I’m in danger of becoming a sunset addict…

… and that’s dangerous in a country where nice fixes are few and far between.

We spend a lot of time at my wife's family home in Donegal. And regardless of how we start, the direction we take or when we travel we always end up on the road from Fintown to Doocharry.

I’ve taken pictures along that road before and I will do again. But if you’re ever in the area, take a drive along it – enjoy the sense of isolation.

More beaches. More sunset. More…

I’m suspicious my monitor is set too dark based on some of these images I’ve been looking at on other pc’s. Plans are afoot to check this, so bear with me.

I’ve been sitting on this picture for a while now. I knew I wanted to try and process it through HDR – even when taking it I took three exposures to give me the capacity.

I find shooting into a sunset like this incredibly difficult. The last rays of the sun either cause the shot to under-expose or leave the sky a horrid washed out white mess. Taking this as three exposures allowed me to find the best of each world, and whilst I normally wouldn’t go this extreme with HDR, I do like the finished result quite a bit.

The last three pictures I’ve posted have been processed in HDR and I think this is my favourite. It does give images a nice feel, although I’ll be the first to admit they do drift away from “what the eye saw”.

It’s typical that now the competition season is over in the club, I start producing pictures I’d like to use. Still, there’s always next year.

I swear, I will not start randomly posting images on a Friday for no reason. I just liked the gold colours of the sunset…

Built from three exposures using HDR and then some additional tweaks, it lost all semblance of “natural picture” a while back, but I took a shine to the gold colours.

I’m back in the picture picking mode again. Now Christmas is over, the club competitions are coming thick and fast. Over the next few weeks there is an open round, a street scenes round, a photo essay round and the club exhibition.

Now I don’t expect to do well in any of these, I’ve been lucky so far to get what I’ve got, but I' want to submit so I get feedback and can see where I’m improving and going wrong.

Meanwhile Jim Mooreland was at the club last night presenting images from submissions to the Royal Photographic Society. Some of the stuff was inspirational, but two sets of prints displayed were just out of this world. (I’ll post details of them as I get more information).

So, where does that leave me?

Well, I’m left wishing I was as good as the guys I saw last night and hoping that maybe just maybe I’ll get there in the future.

On the other hand. I could just continue to take curious photographs of plastic glasses.

After the Peoples Photography I found myself sliding into the blues as I reviewed my last year. Not because I felt I'd done badly, more that mentally I'd reset the clock and was starting out on another year of photography. The slate was clean so to speak. Mentally I'd decided that I was going to move on from last years pictures and treat this year as a brand new year, with brand new challenges. Essentially filing last years pictures in the done box.

I'd heard a photographer in England once describe how he destroyed all his photographs every year and how cathartic and refreshing he found the experience.

...

Well, bugger that.

After a week in the dumps, I remembered that they're my photographs and I can do what I want with them. So I looked through them again. It was a hell of a fun year for me to even get to the distance I managed.

Onwards and upwards I say. But now by building on the last year of photo!

...

Anyway, I took this at the weekend. It's had the saturation dropped a little to make it a bit more low key and moody.

I think it's a good example of how things have changed in a year for me. this old swing has been in this field for eons. I walked past it with the camera a few times last year and never saw the picture until the weekend. I'm not sure I did it justice, but it's a decent example of how my approach to a shot has evolved in a year.

(f/2.5, 1/1600sec, 50mm, ISO-200, 07/09/08)

OK, so technically it's the same old boat from Cruit Island as before, but I was playing and thought I'd share.

This has fallen foul of my current fascination. Graduated filters in Lightroom 2. Well worth investing in or using the demo if you can get it.

The following thumbnail gives you an idea of the picture before the filters were applied. (Sorry, didn't bother uploading the full size version of it).

Now, as you can probably tell, the original image suffered from the usual problems encountered (by me anyway) on a bright day in that it was left very washed out and feeling flat.

Adding a filter to the top right, running down to the middle of the picture in a diagonal has allowed the sky to come back into its own. A few other tweaks to curves and general contrast and exposure and hopefully things look a little better.

Now, lets be honest. It was never a great picture to start with, but I made all these changes in about 10 minutes. (Less time than it took to knock together this post).

The simplicity of Lightroom 2 is just fantastic.

 

I fought with this picture for an hour after making it HDR. I'm still not happy with the colours, but I thought I'd share and see if some kind soul (soul, church - geddit?) would help me out and suggest where it all went wrong.

I've been busy the last week selecting and printing photos for the Peoples Photography thing in Dublin at the end of the month. It's been an interesting challenge, not because I have so many great photos (I wish), but because sometimes what's important to me isn't what you would call "good". In the end I decided to use people's advice to a point and then to supplement with some photos which might not otherwise have seen the light of a printer. Once the dust settles, I'll list the photos I used here.

