I’ve posted up a few shots of Logie already, so I thought I’d share the rest of my picks from the night. I’ve enjoyed the versatility offered by these images – it’s good to have a set of shots of the same person and have enough interest about their character to let you play with different styles and moods.

I doubt many of these will ever do well in competition or exhibition, but that was never the aim.

As well as the more moody shots of the juggler from Tuesday, I snatched this

the lighting wasn’t great as it was a grab while others were shooting the moody stuff. But I liked the pose and the look so I wanted to see if I could make it seem more “classic”.

A few curves and a black and white layer later and I got this:

All I had set out to do was to make it feel like a classic desaturated photograph. I’d left it at that and probably wouldn’t have shared it, except I got to looking at textured images and thought it’d be fun to try.

So, I took the image and applied a heavy antique paper scan over the top of it. Changed the blend mode to overlay and pulled down the opacity. I really like the result:

A little curves were added to vignette the picture.

All in all, I liked the result.

You can read all about texturing here if it’s something you want to try.

First of a series of pictures of Logie, a local juggler in Belfast who was kind enough to sit for us last night.  Lighting set up by Gordon – it pays to have a professional in your camera club…

September introduces a new season of photography clubs for me. It’s a good thing too as I’d fallen away from my camera over the past few months, not by choice but by circumstance.

Interestingly this year, the program for my local club (CPA) has a lot more focus on taking and working with photographs. I’d been hopeful this would invigorate me and teach me some new tricks and even after week 2 I can see I’m going to be pretty happy this year.

Last night we set up a series of still life objects using different light types. The idea being to show that you could do a lot with simple lighting and you don’t need expensive  equipment. This picture was taken using a 40watt desk lamp and a gold reflector.

This final image was converted to monochrome, but the original was good and a little compensation for the colour balance of the bulb made for a great result too.

What was especially interesting for me was the introduction to the subject delivered by one of the club members. Brian has won a lot of awards including achieving some great accreditation with the Royal Photographic Society for his still life work and some of the tips and suggestions he gave made for an excellent learning experience.

“If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise..”

OK, so no bears, but you would have seen members of CPA out with the Northern Ireland Fungus Group hunting for mushrooms. It was great to be welcomed along to one of the Funguys outings and to get a chance to be shown some of the cool things that start to appear in forests and woods around the country this time of year.

I know I harp on about camera clubs, but if it wasn’t for my membership of one, I’d never get opportunities to take some of the photographs I do, to play with kit I can only dream of owning and to learn things that no sane man would ever set out to teach me.

It’ll be interesting to see what the fungus experts make of the camera club pictures – I suspect they may despair of our artistic license…

(100mm (macro), f32, 1.3secons with a flash fired from low camera left to create shadow)

I blame Dermot for this. Ever since I took him to the Giants Causeway and he spent most of his time taking close up shots (brilliant ones dammit) instead of pictures of the big wide vistas, I’ve foud myself looking for more and more obscure shots that others might miss.

That was the reason for some of the car shots – Taking photos of unusual bits of the cars seems more interesting photographically than another front on or 45 degree side shot of a car.

And that was my frame of mind as I walked through the zoo, taking photos of things like flowers.

And no, I don’t know what these flowers are either. I suspect this will beat even Paul Glover since it’s neither car or computer shaped.

I might return to this image and decompose it a little, as the little changes I made to it produced a much richer finished shot than the original.

I wasn’t as happy with the treatment of these as I was with the Jaguar shot, but thought they were worth sharing anyway.

I liked the spokes on this. The car was pristine, but the wheels just shone. The keen eyes may notice the reflection is slightly warped – that’s because I cloned out some writing across the centre of the hub.

I’m not sure what type of cars any of these shots came from. If anyone knows, let me know?

I spent today at the zoo. We were lucky that the animals weren’t the only big cats on show.

Festival time in Donegal is a great time to people watch and if you’ve blue skies it’s even better.

Sometimes, just sometimes, Irish weather plays into your hands.

I might never be a great photographer, but it’s days like this I’m glad I’m learning how to use a camera. I’ve maybe 30 photos of my little girl on the beach and being able to capture the look in her face is worth all the hours of photoshop hell and frustrations in blurred shots.

If there was one new lesson I’d take from this weekend, it’d be “take photos, but have fun too”