1/400s |
Bubbles in the incoming tide break on the sandy beach at Garretstown about a month ago.
I turned this black and white because I love the abstract feel to the bubbles and it makes the grain of the sand beneath more visible. I had to jump up to avoid getting splashed moments later but such are the risks one takes for one’s art!
| Aperture | ƒ/11 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 200mm |
| ISO | 100 |
| Shutter speed | 1/800s |
California, a street in San Francisco near where we were staying last August.
This was taken after a great lunch in a nearby restaurant with some of the WordPress guys in a Burmese restaurant – Mark Jaquith, Markr (the support guy formally known as Podz), Andy and of course Matt. Excellent food and company.
I like this: Aaah! les galettes… – almost a painting. Great art.
Nice – in Couple Dancing, Cory Parris does a great job on a first dance shot.
| Aperture | ƒ/14 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 10mm |
| ISO | 200 |
| Shutter speed | 1/400s |
James Joyce, forever forced to look upon the Spire on O’Connell Street Dublin. Here’s a humorous look at the names of the statues and monuments in Dublin. I had heard that the Spire was nicknamed the “Stiletto in the Ghetto”, but I hadn’t heard it called, “North Pole”!
Overhead wires destroy urban photography and this is no exception. I could have tried to clone it out but it’s notoriously difficult to clone out objects against a varying sky. Ah well.
I like this: self-portrait with 6×9 ultrawide pinhole camera
| Aperture | ƒ/8 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 10mm |
| ISO | 200 |
| Shutter speed | 1/4000s |
