I was there too
Just a few months shy of ten years ago, we’d visited Sherkin Island and as we were leaving I spotted a man on a RIB talking to two others on their dingy. It was a lovely warm August day, just before school was about to start again.
In the background is the famous Baltimore Beacon, built in 1849 as a navigation guide.
| Aperture | ƒ/8 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 6D |
| Focal length | 105mm |
| ISO | 100 |
| Shutter speed | 1/500s |
The sun was particularly active last weekend, promising spectacular aurora with KP values of over 7. Unfortunately, the expected nighttime display failed to materialise. Instead, I swung my camera around and took 10 30-second exposures of the night sky, with the trees of a nearby road.
After combining them in Photoshop this is what you get. Not bad for 300 seconds.
Star trails form circular patterns around the celestial pole due to the Earth’s rotation, and in the Northern Hemisphere, these circles are centred on Polaris, the North Star, which barely moves at all in the sky. I wasn’t sure where Polaris was, but it looks like it’s just off the photo.
| Aperture | ƒ/2.8 |
| Camera | ILCE-7RM5 |
| Focal length | 24mm |
| ISO | 1600 |
| Shutter speed | 30s |
A pair of Eircom phone booths on St. Patrick Street, Cork, pictured in 2005.
The phones were there until at least 2022, but Eir announced a few years ago that they’d be removing their public phone booths, so away they go.
| Aperture | ƒ/13 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 20D |
| Focal length | 55mm |
| ISO | 400 |
| Shutter speed | 1/320s |
A little dog looks out of a window of his home on Barrack Street, Cork. He must be very used to passing foot traffic. He never barked once!
| Aperture | ƒ/1.7 |
| Camera | Galaxy S23 Ultra |
| Focal length | 6.3mm |
| ISO | 10 |
| Shutter speed | 1/390s |
Every Saturday there’s a rally in Cork supporting the people of Gaza and protesting the awful genocide being carried out by the IDF.
| Aperture | ƒ/4 |
| Camera | ILCE-7RM5 |
| Focal length | 24mm |
| ISO | 160 |
| Shutter speed | 1/500s |
The sun had set by the time I got into the city to photograph the Andalucía. Twenty minutes earlier, the sun was shining on it and made for a spectacular photo.
I made a bracketed shot from further down the quay because there were bright lights on the front of the boat that would make a shot from that side difficult. I like this shot anyway, as it captures the old with the new. The buildings at the quayside are old, the ship is a replica of an old ship and other buildings nearby are new and modern.
I did take some more photos. A rather drunk man asked me to take a photo of him with the ship, using his phone. A few minutes later, he asked me to photograph him in front of Penrose House here and then went off home.
So, I discovered that the Galeón Andalucía is not just a static museum piece. It is the only replica of a 16th-17th century Spanish galleon in the world that actively sails today, having travelled over 80,000 miles and visited ports on four continents since its launch in 2009.
| Aperture | ƒ/8 |
| Camera | ILCE-7RM5 |
| Focal length | 24mm |
| ISO | 400 |
| Shutter speed | 1/6s |
One more from last week. This time, the long exposure shot is of a bus heading to Parnell Place in Cork. The traffic light had just turned green, so the bus was driving slowly, accelerating as it went. It made a colourful impression on the digital sensor of my camera!
| Aperture | ƒ/8 |
| Camera | ILCE-7RM5 |
| Focal length | 24mm |
| ISO | 50 |
| Shutter speed | 4s |
Evening traffic whizzes past last week. Just after the sun had set, but the street light above my head hadn’t come on yet, so I got a nice long exposure.
How does photography affect your memory? Interesting podcast episode.
| Aperture | ƒ/8 |
| Camera | ILCE-7RM5 |
| Focal length | 33mm |
| ISO | 50 |
| Shutter speed | 8s |
Construction signs on Parnell Bridge in front of Cork City Hall were lit up by a passing bus a few nights ago.
| Aperture | ƒ/8 |
| Camera | ILCE-7RM5 |
| Focal length | 24mm |
| ISO | 50 |
| Shutter speed | 6s |
Robert’s Cove in Co. Cork looked particularly spectacular this afternoon when I visited. We arrived to a sudden shower of rain, but it soon stopped, and we wandered up the path alongside the cliff away from the beach.
Panoramas really don’t post well online. I need to do something like they do on Instagram where they break it up into 3 identical sized images and the gallery allows you to scroll from left to right smoothly. An idea for a new WordPress block?
Two podcast episodes you might like:
| Aperture | ƒ/4.5 |
| Camera | ILCE-7RM5 |
| Focal length | 24mm |
| ISO | 100 |
| Shutter speed | 1/640s |
The Galeón Andalucía, a replica of a 16th-17th century Spanish galleon docked in Cork a few days ago for the European Maritime Days to Play, on yesterday and today.
I wandered down the quays where there were a number of other boats. A nice day out for school kids who got a few hours out of the classroom too!
| Aperture | ƒ/2.2 |
| Camera | Galaxy S23 Ultra |
| Focal length | 2.2mm |
| ISO | 50 |
| Shutter speed | 1/3800s |
If the road works, why are there signs pointing out where diverted traffic goes?
Did you know that most street signs in Ireland are bilingual? As Gaeilge on top and English below.
Thanks Henry, for the company last night. A good spot to do long exposure photography.
Oh, here’s something interesting about this photo. It’s made of two images I had to merge together in Photoshop because my long exposure shot wasn’t long enough. Two 4 second shots of a slowly moving bus on a corner.
Set the layer type of the top layer to “screen” and the lights in the air come through.
The resulting tiff file was 318.7MB. That’s a monstrosity for a simple image so I converted it to DNG which resulted in a 233.3MB file, and then to lossy DNG. That squeezed it down to 7.5MB! Not bad for a 9417×6278 image.
I couldn’t see any difference in image quality. There were slight differences when I clicked the auto Transform button, but nothing major.
| Aperture | ƒ/8 |
| Camera | ILCE-7RM5 |
| Focal length | 29mm |
| ISO | 50 |
| Shutter speed | 6s |