In the meantime, here's a shot that did make the selection even though I'd never shown it to anyone. I really liked this red door and the flowers. I took it while visiting Errigal in Donegal a few weeks back. It was the classic "Look at the view" moment, except I was pointing the other way taking photos of a door...

Still, I like the colours.

 

(f/11, 1/80sec, 33mm, ISO-200, 02/08/08)

I spent the bank holiday weekend in Donegal basking in some unexpected, but very welcome, blue skies and soaring temperatures.

I was also lucky enough to get out a couple of times with my camera. the photos are currently uploading, and I'll get onto that subject in a moment, but for now... Some Seaweed.

 

(f8, 1/100sec, 181mm, ISO-100, 04/05/2008)

Yeah, it's not great (are they ever?), but I liked the liquid effect on it.

 

Anyway, onto more important matters. I remember a time when I made mention of taking 100 photos over a weekend. Well, this weekend I arrived home with not one, but 3 and a half full memory cards. That's 7Gig of photo insanity. This leaves me with a couple of important things to consider.

1. Do I buy more/bigger cards? I'd really rather not run out.

2. Am I being too proliferate* with camera? Taking too many pictures, or too many pictures of the same thing?

3. do I need to start deleting on the camera before uploading?

Any thoughts?

 

 

*I do not think this means what I think it means, but I think you know what I mean...

Last picture of the pier in Dungloe for the time being. It's yet another thing on my list of "to try again" shots. Next time, hopefully with the classic sunset (and just a little bit warmer please).

I've been using a product called Dynamic Photo HDR for all these shots. Whilst possibly not as complete as Photomatix, it's pretty simple to use, gives good results and isn't out of the question at $39. Both products have demo versions available, so give them a go.

Having played a fair bit with HDR over the past week, it's another of those techniques that generates tripe and treacle. I'm not overly happy with some of the pictures I've ended up with, but the taste is there and I'll be back for more.

This is another composite image, created from an HDR tone map.  It's also had some level alterations made to the pier itself to make it a little brighter.

 

Oh and Darrell, you're right. There is crud on my lens. It was in this picture as well, before I cloned it out. I'll look into cleaning the camera and kit over the weekend. Good spot!

Another of the shots from Donegal over Easter. This time, taken at a fly fishing pier close to Burtonport. The weather spent the entire weekend trying to annoy me.

Yes, it was a personal vendetta.

 

(1/25, F/20, 10mm, ISO-100, 22/03/2008)

 

This image has had some tonal mapping, similar to the previous couple of posts. Mostly just to give the water and the sky a bit more life. Interestingly, it's not composed from multiple images like the HDR posts, instead just using one exposure as the basis.

I like the eerie quality to it, though I'm not sure about the corner of the quay in the bottom left of the picture.

Oh, I've also decided to increase image sizes a little on the blog. Typically I used 300*200 for thumbnails and 800*533 for the proper upscale. I've changed it to something like 400*267 and 900*600 respectively. The odd numbers for height are down to the aspect ratio of the raw picture.

 

Waiting...

... for his ship to come in?

Actually, just waiting to see if the clouds will clear and give me some sort of sunset or if the storms will get that little bit prettier before the rain starts to fall again.

This is another of those tone mapped images using the HDR tool that I found. To be honest, it's pretty much what I would have tried to do manually anyway as the original pictures were either to dark or had the sky blown out.

And yes. This is the first time a 'person' appears in a photo on this blog. It's also the first time 'I' appear on the blog (told you there was a self portrait coming Dermot).

The power of the shutter timer is a glorious thing.

Yes, I is giant. I also wear very baggy jeans for some reason...

Like I said yesterday, I went out over Easter with the attitude that I would try some new things and experiment with some stuff I'd heard of over the past few months.

One of the things I did was to set my camera to do some auto exposure bracketing (AEB)*. For those that don't know, or got bored before that part of the manual (and who can blame you), AEB on your camera sets it up to take three photographs. The first is at the exposure you select, the second is under exposed and the third is over exposed. The amount of over and under exposure is up to you.

It's a useful facility for shooting landscapes and other static scenes and allows you to do things in post processing like tweak some levels or replace an over exposed sky (kind of the same way you might use an ND filter I guess). Whilst not a great example, the picture I took of the Rock of Cashel used the effect - basically the sky was cloned from an under-exposed version of the shot.

Anyhow, I took a range of pictures of a life buoy on Dungloe pier as I really liked the colour against the stormy sky.

The image I got was OK.

(1/15, F/4.5, 22mm, ISO - 100, 23/03/2008)

In itself, I guess the image isn't bad. It's probably better than stuff I took 6 months ago, and I'm happy enough with it. But as usual, I got to playing around and remembered a technique a bluegrass loving bloke I work with told me about called HDR.

