In Photos dot Org

  • The Construction of The Grand Parade Cork

    Six years ago the Grand Parade in Cork was a major building site. I can’t remember how long construction lasted but it went on for quite some time as they tore up and changed the road layout, widened the pavements and generally made the street look a hundred times better than it was before!

    I’ve also posted photos of the construction before, with some of these photos appearing in older posts:

    Seven years. That’s a long time to be running a blog and still updating it. I’ve been running Holy Shmoly! even longer but this blog is full of the photographic memories of a city and life over that period.
    Most of the time taking photographs is a trade off between being there and looking through a lens. If you’re a photographer you’ll know the feeling. You may have attended a significant event but all you’ll remember was the pain of shooting at high ISO in bad light. When I can dig up old photos for a post like this it makes me glad I took my camera that day into town and snapped a few photos!

    Aperture ƒ/13
    Camera Canon EOS 20D
    Focal length 20mm
    ISO 200
    Shutter speed 1/160s

  • The St Patrick’s Day Parade 2013 in Blarney

    Just a few photos from the short but colourful and noisy St Patrick’s Day Parade in Blarney this year. This parade proved more popular than other years as cars parked as far away as the park I live in. I don’t remember that ever happening before!

    Well done to everyone who took part!

    Aperture ƒ/7.1
    Camera Canon EOS 40D
    Focal length 179mm
    ISO 400
    Shutter speed 1/250s

  • Windswept in Reykjavik

    One of the many buildings in Reykjavik, Iceland that are battered by the harsh weather there. You wouldn’t know it by looking at the sky here but it was quite cold when I took the photo. I think it was at the end of a short photowalk around the city centre when our fingers were numb with cold.

    Aperture ƒ/13
    Camera Canon EOS 40D
    Focal length 18mm
    ISO 400
    Shutter speed 1/400s

  • Kilkenny Castle and Bench

    Kilkenny Castle as seen from the garden in front of the building on one of the many benches lining the paths through the grounds.

    I don’t have enough photos of Kilkenny on my blog. Must some more of this beautiful city.

    Aperture ƒ/4
    Camera Canon EOS 40D
    Focal length 21mm
    ISO 100
    Shutter speed 1/200s

  • A woman and her phone

    A young woman concentrates on her phone in a London Tube station while our train was momentarily stopped.

    Aperture ƒ/7.1
    Camera Canon EOS 40D
    Focal length 40mm
    ISO 400
    Shutter speed 1/100s

  • Marrakesh Rooftop City

    A view of some nearby rooftops and a stunning sunset over Marrakesh, Morocco. In black and white I know, but I have a few more shots of the same sky coming! This was shot from Riad O2 in the city where Polldaddy recently stayed.

    In the Medina many (most?) of the houses are jam packed in next to each other. We had to take a winding alley way from the main road to the building, going left, right, left, right, left (and maybe 2 more turns?) to get there. Like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.

    What’s Marrakesh like? The medina is the old fortified town which is where we were staying. You’ll be woken each morning by the Muslim call to prayers as there are loud speakers dotted around the city. Currently the first one starts around 5:30am so I hope you can get back to sleep afterwards! I wasn’t too fond of heading out in the city. It’s very busy, vehicles of all sorts zoom up and down the streets. Everything from motorbikes to carts pulled by donkeys will pass you by. There are no traffic lights in the medina either and footpaths disappear without warning, if they existed at all.

    The food we ate there was excellent, both in the riad and outside. Well, except for the one night we decided to sample what was on offer in the plaza. What a mistake! For the same price you’ll get a top quality meal in a fancy restaurant elsewhere!

    The hot air balloon guys were super friendly and I can recommend them, the locals taking care of us in the riad were too but out on the street was another matter. Talk to anyone and they’ll either lead you to a particular area of the souk or demand a tip for “showing” you the way.

    If only we could get a bit of their sun here in Ireland right now. Go on clouds, let the sun through!

