Dancing Shades of Light

The world Topper championships are on in Fenit Co Kerry at the moment.

Although there was no racing on Sunday, a load of boats went out, and we were lucky enough to be in the area when they all came back in. I like this one.

Tuesday evening, Sutton

I’m anxiously looking at the weather again today. The sun looked like it might poke its face around the clouds; I am hoping that it will for this evening although it’s not looking too likely.

I didn’t expect to get anything out of Tuesday. The wind was scrappy, everyone I talked to said it was gusty and no one was doing very much to interest me. But I was still there at 8 when things looked a little more interesting, so I hopped into the wetsuit and grabbed the wide angle.

This is shot at ISO800 so I was running out of light because normally I go nowhere above 200. IT’s the first high ISO shot that I really, really like myself.

Following on from that, I am planning to get myself a 580 Speedlite to do some more interesting things in the water in the dark. I have Plans, with a capital P.

The sun has gone away for the evening. I shall not complain because its brief visit this morning was more than welcome. I had a date with some camera club friends to take early morning pictures in Skerries.

It’s very different to sports photography, needless to mention.

This is my absolute favourite. I set it up myself, and had major problems avoiding shadows and not being able to look through the camera to take the shot, and over exposing the mussel shell.

And I love the colours in this one. There’s something about the blues that just appeals to me…so bright and happy.

I get splashes. I love them. You can see this in the kite photography…often I am concentrating on what is happening with the water rather than with the kitesurfer. There’s a photograph in a frame here, from my film days, which was shot at the High Rock in Portmarnock, again a wave splashing against some kind of a pier…it was the photograph that first said “yeah, you can do this photography lark”. Amazing. I loved it.

This is a composite drawn from two processed versions of a single RAW file, in an effort to avoid a blown out sky.

Mostly when I am integrating photographs, it’s to do some kind of a sports action stitch. This is unusual in that it’s to fix light metring problems. I’m quite happy with it, and although I messed up with the angle of the walk way (didn’t get it perfectly perpendicular), I’m not utterly disappointed in it.

I spent most of the day playing with a Sigma 10-20mm wide angle, and in fact, only the last photograph was taken with anything else. I guess it’s the novelty of not shooting sport.

It arrived on Friday afternoon, amid much relief. I’d been without it for one whole month.

I took it out to play immediately.

and

and

I shouldn’t like that one, the greys lack contrast a little and because of the lighting conditions which were pretty awful for most of the evening, there is a load of noise in the shot. But - shrugs - you can never tell what ones will appeal to you.

I had some difficulty identifying my favourite one.

This one appeals to me for various reasons, as does this one

mainly because the light was moderately good as opposed to truly horrible. We take pleasure where we can…

but I liked a couple of selective colourisations as well:

Anyway, having it back makes me really happy.

This was one of the last photographs I took with my 50-500mm zoom lens before it had its sad accident. It will be back to me really soon.

I can’t wait.

Lakes of Killarney at Ross Castle, sometime last weekend when it was not raining.

There are two versions of this photograph, one warm filtered and one cold filtered. This is the warm filtered version. What struck me about them is that the warm filtered shot looks like a sunset timed shot (which is in fact the case), and the cold filtered shot looks like a dawn shot. It’s just another useful piece of information to file away for the future.

I got soaked today. I took the bus to the city centre and this left slightly more at the mercy of the weather than would normally be the case. On the plus side, the bus was fairly quick. On the minus side, it started raining while I was in town and I got drenched. I didn’t like that so much.

Lately I’ve been looking at Photoshop brushes. This came about because I was doing an interestingly little side project involving the creation of graffiti-esque art work for a proof of concept. Initially i was hoping that there was some kind of a filter not unlike posterize but I couldn’t find one and any help queries that I posted resulted in people explaining how to make graffiti style type faces. It wasn’t want I wanted. However, Idid also buy a graphics tablet (I thought long and hard about it), a Wacom Bamboo, and am charmed. During a sleepless night the other night, I realised that with the aid of a photograph, I could actually do something akin to what I was aiming for myself using the tablet and the gradient tool. There is one example sitting on the flickr account which, somewhat surprisingly did not provoke too much comment. Anyway I am going to try and figure out how to do some lighting issues that I could not get to work for me at the time at some stage tomorrow. I figure if it’s still raining I won’t be on a beach taking kite photographs again. It’s the longest I’ve gone without a fix of the lads, I must say.

