Limpits cling tightly to a rock in Church Bay.
| Aperture | ƒ/9 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 10mm |
| ISO | 200 |
| Shutter speed | 1/160s |
The Swan Gang
Tough looking swans gather for bread at the Lough in Cork for bread.
The problem with shooting dangerous wildlife with a wideangle lens is that unless you stick the camera in their faces nobody will believe you were risking life and limb by leaning down right next to them when shooting. Well, I was that close. *gulp*
See how the swan in the background is lunging for his neighbour with a wicked looking snap? He wasn’t the only one doing that!
| Aperture | ƒ/7.1 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 10mm |
| ISO | 200 |
| Shutter speed | 1/100s |
The RAW Backlash
There are holy wars in every field of human endevour. Vi vs Emacs, C vs Java, film vs digital and of course RAW vs Jpeg.
For several months last year I shot in Raw+Jpeg which was great. gThumb displayed a thumbnail for the Jpeg file while I also had the RAW negative. Yes, great. Until I got tired of opening the RAW file in my RAW converter (bibblelite, ufraw-gimp), before opening in the GIMP. Then there’s the space requirements. I shot 85GB of images last year. I need one of those terrabyte RAID servers Joe mentioned the other night at that dinner!
Ryan has done the same, shooting in Jpeg now.
Doug Pardee has too. He explains why too. He hasn’t got time to do the extra conversion required given the volume of shots he takes.
And of course, Ken Rockwell shoots Jpeg. He has a very lengthy post about his choice.
Still not sure? Read Tommy’s post for a rebuttal to Ken’s article. If you agree with him (and he makes plenty of valid points), then you should shoot RAW.
I’ll still shoot RAW, but only at special occasions. We’re going to a wedding next month and I’ll certainly be shooting RAW there!
Clinging Flowers
Flowers cling to the rocks in Church Bay, Co. Cork.
Post processing: curves, channel mixer, blurred layer and layer mask, lomo and unsharp mask.
| Aperture | ƒ/8 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 10mm |
| ISO | 200 |
| Shutter speed | 1/125s |
Purple Flowers
Purple flowers that crept into my garden from next door. I’m not complaining because they’re very pretty!
| Aperture | ƒ/5.6 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 20mm |
| ISO | 200 |
| Shutter speed | 1/250s |
Old Rope
Old rope tied to a rusty old screw embedded in weather beaten mortar at Church Bay near Crosshaven.
I used to dive off this rock about 10 years ago, mind you the tide was in whenever I did!
| Aperture | ƒ/10 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 10mm |
| ISO | 200 |
| Shutter speed | 1/200s |
West Cork Landscape
The beautiful countryside north-east of Dunmanway in West Cork.
| Aperture | ƒ/9 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 18mm |
| ISO | 200 |
| Shutter speed | 1/200s |
The Web 2.0 Conference Cork
Tom Raftery welcomes everyone to the Web 2.0 Conference in the Radisson SAS Hotel in Little Island yesterday.
I’ll post a few more shots later tonight and update this post.
From left to right: Shel, Walter, Rob, Fergus (behind Rob), and Tom speaking.
Salim was seated to the right of Shel just outside this photo.
Tom has posted his own thoughts on the Conference and Conor has extensive coverage of each speaker, including a few nice words about me. Thanks!
| Aperture | ƒ/5.6 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 125mm |
| ISO | 1600 |
| Shutter speed | 1/60s |
Web 2.0 pre-conference dinner
A group of about 20 bloggers, techs, and generally smart and nice people gathered in Probys Bistro last night before the Web 2.0 Conference today.
Pictured, in no particular order, and only if I figured out, or know your blog:
- Joe Drumgoole who posted some dinner photos and notes from the conference.
- Rob Burke who gave a fantastic demo of Microsoft’s new AJAX development tool.
- Tom Raftery who helped organise the event.
- Salim Ismail who gave a brilliant talk at the conference today.
- Britt Blaser who was in Ireland with his wife at this time.
- Shel Israel is in Ireland too and also gave a rousing and enthusiastic talk at the conference. I was lucky enough to talk to him last night and he impressed me with his passion for blogging and open source software and WordPress!
Not pictured are Fergus Burns or Walter Higgins who were sitting on either side of me at dinner. They gave great talks too, Fergus concentrated on the Irish perspective of starting a company while Walter gave a more technical talk on the technology behind AJAX and Rich Internet Apps.
Bref, Conor and Sabrina – where are your blogs?
Thanks again to Damien Mulley for organising the dinner. It was a great opportunity to meet some of the participants and characters at conference in an informal setting.
Later.. here’s a pic of me at the dinner taken by Joe Drumgoole: 
| Aperture | ƒ/4 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 10mm |
| ISO | 200 |
| Shutter speed | 1/5s |
Using Photoshop actions in GIMP
GIMP#, a project to provide a “C# wrapper around the GIMP API” and that “enables users to quickly write new GIMP plug-ins using .NET or Mono” has had some exciting developments recently.
Maurits is working on a GIMP# plugin that will hopefully allow GIMP to use Photoshop actions. AFAIK, these are basically files with calls to Photoshop functions. They are self-contained programs using a Photoshop programming API to perform operations on images. There are a countless number of Photoshop actions for download, free, shareware and commercial, so having access to these plugins would give GIMP a huge boost in terms of what it can do.
There are problems, some filters and functions in Photoshop simply aren’t available in GIMP but he has managed to parse 25 filters from the action files.
Lots of actions map on a GIMP equivalent. I downloaded about 100 action files and created a top 25 of most often used functions. At the top are functions like Brightness/Contrast, Set Selection, Gaussian Blur, etc. etc. The first function without a direct GIMP equivalent is the Chrome filter.
Bovine bodyguard
Three cattle watch as we passed their field. “Is that a bull on the left?” says the city boy.
| Aperture | ƒ/9 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 72mm |
| ISO | 200 |
| Shutter speed | 1/200s |
06-06-06
Today is the 6th day of the 6th month of the 6th year or 06-06-06.
People worry about the date’s similarity to 666, “the number of the beast”. Did you do or not do anything today because of the date?
Here’s some more trivia about this once in a century day.
| Aperture | ƒ/5 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 16mm |
| ISO | 100 |
| Shutter speed | 1/2.5s |