Ireland Today: construction

Ireland today is defined by construction. A huge portion of the Irish economy is driven by the residential building trade. An acre of land can go for €50m and up in Dublin. Two rate hikes by the ECB hasn’t dampened Irish interest in owning their own property.
This crane was pictured at University College Cork where building work on new developments continues.

Aperture ƒ/9
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 18mm
ISO 200
Shutter speed 1/200s

Blarney Horses

Three horses appeared in a field close to Blarney village about a week ago. At first, a mare, her foal and another horse were there, but the mare is gone now and three young looking animals are in residence. I took this photo one morning a few days ago.
One of the horses was exceptionally friendly, looking for attention and pushing the others out of the way to sniff my hand and be rubbed!
They’re lovely animals and hopefully they’ll be close to the fence next time I walk past.

Aperture ƒ/8
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 18mm
ISO 200
Shutter speed 1/160s

The Craft Fair is now on!

A craft fair was recently held in the Unitarian Church on Prince’s Street. I have been dying to get into the building and see what it’s like on the inside for ages so we jumped at the chance. We like visiting these fairs too so it was doubly good.
This rather tall and cheerful man was advertising the fair on St. Patrick’s Street!

Aperture ƒ/10
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 18mm
ISO 200
Shutter speed 1/250s

A boy on St. Patrick’s Street

Just outside Boots he stopped in front of me, what could I do but make this image?
He was waiting for his parents to catch up but I liked the contrast between him and the busy world around him. He rejoined that world moments later.
A moment in time.

Aperture ƒ/8
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 18mm
ISO 200
Shutter speed 1/200s

A Cork Skateboarder in Times Square

I received an email yesterday from GE Health. A few months ago they contacted me and asked me to add this skateboarder picture to their new Health website. It was to be displayed in Times Square during the month of April and yesterday’s email confirmed that it had been!

The email included a link to this webcam photo. It could have been taken anywhere but since there definitely was an ad campaign on April 7th, so it’s probably real!

Feed me your art

While trying to keep up with all the photoblogs I’d like to visit every day I subscribed to each one that offered a feed in my Bloglines account thinking that I’ll read these blogs like I read the rest of my favourite sites.
After importing them into Bloglines (not a difficult task, but it takes a while), I clicked around and quickly discovered that many photoblogs will only show a thumbnail or none at all in their feed!
I was particularly disheartened that Joes NYC stripped all post content and No Words, Iced Coffee and Headphoneland only showed thumbnails.
Thankfully, some of my favourite WP powered blogs, Just Photo and Simply Lotus display full size images in their feeds, and even one of the heavy hitters, Daily Dose of Imagery does too.

Blogger users can rest easy, Bloglines couldn’t auto find the feed on Shutterbug Exposed but Firefox did and I copied that into my Bloglines account. You get what you post on that site. Happy! Happy!

I noticed that many blogs powered by photoblog specific software only display thumbnails. Maybe it’s the default setting of these programs or they try to save bandwidth for their hosting companies but it doesn’t strike me as being very friendly to the visitor. As an example, the Pixelpost powered Glassey Alley displays thumbnails yet Ryan’s WordPress powered text/photoblog Rymus.net displays full size images.

Sure it’s nice, no, it’s important that you display your work with the surrounding colours and whitespace customised but in this age of information overload, RSS aggregators are a huge help to those of us swamped by too few hours in the day.

We Love WordPress

Imagine my surprise when we stumbled upon the above scrawled on the sand at Inchadoney. I had nothing to do with it, honest! 😉

Jacinta and I drove down to Clonakilty yesterday evening where we enjoyed a lovely meal in the Cobra Indian Restaurant. Then it was on to Inchadoney beach to enjoy a walk before the sun set.
I just had to write “WE LOVE WORDPRESS” in the sand after seeing a message about bebo nearby. Thanks Jacinta for the idea!

Aperture ƒ/7.1
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 18mm
ISO 200
Shutter speed 1/125s