One of the things which came up for me while I was doing the graffiti art was the question of Photoshop brushes. I know how to make them in principle although I was looking for a spray can effect. The spray brushes I have aren’t right. I’ve since spent alot of time looking at the brushes people have been kind enough to offer for download on the internet, and I have a set that I’ll be making available myself sometime soon.

What struck me was the restrictions that people were attaching to them. Only use on DeviantArt projects. You must link back to me. You must this. You must that.

It gives me a headache. While I understand that if someone goes to the trouble of creating a set of brushes, they’re entitled to attach conditions to the use of those brushes. But what it does for me is create a headache as I try to administer the brushes and ensure I adhere to licence conditions. I’ve decided not to bother downloading any from DeviantArt unless they are very good. For others, I may be prepared to pay for them if I am not in a position to create suitable ones of my own.

When I create my own brushes and make them available for download, I will make them fully free for use.

Muckross Friary, Co Kerry

My dad notices things, and he noticed this swallow’s nest. I’ve already made it clear that I’m not particularly talented at nature photography and I’m pretty sure I’ve done bad things with this photograph.

It has been cropped down a bit so I’m very pleased that it turned out okay although I don’t expect to ever get a great print out of it.

I’ve been taking very few photographs lately. There are a few reasons for this. One is that the lens which I use to do about 80% of my work, the Sigman 50-500mm zoom had an accident two or three weeks ago and is not working correctly. I have shipped it to the Sigma repair agents here in Ireland and they are flummoxed by it. Last I checked they had tried replacing a load of bits and it’s still not working correctly. When I shipped it to them, it refused to focus at short focal lengths. Now it’s sticking mid focus. I’m coping okay fro the moment without it - I’m just not taking photographs - but it’s going to get on my nerves soon enough.

I don’t know what I want from life at the moment. I’ve been doing more interesting things with the photographs and to some extent, having a break to do interesting things is good.

It must be said that the weather wasn’t really my friend at the weekend so despite my hopes for Ross Castle, I didn’t really get the shots I intended to get. But I got a couple of nice ones at Torc Waterfall.

Killarney is probably the number one tourist attraction in the country outside of Dublin, and frankly, given a choice between spending my holidays in Dublin and spending my holidays in Killarney, I think I’d prefer Killarney any day. Even though the weather there for the past few days was MISERABLE.

This was shot without the benefit of a tripod. Because I so very rarely use one, I just completely forget to even think about bringing it. So I had to rest the camera on a handy rock and hope that it was roughly pointing the right way. I never thought I’d get the shutter speed reasonably right for this, and for info, it was shot at f29 (I love my digital camera) and the shutter was open for half a second.

The photograph got a going over in Photoshop between curves, and brightness sliders. I think I upped the green channel as well to bring out some light in the leaves. I’m quite happy with it.

I didn’t know there was a photography club in Killarney, but there is. Right now, they are exhibiting photographs upstairs in the Outlet Centre in Killarney Town and if you are of a mind to look at some stunning photographs from the region (and it’s a place that generates stunning photographs) it is will worth taking a trip along to have a look.

I have decided to decommission KiteLense.net

All the kite/sports photography related stuff is now moving to the blog on treasalynch.com.  At some point over the next few days, Kitelense.net will be completely cleared out, gone. The blog over on treasalynch.com will grow in tandem with the gallery site over there.

Dancing Shades of Light is getting a haircut today. The theme is not going to change from this - I find it light and airy - but I am not happy with a lot of the quality of writing here lately.  Nor with the photography. I did toy with leaving it as it was but felt that actually I wasn’t doing it that way because I wanted to do it that way, but because something told me it was wrong just to clear the place out. My plan is to try and get more practical stuff in here along with thephotographs, such as useful tutorials, more and better links to other places I like. In doing this I am hoping that the traffic will increase again.

Normal service will hopefully resume sometime this afternoon.