Cornmarket Street commerce

Fruit and other produce are still sold on Cornmarket Street although it’s more commonly known as the Coal Quay.

Aperture ƒ/7.1
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 10mm
ISO 200
Shutter speed 1/200s

Paparazzi wait for Flatley at hospital

Film crews and photographers wait outside Cork University Maternity Hospital yesterday for a shot of Michael Flatley. His wife Niamh gave birth to a bouncing baby boy that morning in the hospital. Apparently Flatley gave a 5 figure donation to the hospital. Nurses I spoke to wondered where it went..

OK, maybe the people pictured are TV3, RTE news and a couple of photographers for the local paper but it’s not often one sees them about and in one place. I was busy helping Jacinta and Adam into the car and we weren’t about to stop and hang about. I told the reporters I had no comments to make except that Adam was in great form and that he and his mom were coming home.

I saw Michael Flatley on TV later and he was beaming! 🙂

Aperture ƒ/4
Camera DMC-FZ5
Focal length 16.5mm
ISO 80
Shutter speed 1/200s

San Francisco Tram

A tram waits for tourists a few blocks from Union Square in San Francisco. It’s a popular attraction. There was a long line of people waiting to board just behind me!

Technique – I used a blurred layer with a layer mask and circular gradients to create the blurred background. Black and white conversion with colour mixer.

Aperture ƒ/5.6
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 10mm
ISO 200
Shutter speed 1/60s

The Atlantic Manor Hotel Demolished

The Atlantic Manor Hotel stood for many a year at Garrettstown in Co. Cork and is even still listed on a travel website but it is gone now. Ryan visited there a while back and took some great interior shots of the decaying ruins before they disappeared. Check out his Flickr album too.

A JCB operator was clearing up some of the rubble when we happened to drive past last year and as luck would have it, I only had my wide angle lens so I was limited in what I could shoot unfortunately. It does force you to learn a new discipline and work with what you have though.

We drove past there recently and all that remains is barren wasteland. People still have their memories.

Jacinta and Adam are possibly coming home today. I’m very happy (and tired!)


Apertureƒ/13
CameraCanon EOS 20D
Focal length10mm
ISO200
Shutter speed1/320s

No Entry to Tuckey Street

Tuckey Street is a one way street that joins The Grand Parade with South Main Street in Cork. In typical Irish fashion, the one-way has been reversed over the last few years and anyway, the road works on The Grand Parade make getting onto the street a bit more difficult at the moment.

Nothing left to say, I’m off to the hospital again shortly. Hopefully Jacinta and Adam will be left out tomorrow. I’ve already registered Adam‘s domain name for the next couple of years!

Does anyone know how to get namecheap’s DNS to not redirect to the www hostname? I prefer nowww urls but it doesn’t seem possible. On the “@” line, entering the IP address of the server as an ANAME record simply causes a URL redirect to the IP. At least I have two servers now so maybe it’s about time I host my own DNS.

Aperture ƒ/4
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 10mm
ISO 200
Shutter speed 1/3200s

The Color Kids

Two kids running along Cornmarket Street last August had a great time. I don’t think they were being chased by anyone so it was pure innocent fun!

Heading into the hospital again shortly. In between taking care of Adam with Jacinta I watched Kill Bill 2 on the Macbook which has become a glorified DVD player. I’m tempted to copy over some of my WP projects so my brain doesn’t turn to mush. I have three ideas for different plugins I’m trying to find time to code.

Aperture ƒ/7.1
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 10mm
ISO 200
Shutter speed 1/200s

Scared Child

A girl looked up at me from her buggy as I took her photo with the wide angle lens of my camera. This was taken just after the St. Patrick’s Day Parade this year and the place was black with people, especially outside the The Larry Tompkins pub so no wonder she was a little upset. Mum can be seen in the background, looks like they’re going home.

Today is the calm before the storm. I woke up to quiet. Oscar is with my family, Jacinta and Adam are still in the hospital. Tomorrow, everyone comes home probably, although Jacinta could do with an extra day.

Thank you to everyone who commented yesterday (and here too!) I’m bringing my laptop into the CUMH this afternoon to share with Jacinta all the good will and wishes left by you and everyone else!

PS. Good luck to Donal and Celine who are off to Lesotho today for 10 days. They have a long jounrey ahead of them but I know they’re going to do some great work out there, the money they’ve raised will be well spent and I’m looking forward to the photos!

Aperture ƒ/4
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 10mm
ISO 200
Shutter speed 1/320s

Kilbrittain 6 miles

A sign points to Kilbrittain in Co. Cork near the beach at Garrettstown.

Has it been 2 years already Ryan? My Flickr account expires in February 2008 so I have a bit more time on my hands. It’s been well worth it however!

Aperture ƒ/14
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 10mm
ISO 200
Shutter speed 1/400s

Clever panoramas with CleVR

Photocritic found a neat bit of software for displaying panoramic images in a scrollable window. It should make showing them off in a blog much easier.

The beauty of the CleVR system is that the panorama uses Flash instead of Quicktime. Flash is installed on a lot more machines than Quicktime making this more accessible. Unfortunately I think it requires Flash 9 as it didn’t work in Firefox on my Linux desktop. Can anyone else confirm? According to the comments on the post above, the CleVR software is lot easier to use than Quicktime too.

The CleVR software itself is written in Java and loads using the Java Quickstart system. Not everyone will have it installed but it worked fine on my Macbook.

Instead of stitching a few photos together in CleVR, here’s one I made earlier. Much earlier in fact. I made this panorama of Cork City back in 2004 but I never uploaded a high-res version of it anywhere. Now I have. Enjoy!

I would love if the panorama image files were stored on my own server. If CleVR go out of business, or change their site, or something unforseen happens then my panorama is lost. At least with regular images hosted on Flickr, I can simply move them elsewhere and they’ll display fine. Hopefully they’ll address that in the future. They’re not making their money from hosting so they might as well get rid of that cost base.

I’d also love to be able to change the size of the viewing window. I tried changing the embed code but the Flash applet still only displays a 450px wide image. Please, please, please CleVR?

45 on the Golden Gate

The posted speed limit for the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco is 45mph but good luck to anyone who managed to reach that speed! Traffic crawled the day we were there and I suspect that’s the norm.

Shot from the car as we drove along. Thanks Andy for driving that day!

Aperture ƒ/8
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 20mm
ISO 100
Shutter speed 1/500s

Watching the fish underwater in Lanzarote

A young boy watches fish swim past on a boat off the coast of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. The boat’s staff threw food overboard for the fish while the passengers went below decks to watch from the observation windows. As it was the start of the season in May, the boat was nowhere near full and everyone got a good look at the marine life swimming past.

This is the first picture I’ve posted from our honeymoon in Lanzarote last year. I took so many photos it’s daunting to look through them and pick out the ones I want to publish.

Aperture ƒ/2.8
Camera DMC-FZ5
Focal length 6mm
ISO 80
Shutter speed 1/50s

San Francisco Tourists

Tourists stopped on the sidewalk off Union Square in San Francisco last summer. Despite the city’s reputation for fog the day was sunny and clear.

I had a great time doing some street photography of course!

Aperture ƒ/10
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 10mm
ISO 200
Shutter speed 1/200s