HDR, or High Dynamic Range, is a process which allows more tones in an image than would be usual. Essentially shadows are reduced and highlights less blown out... or something like that... Essentially it takes a range of exposures of the same image and mixes them up to produce an interesting composite. Here, let wikipedia explain....

Well, I pushed my three exposures of the life buoy through an HDR engine and got what I think is an interesting result. I'm actually kind of taken with it, so expect more HDR type images soon!

 

 

*For those of you with Canon 400D's and who can't be bothered reading the manual, the AEB setting is on the second menu tab. It's worth noting it resets every time you power off the camera, change a lens, etc etc etc... Also, it behaves differently when using remote or timed release of the shutter. It is worth playing with though...

 

Oh, and the astute will notice that the HDR image is number 1 and the original number 2. Nothing sneaky, just the sequence number that was added when I exported the pictures for upload..... Honest!

Hopefully you survived turkeyfest 2007 and are now in last minute training for achieving the end of the year? As an aside I always find New Year to be an odd celebration - Whoopee it's a new year? OK, yes it's good that by celebrating it you can safely say you've survived (2007 in this case), and OK you can say you're looking forward to a new year of dreams, promises, chances and such. But... Why not celebrate everyday if that's your thing? I mean, Whoopee it's Tuesday morning! I've survived the first day of the week and all that... Then again, maybe it's just me in my post festive blues. I'll just go back to bahing my humbugs*.

Anyway...

Christmas passed in a blast of Turkey, Santa, kids and weather. Since the turkey was for eating not photographing and I have this thing about not wanting to post pictures of people here, and since Santa waited till I was asleep before forgetting to leave me any presents, here's some pictures of the weather...

I was in Donegal for a few days at the inlaws and the weather was gray and blah. That said, the wind on Boxing (St. Stephens) day was kinda cool. I ended up out on Cruit Island again and managed to take a few pictures whilst standing in what must have been a force something wind.

They aren't great, but I thought I'd share them anyway. Hopefully the show some of the intensity of the waves. At the very least, they'll probably show how much the tripod was getting blown about.

 

(1/8sec, f/22, focal length - 30mm, ISO - 100, 26/12/07 13:31)

(1/6sec, f/22, focal length - 55mm, ISO - 100, 26/12/07 13:40)

 

I've a new appreciation for people who take fantastic pictures of oceans and beaches and such during storms. Not only do the have to contend with 'weather', but they also have to get to the spot to take the picture - something that can be one bugger of a challenge. I ended up staying quite high and dry on the day as it just looked a little too dangerous down on the proper shore line. That and the fact that I fell anyway...

 

In case I don't post again this year - Happy New Year.

 

 

 

*Yes, ok I know 'Bah Humbugs' more to do with Christmas spirit , but I only came up with that 'bahing my humbugs' phrase tonight and there was no way I could sit on it for a year! And yes, technically I 'enjoy' new year but I felt I needed to let off steam and it was a good line. Besides, it's new year - may old acquaintance be forgot and all that stuff.... See, you have to forgive me.

First. Sorry for the long radio silence. I took a few weeks off work, and spent them doing duck all. No, really. I demolished some stuff, I played some games I even slept a little. But the one thing I wanted to do was snap and the one thing I didn't do was snap.

Except for one day in Donegal (Nope, still not being sponsored by the Donegal Tourist Board!).

It was kind of a family weekend, so a lot of family shots, which means you won't see 'em here - sorry.

That said.....

I own a polarizing lens. So I took it out to take this shot. Here's kind of a before and after (or my attempt at one).







Ignore the digger. It was a picture I took for my mother in law as she's about to lose this view in favour of someones house. (Remember what I said about over population in Donegal?).

I don't think I was using the polarizing lens quite right. The left hand side of the sky looks great, but it fades out as you move right.  If you've an idea where I'm going wrong, let me know!

As I've mentioned, Saturday and Sunday were pretty unsuccessful in terms of photographs and learning anything useful.

Still, I thought I'd share some of the shots this week. If you have opinions about what went wrong, or advice on how to make better use fo things, please let me know!

I could get into a diatribe on the decline of fishing within Ireland and how generations of fishing heritage are being lost because of over fishing and EU bureaucracy....

Instead, I thought I'd share a good example of how not to park your boat.



(1/100, f/5.6, metering - matrix, focal length - 18.0mm, 04/08/07 16:05)

Personally, I think the image is too dull. I'd prefer the shadows under the boat to be less black, allowing some of the detail and the rust to be visible. In retrospect I should have got lower and been looking up at the boat to make it more expressive. As usual the image has been quite heavily cropped and had minor tweaks from Picasa to make it presentable.

