A thought before bed
Cor, ain’t she a beauty?
/steve_irwin
Oh what a world!
Today started last night, with me falling asleep reading this excellent article. Patsy O’Neill gave me the first bit good of advice about photography: Always carry your camera with you, and the article gave me my second (paraphrased): If you only show people your good photos, they’ll think you’re good. And hey, that works perfectly fine for me!
Work was…bleh. There pretty much wasn’t anything to do as the lovely weather kept the customers out. I did make a child cry, accidently, while her mother was filling out a cheque. I got the child’s attention and made my rawr face, as I’m wont to do. Tears swiftly followed. It was funny, although I’ve probably scarred a child for life now.
I got off work early as I skipped lunch, bought some shower gel and then had the bottle open and destroy my bag on the way home. Exciting , isn’t it? Ah well, I threw myself into tweaking the “Bill” photo from yesterday and came out with an excellent wallpaper:
I went up the Dyke Road at after seven o’clock and wound up doing better than usual on the crud:good photo ratio - four good photos and one okay out of a total of 86. Behold:
And now I get to go and delete all of my ununsed photos, as I’m effectively out of hard drive room (/home is the important partition here):
Bill, eat your heart out…
Not much to say for today, except that I went out to Renville, near Oranmore, with Jennifer. I will say that I am really looking forward to getting my new lenses, after today, as I was dismayed by the amount of photos that were either horrible soft and out of focus or were suffering horrible colour distortion. Here’s a blow-up of the distortion:
Five good photos out of 150 is annoying as hell. Here’s the cream of the crop:
BIll Gates, eat your heart out
My first HDR photo for some time:
Another nice spot for a picnic
This was one of the very first photos I put online and I still love it today and often use it as my desktop wallpaper. And as with most of my good photos, it was completely accidental - I had my camera then set to use tungsten white balance by accident.
The Irish weather…
…is quirky. The day started gloriously, warm and sunny with nary a cloud to be seen. By 9am a low, dull overcast came winging in on a chill north wind. There were spatters of rain and people could be seen going to work in gloves, scarves, hats and greatcoats. And this gelid state lasted until about half an hour before I got off work, at which point the cloud broke in the blink of an eye, the wind shifted to a warmer west breeze and things warmed considerably. And the light changed as well. There’s no real way to put it into words except to say that when the light is just so, it is pretty much impossible to take a bad photo. After a brief debate with myself, I decided to put off the gym until tomorrow, when we’d probably have snow drifts anyways and make the most of the light.
I ran home, grabbed my gear, made my evening salutations to Jenny, Gabi, Mariah and Michelle - gods above, most geeks with my hobbies would trade their firstborn for women in their lives. At times, I would trade mine for less. Uhm, that was directed at those of my friends who didn’t read that.
I’m moving on now, before I find my heart ripped from my chest and held before my dying eyes by an aggravated woman.
I think every tourist with a camera had the same idea, as all of the locals seem to have retreated to pubs and the streets given over to roving packs of camera-wielding tourists. I amused myself in Eyre Square by annoying all the tourists with their dinky little cameras by plopping down my tripod, putting A Big And Expensive Camera on top of it and fussing over it for five minutes before I took a photo. One photo.
I had a wander down the town after that, down Shop Street, up and then down the canals, up through Claddagh, down around the Claddagh Basin where I snapped some swans and then home.
Photos to follow from all of this. The photos are here:
Me, elsewhere
