We visited Bantry recently, on Valentines Day, and the town was buzzing. The square was taken over by the market, which is always worth a wander around. As we ate our burritos, I spotted the sun hitting the street nearby, leaving one side in shadow, and also illuminating the countryside rising up out of the background.
It’s a busy scene, and the van in the foreground is distracting, but that’s life. Everything’s messy, and then we went for coffee and scones in the community café. Yum. 🙂
We went to see Qween perform in The Everyman theatre last night. Their performance had to be delayed because of one of the major winter storms a few weeks ago, but it was most certainly worth the wait!
They put on a great show, entertaining us all with the fabulous music of Queen, the greatest band in the world.
Definitely, if they are performing near you, go see them!
We were in Youghal recently on a cold and blustery afternoon, and so were lots of others with their dogs. Not in this photos is Diego, but he was keeping a close eye on the other dogs!
A few photos taken in Crosshaven in May 2023 when I visited there with Blarney Photography Club. A bit of fun with swirling the camera around as I took the photos.
What difference 6 years? Nothing really except they’ve removed the rubble. It’s still an ugly eye sore. They really should have put a park there if they’re not going to do anything with it.
In July 2022, I was in Llafranc and wondered if I’d be able to photograph the Milky Way. Dark skies maps of the area showed glowing lights all along the coast, and it seemed unlikely, but I wandered down to the beach one night to try. I was pleased with the result because there was no way I could see anything like this with my bare eyes! There was too much light around.
A hotel on the coast of Tenerife on Playa de Ajabo looks out on the Atlantic as waves batter the rocks underneath. They’re turned into mist by a long exposure photo in this evening shot, about 20 minutes after the sun has set.
I had some fun in Bantry today, experimenting with a new exposure mode I haven’t really used in the past, Spot Highlight. I came across it in this video made by Sean Tucker. In this mode, the camera will expose for the highlights, sacrificing shadow detail to make sure that bright areas contain detail and aren’t over-exposed.
Luckily, the sky was clear, and it was a lovely day in Bantry, so there were plenty of highlights and shadows.
The histograms of such images showed most of the data was in the shadows, for obvious reason. There were usually plenty of dark areas in those images.
I tested the new adaptive profiles in Lightroom Classic on this image too, but it brightened the shadows in a way I didn’t want it to. Luckily, you can reduce the “Amount” slider, so the effect is reduced.
I used Lightroom’s native noise reduction “enhancement” which generated a 64MB DNG from a 69MB RAW file. I was delighted when I converted that to a 3.6MB lossy DNG, and I was still able to use the adaptive colour profile!
This photo was taken inside a lovely shop called Meara & Morley in Bantry. My wife loved it. I think we’ll be returning in the future!
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