It’s unusual to see a man wearing a hat like the one above these days. I made this photo on Patrick Street a few weeks ago and love the different textures and the faces!
Category Archives: Urban
Out Of Frame
Patrick Street, Cork.
Lady on the phone
Sometimes you’ll take a photo and think it’s not great. Occasionally you’ll spot a photo within the photo.
I was attempting to photograph two lads walking down the street but when I saw the resulting image they were blurred by motion and out of focus. A closer look later showed this young lady on her mobile phone, and a man looking after her in the background.
Quite a bit of cropping, and this photo is only a 1/3 of what the original was!
A flock of birds on the Lee
I love the old style nature of this shot. The fog that day made the far distance disappear and the middle distance was shrouded in white!
Girls on the town
Pictured on Winthrop Street a few days ago.
English Market Seller
There’s a wonderful looking olive and spice stall in the English Market!
Unfortunately it is always mobbed with customers making it difficult to capture a photo of it but I raised my camera into the air and shot this blind.
The original is quite grainy as I used a high ISO of 3200 to compensate for the bad light.
Workflow:
- Increased the saturation slightly.
- Unsharp mask with a radius of 5 to bring out the grain more.
- Duplicate layer and used the Threshold tool to isolate bright parts.
- Blur the top layer with a radius of 25 pixels.
- Set the top layer mode to “Soft Light”.
- Saved a .xcf version, .jpg and a resized jpeg too. I didn’t unsharp mask the resized version.
Hope you find that useful!
| Aperture | ƒ/3.5 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 18mm |
| ISO | 3200 |
| Shutter speed | 1/320s |
Run around and around!
Children running around a labyrinth on The Grand Parade.
Schools, churches, community groups and businesses around Cork were asked to design them as part of the closing ceremonies of Cork City of Culture 2005.
Audience
Through a break in the crowd I spotted a little girl watching a band play on the street in front of Brown Thomas.
Nollaig Shona daoibh! (translation)
Santa’s on his way!
Tonight Santa visits as the Christian world celebrates the birth of Jesus over 2000 years ago.
Christmas Goods For Sale
At Blackpool shopping center there was a charity event for the Belarussian Orphanage Project. A band played inside and just inside the main doors they were selling Christmas cards and small gifts. Not sure if I should have left this as a colour image but I think as a character study of the boy and woman it works much better in black and
white.
Off The Wall
Pictured at the Blarney Woollen Mills a week ago.
Links of the Day
- Retouching Magazine Cover – magazine photos have to feature pixel perfect beautiful men and women. This girlpower Flash presentation goes through all the little touch ups that go into improving a model’s eye, nose, cheeks, lips, breasts, waist and more until she is not the person who stood in the studio. (via)
- Digital Photography World has published some great articles recently including image management now that he’s gone completely digital.
- John Engler’s photography section of his blog has lots of good stuff, including 3 introductory articles: What’s an SLR Anyways?, Film Speed, Aperture. (via)
- I posted the last two US photos: Chatting and Shopping and Crowded Cork. The collection is complete!
Don’t go to bed reading a photographic book, you’ll get up again to “try out” the new techniques you read about.
Smile Please!
Guy in a clown suit walking around town. Not everyone was amused!