Pictured last Sunday evening as the sun set over Cork Harbour.
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The Signs in Blarney

The signs in Blarney always point towards a B&B!
This bunch of signs do anyway. Right at the end of Station Road there’s a pole with signs to about a dozen B&Bs! If you ever need somewhere to stay in Blarney you shouldn’t have trouble finding accomodation!Link of the Day
If you haven’t read any of the The Digital Journalist yet then the January issue is a good place to start! I found dispatches for Iraq and Bolivia rivetting and scary and exciting.
In a compeltely different way, Bill Pierce’s memories of the late Michael Evans will stir your heart. He did a great job writing about his friend. -
The Look, Dad, The Yawn

An experiment in high-key cross processing.
Pictured on Patrick Street, Cork.Howto and what is cross processing?
Cross-processing has been around for as long as film has, and is a way of making your images more interesting and abstract by literally mixing colours. I followed the simple instructions here which I had blogged a long time ago but forgot! It came up in a search for “cross processing gimp”!There’s no magic secret way of doing this. Simply open your image in your favourite image manipulation program, GIMP of course, or Photoshop if you must. Bring up the Curves tool, and play the Red, Green and Blue channels separately until you have something you like! Create S curves to increase the contrast of each colour, and make it pronounced to increase the effect!
Use the saturation tool to make the colours even more pronounced and remember, have fun!Aperture ƒ/3.5 Camera Canon EOS 20D Focal length 18mm ISO 400 Shutter speed 1/640s -
Sunlit Web

On a foggy morning a web will sparkle in the ambient light because of the moisture in the air.
I spent an inordinate amount of time crouched down shooting this dead bush! -
Coats and Hat

It’s unusual to see a man wearing a hat like the one above these days. I made this photo on Patrick Street a few weeks ago and love the different textures and the faces!
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Swan in Black

Swan on the River Lee last December. I love the quality of the winter sun when it shows. It’s an evening glow almost all day!
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Lady on the phone

Sometimes you’ll take a photo and think it’s not great. Occasionally you’ll spot a photo within the photo.
I was attempting to photograph two lads walking down the street but when I saw the resulting image they were blurred by motion and out of focus. A closer look later showed this young lady on her mobile phone, and a man looking after her in the background.
Quite a bit of cropping, and this photo is only a 1/3 of what the original was! -
Road Narrows

Taken in Monkstown, Co. Cork last night.
Camera was handheld. I waited for a car to go past and with the camera set to AV mode and the flash on, I shot a 25 second exposure. I moved the camera from side to side to make the rear lights of the vehicle moreinteresting!
Added a cloud layer in post processing and set the layer mode to “subtract” to give the signs that nice weathered look.
- Sunset at Drake’s Pool (2006)
- A new Noise Ninja release candidate is out now forNoise Ninja Beta (2006)
- 2 bikes in Daunt Square (2007)
- Instead of obsessing over composition, is the flas
- Spotty Cactus (2008)
- Roof Support (2009)
- Arrow (2012)
- Bread Delivery (2013)
- The Night is on Fire (2016)
- Making Headlines (2017)
- Almost There (2018)
- Refugees Welcome (2021)
- An Impossible View (2022)
- Wind Blown Clouds (2023)
- The Pacific Park in the Sea (2024)



















