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

Golden Gate Bridge in Fog

Tourists on a ferry pass by the fog shrouded Golden Gate Bridge
in San Francisco Bay.

The day was beautiful out near Alcatraz but fog covered the upper reaches of the bridge and I thought would make a pleasing shot.

PS. I’m not finished with photos from 2006 by a long shot!

Aperture ƒ/13
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 200mm
ISO 100
Shutter speed 1/800s

The River, The Brewery and the Cathedral

The River Lee rushes by the Beamish and Crawford Brewery on one side, and O’Sullivan Electrical on the other with St. Finbarre’s Cathedral in the background.

I have discovered there’s a dead pixel on my camera’s sensor. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to show itself much but when I take long exposure shots like the one above a little red dot appears in the top-right of the image. It’s easy to get rid of with the clone tool but also annoying.

The Wacom graphics tablet is great fun to play with but I haven’t got it working fully in Linux yet. Ubuntu thinks it’s simply another mouse device and GIMP doesn’t see it as an “extended device”. I spent quite some time on the Ubuntu forums trying to fix it yesterday before giving up and trying it out on a few images.
It’s a little fiddly to begin with, but I think that’s par-for-the-course when using a new tool. I do find that when dodging and burning large sections of images the brush can get stuck and won’t follow the cursor but I’ve read that once it’s properly configured performance is improved so I hope that is fixed then.

Hope you had a nice Christmas Day!

Aperture ƒ/11
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 10mm
ISO 200
Shutter speed 8s

Chistmas Tree Lights

St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Mallow is lit up by the lights of the Christmas tree in the church grounds.

The camera club social night was in Mallow last night and after a great meal myself and Jacinta left the rest to prop up the bar! I had my camera with me and I got some good shots of the town and the church above.

It gave me the idea of writing an article about night shooting, so expect that in a day or two!

Aperture ƒ/22
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 10mm
ISO 100
Shutter speed 20s

Clontarf Bridge at night

Clontarf Bridge in Cork City joins Lapps Quay to Albert Quay where the City Hall is situated. The construction cranes in the background are those at the site of the Elysian pictured previously.

This picture was taken on Monday night when several members of Mallow Camera Club walked the streets of the city taking photos of the streets and the people out on a cold December night. I didn’t have a tripod with me but there is enough street furniture to suit most circumstances and if not, then a wallet stuffed under the lens makes a shot from the ground more interesting!

Google Maps has a relatively good shot of the bridge if you’re interested!
I didn’t know the name of the bridge but this page came to my rescue. Thanks Blue Dolphin!

Aperture ƒ/8
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 10mm
ISO 100
Shutter speed 30s

Oh those lines!

Pedestrians gather at the traffic lights on Grand Parade and wait to cross a busy city-center street. Yes I got a few funny looks as I crouched down with my camera but I’m used to it by now!

This was a construction site a few months ago but work is progressing well and most of the work is done.

This was an entry in the MCC Patterns around us competition a few weeks back.

The city shoot last night with the club was a great success. I didn’t have a tripod with me and in the dark that posed a challenge sometimes but at other times it was a blessing. There’s enough street furniture to rest a camera on if needed.

Aperture ƒ/9
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 10mm
ISO 200
Shutter speed 1/200s

Port of Cork

The Port of Cork seen from the hills on the north side of the city. Looks carefully and you can see several landmarks:

And many more sights!

I entered Little Communion Girl into the Photo Friday “Fresh” competition this morning. Let’s have a look at the other entrants.

Aperture ƒ/8
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 106mm
ISO 100
Shutter speed 1/250s

Up up and away

Yesterday the Elysian’s tower reached the 18th floor, 72m above sea level and one of the tallest buildings in the country. Apparently St Finbarre’s Cathedral is 75m to it’s central spire but there won’t be a 2400sq ft penthouse at the top of that!

While we Irish congratulate ourselves on building an 18 storey lift shaft, here’s one I made earlier in San Francisco. I tried counting the floors but lost count around 14!

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

Post no bills

Post no bills on the wooden boards surrounding the building site on Cornmarket Street. The red brick wall is the front of the old Guy and Company building. It looks like the builders are going to incorporate that into their new building which is great – mixing old with new.

See map for location.

I followed Mike’s advice in his comment and bought a Wacom Graphire4 off Pixmania. Mynn’s post about his Volito2 Graphics Tablet sealed the deal, especially when he said that the “A6 working area is MORE THAN ENOUGH”. Hopefully it’ll be delivered early next week. I’ll ask Jacinta to open the box and verify that it’s in one piece but I’m not going to touch it before Christmas Day!

Aperture ƒ/4
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 10mm
ISO 200
Shutter speed 1/60s

Buildings in the sky

I live in a city where the tallest building is one that will be 17 floors high so when I travel to far off lands it’s always great to see tall skyscrapers looming over the streets.

This might bear a striking resemblance to a previous image but it is a different one and was one of my entries in the Patterns Around Us competition at my local camera club.

I have another 3 or 4 similar images but I’m not going to bore you to death by posting all of them unless I can come up with a nice montage effect or something. I’ll have to think about it.

Aperture ƒ/11
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 10mm
ISO 200
Shutter speed 1/320s

First Draft: Ready to go!

John asked what did he original Ready to go! look like and I’ll oblige now. Showing what the original photo looks like is akin to showing what the first draft of a written essay or post reads like. Sometimes the image comes out perfectly in the camera but that’s rarely the case. At the very least light levels have to be balanced and if resizing for publication online then the resized image has to be sharpened.

Hover over the image below to see what the original shot looked like. Hopefully this will work for RSS readers but if it doesn’t, visit the blog and leave your mark here!

Notice how I rotated the image? I had to reconstruct the bumper on the right of the picture, as well as filling in the gaps at the other corners of the photo. Tree branches and leaves are easy enough, as is the relatively solid black texture of the tar on the road, but the bumper was difficult, and the shaded area of the building on the left presented me with a few extra minutes of clicking to get right.

Want to see more “First Draft” posts? I can’t promise to do many, but if you have a compelling reason why you’d like to see the original of a photo I’ll do my best to help!

PS. Bryan – you might recognise the CSS. I took it from the button of doom you did! Hope you don’t mind!

PPS. Treasa has posted a tutorial of how she worked on two photos with steps in Photoshop to get the desired effect. Nice!

Ready to go!

You better be good at hill starts if you live in San Francisco! I presume it’s slightly easier with an automatic transmission rather than manual?

Highly processed image via multiple tools in the GIMP until I came up with an effect I liked – multiple layers, b/w, gaussian blur, layer modes and more.
I had to rotate the image at first and reconstruct parts of the image, but I think it came out reasonably well!

Aperture ƒ/8
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 10mm
ISO 100
Shutter speed 1/250s