Well, I got back from Donegal.

I had the camera out both days.

I got zip.

Nothing.

Nada.

Zilch.

OK, I took maybe 100 photographs. Mostly repetition of the same couple of scenes and people to see what slight (and sometimes quite drastic) settings changes would do. I uploaded them tonight and there isn't a single photo I looked at and went wow.

As I've said before, you'll see more tripe here than treacle, so I'll post some of the better ones over the next few days. I'll also provide some commentary on what I was trying to do at the time.

If I'd thought I could just pick this up before the weekend, my mind is set on needing a course now.

Last of last weekends shots (and just in time too since I'm off to Donegal again this weekend)

A few posts back I mentioned taking photos when the tide was coming in? Well, yeah. this was that shot.

Camera was still on "world of automatic" and as I've posted these images this week it's the one thing that has frustrated me. I need to start stepping up and seeing what these other buttons do.

If anyone can recommend a decent "Idiot" book or can advise on a course in the Belfast/Northern Ireland area please do so...

 

(1/250, f/87.1, metering - matrix, focal length - 85.0mm, 04/08/07 16:05)

(Yes, the ocean is at a funny angle. I just noticed that too.)

Another shot from last weekend.

To be honest there will be a lot of shots of Donegal appearing on this blog. I've family up there and I tend to spend a lot of time there.

Have camera, will snap

No real deep insights or comments about this for you. If you know Donegal, this is on the road between Dungloe and Doochary. The continued urbanisation of Donegal is a growing problem.



(1/200, f/8.0, metering - matrix, focal length - 18.0mm, 05/08/07 19:05)

I like this shot, but it suffers from a mistake I make a lot. If I'd stepped maybe two steps to the right it I think it would have been much better. Aside from the 47 billion options and widgets and doofers and stuff that you can do between picking the camera up and setting it down, there seems to be a whole bit about what you look at as well.

I read a good article on this in Digital SLR Photography last month and, assuming the opportunity presents itself, I'm going to try and play with this at the weekend.

Oh, and as you can see. Saturdays grey skies turned out just peachy on Sunday.

Learning To Snap

Since it's lunch time and I've got five minutes, I thought I'd post another from last weekend in Donegal.

Again, it was taken on the dull overcast Saturday but strangely it doesn't seem to hurt this one too much.

This was the first time I used the Tamron 55 - 200 lens that came with my camera kit. The picture was taken at full zoom and then cropped and tweaked using Picasa to make it a little less mweh and a little more hmmm....

It was still taken using one of the vast range of automatic settings on the 400D.



(1/500, f/10.0, metering - matrix, focal length - 161.0mm, 04/08/07 12:32)

Learning To Snap

I think I mentioned the other day that I ended up in Donegal at the weekend. Well, it was my first real opportunity to get out for an hour with my shiny new camera and see if I could point it at things and make it work.

To my mind, the aim of the day was to get out and point the camera at objects, to get comfortable with it in my hands and using viewfinders and things again. I didn't intend to make use of the manual settings on the camera (I'll start looking at Aperture and Shutter priorities soon I guess).

Anyway, I went back to Cloughglass Beach since it's close and I'd visited it a lot.

The August summer weather was what you expect, dull grey, rainy.

The sky was an almost solid grey, but it had a moody feel to it - I have no idea how to get that into a picture. Maybe someone with more experience will happen in here and tell me the secret? My own overriding impression of the day was that if the sky is like that again I'm not going to expect to get much from it.

Other lessons I learned...

1. The tide is coming in means THE TIDE IS COMING IN. Thou shalt get wet feet if you stand there too long


2. Carrying a tripod is not fun. Using it may be, but carrying the bugger is a pain in the bum


3. Think about what you need in your camera bag before you go - AKA- There probably isn't a plug on the beach, so you didn't need to bring your battery charger

As this blog grows I'll probably post more turkey giblets than turkey dinners on this site. Here's one (you can decide which) from Cloughglass Beach.



(1/800, f/4.0, metering - matrix, focal length - 18.0mm, 04/08/07 15:56)

Learning To Snap

These were some of my favourite shots with the Fuji E550 and I guess they formed the kernel that made me what to know more about taking decent photographs.

I tend to spend a lot of time in Donegal. If you've never been I have to recommend it - good food, good pubs and great scenery. Regardless of the time of year, it's always breathtaking (though as I found last weekend, not very photogenic with grey skies).

Anyway, I took a lot of photos one weekend while playing with my little E550 and these are some that I really liked. Typically everything was done by the camera and that's what was so frustrating. That's what started the drive towards spending money on a dSLR and this site and stuff.

I'm sure these could be better, I'm keen to hear your thoughts and comments on these and any other image I post here.

Cloughglass Beach



Cruit Island



 





Learning To Snap