In Photos dot Org

The couch on the street

A couch rests against a pole on a street junction in San Francisco. That’s a novel way of getting rid of unwanted furniture but I wonder who’ll pick it up? For all I know, it could still be there with a family of squirrels living in it.

The same happens everywhere. Here in Ireland bed frames, mattresses and other other furniture can sometimes be seen dumped by the side of the road, usually in the country away from the watchful eyes of the authorities.

John Harrington posts about cuts among staff photographers at major US publications. Not a good time to be working in the “old world media” in some places.

Aperture	ƒ/8
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	10mm
ISO	100
Shutter speed	1/200s

The 15-Hour Photographer

If you’re reading about this here for the first time then you’ve got just under a month to enter The 15-Hour Photographer. During one day take a photo every five minutes and try to make 225 shots. You don’t have to but if you’re really trying to outdo yourself, do it in one day! Submit your best five shots to Popular Photo and a winner will be drawn on Feb 23rd.

The International shoot all the time day is the same competition by another name. I might try it. Next weekend?

If that isn’t enough for you, check out Photo Competitions.com where you’ll find lots more competitions to enter! (via)

Later .. Popular Photography has an update on the competition, with feedback from those entering. It’s not too late to enter either, the first rule says, “To enter, contestants must submit five photographs of any style, subject, or topic you wish. Entrants are not required to take a total of 225 photographs or take photographs on International Shooting All The Time Day.”

Alcatraz 2E 53 45

Alcatraz 2E 53 45

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

Bay Bridge Reflections

Bay Bridge Reflections

Light from the Bay Bridge in San Francsico shimmers in the waters of the harbour. To the left one of the fire fighting boats of the SF Fire Department can be seen.

Posting this landmark of San Francisco today as most of the rest of Automattic make their way to Mexico. Here’s another shot from another night near the bridge.

Aperture	ƒ/4
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	10mm
ISO	200
Shutter speed	2s

The BMW Mini – NCT 5

The BMW Mini – NCT 5

A white mini parked on the sidewalk in suburban San Francisco.

Aperture	ƒ/7.1
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	10mm
ISO	200
Shutter speed	1/100s

SF Weekly

SF Weekly

San Francisco Weekly is only one of a number of free publications available in that city. Not sure what day it’s out though. Doh!

My photos went down reasonably well at Photography Ireland yesterday. There’s a good street photography forum there. It’s worth a visit if you’re looking for inspiration or critiques or simply want to talk to like-minded people!

4 Easy Photoshop Techniques to Make Your Pictures Pop! has a few techniques I’ve used myself in the past. I meant to blog about those techniques, but hey, they’ve done the hard work now, including screenshots and everything. Good post!

Aperture	ƒ/11
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	10mm
ISO	200
Shutter speed	1/250s

Looking out from Homely House

Looking out from Homely House

Last September we stayed in Dingle for a weekend and had lunch in Homely House, a restaurant in the town. Check out the previous link for a picture of Brian Lapen and EagleSpirit who ran the cafe.

Unfortunately for Dingle they’re now in Hawaii, and the building was destined for demolition last I heard so it’s quite likely this view is gone now!

Aperture	ƒ/4
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	10mm
ISO	200
Shutter speed	1/500s

The little red door

The little red door

A small house is stuck between two larger buildings in Dingle, Co. Kerry. I’m not sure what caught my eye in the first place but I think it was the red door.

Shot on a wet morning that brightened up after an hour of intense rain.

Aperture	ƒ/4
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	10mm
ISO	200
Shutter speed	1/400s

The swans they are a coming

The swans they are a coming

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

Scary! Scary! Google forgets In Photos

I wondered why traffic was slow to the site today and then I searched for donncha. Insted of this site being the second or third link it’s nowhere to be found. I know it’s only a Google hiccup that other blogs have experienced too of late but it’s frightening watching my logs. They’re not moving, much.

You can practically hear the tumbleweed blowing across the screen it’s so quiet.

Much later .. I figured out what caused the problem. It was my Google sitemap. The “R&H Hall” tag caused a problem because it wasn’t encoded properly. Adding a urlencode() around the right bit of code fixed that. Must tell the author of UTWgoogleSitemaps…

Getting started with Bibble Labs

I’ve been using Bibble Labs Pro for a few months now to process my RAW files but I know I’m not using it to it’s fullest potential.

I should have looked around the Bibble website because their learning center has a number of videos to help the Bibble newbie!

Bibble Support Forum
Bibble Learn Center – with the following videos: Getting started, Basic tools, Advanced Workflow, Heal and Patch introduction.
Support FAQ
Bibble Documentation

Things I don’t like:

I can’t believe there’s still no single-step undo in Bibble. It’s either CTRL-R to reset the image settings back to the RAW format, or there’s an awful workaround by copy/pasting the whole image before major actions.
Bibble crashes. It usually only happens when saving an image. I have noticed that it happens most often when I change virtual desktop so there’s probably a bug there somewhere.

Despite those misgivings, it’s still worth looking at the trial version.

The Moonlit Shipyards

The Moonlit Shipyards

The shipyards in Rushbrooke, just outside Cobh are still active although much quieter now than during their heyday. The cranes make for great photography against the moonlit sky.

This was shot from across the River Lee in Passage last November.

FRLinux asked about settings so here they are, including post-processing:

Flickr’s exif data for this is a bit wrong – gthumb says the exposure was for 5 seconds, aperture was wide open at f4.5, and lens set at 28mm, which you can probably multiply by 1.6 for the crop factor. ISO was 100.

Post Processing was done in the GIMP using 3 layers:
1. Top layer is transparent with a black gradient at the bottom. Layer mode is Overlay.
2. Middle layer is black and white, and blurred and with added noise. It’s set to screen mode, and opacity of 51%.
3. Bottom layer is the colour image, slightly saturated and darker.

Hope that helps!

Aperture	ƒ/4.5
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	28mm
ISO	100
Shutter speed	5s