    Oh yes, I may have to change the tagline on this blog. This photo was processed by Adobe Lightroom. It’s not Photoshop but it’s close. I used this preset on this photo but Lightroom is really impressing me. It’s ability to recover blown out detail is amazing, the noise reduction and sharpening tools are easy and effective. The one area it really falls down in is not being able to reassign keys. I fixed that by installing Paddy which let me assign hotkeys to my two main export presets.
    I imported over 23k photos into a catalogue and it’s running nice and fast. The next thing to do is write a preset and assign a hotkey to import images from my CF card.

    Aperture ƒ/4
    Camera Canon EOS 40D
    Focal length 21mm
    ISO 100
    Shutter speed 1/30s

  • The London Eye

    The London Eye as seen from below with my wide angle lens. It’s quite a sight to see but there are always long lines to ride it.

    Aperture ƒ/10
    Camera Canon EOS 40D
    Focal length 10mm
    ISO 100
    Shutter speed 1/200s

  • A Berber Village in Morocco from the Air

    A Berber village in a valley outside Marrakesh in Morocco. Another of the hot air balloon shots from Wednesday. It was so peaceful drifting overhead, we could hear animals calling and see people looking up. There were hardly any motorised vehicles at all. All those buildings, except for the mosque, were made of mud and straw. Look around you, how different is your life from theirs?

    Aperture ƒ/10
    Camera Canon EOS 40D
    Focal length 21mm
    ISO 400
    Shutter speed 1/200s

  • To home on the bike

    To say there are many motorbikes in Marrakesh is an understatement. We arrived at dusk and watched shell shocked as small motorbikes wove back and forth between traffic and around corners with little evident care for safety. As a pedestrian here you must have eyes in the back of your head!

    With that sorted out and explained the picture above might not be too surprising and it’s a not an uncommon sight to see 3 people on a motorbike. It looks like three generations here: son leaning forward on the handlebars, mother driving and grandmother sitting on the passenger seat.

    We haven’t seen any accidents yet but this old post from 2009 says accident rates are rising.

    Aperture ƒ/7.1
    Camera Canon EOS 40D
    Focal length 21mm
    ISO 400
    Shutter speed 1/100s

  • Fire Powered Flying

    Fires bursts into the hot air balloon we flew in yesterday near Marrakech, Morocco. The air in the balloon has to be 85C hotter than the surrounding air to provide enough lift to raise the weight of the basket and passengers so we were always warm!

    Aperture ƒ/4
    Camera Canon EOS 40D
    Focal length 21mm
    ISO 200
    Shutter speed 1/640s

  • Hot Air Ballooning over Marrakech

    Yesterday brought the news that 19 tourists died in Egypt when their hot air balloon crashed. It almost made us rethink our activities today because we were planning to go up in a balloon here in Marrakech! The chance that our balloon would crash just because a balloon in Egypt crashed is minuscule. They’re unrelated events but I guess it was a reminder that the activity is not without risk. Many people did cancel their trips yesterday and our pilot thanked us for not doing the same.

    It was a wonderful experience, spoiled slightly by the low hanging clouds but floating through the clouds was surreal for a few moments. Then the wind blew us towards Berber villages as we descended. People watched and children ran as we eventually came to ground. The wind had been carrying us towards the mountains and we’d pass above powerlines that snaked across the valley so the pilot took us down about 200 metres from those cables.

    Definitely worth trying out!

    Aperture ƒ/4
    Camera Canon EOS 40D
    Focal length 21mm
    ISO 200
    Shutter speed 1/1000s

  • Reykjavik Trawler

    A trawler leaves port in Reykjavik, Iceland last year while I was there on a Polldaddy meetup. As you read this now I’m in a much warmer part of the world on another meetup!

    Iceland was great to visit. It was cold there of course but we weren’t there in the dead of winter so it was manageable. The weather was completely unpredictable however. In one hour you’d get the four seasons; rain, sun, snow and cutting winds within minutes of each other. Quite remarkable and something I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world (says me, the world weary traveller, not!)

    Aperture ƒ/11
    Camera Canon EOS 40D
    Focal length 144mm
    ISO 100
    Shutter speed 1/400s
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