3 of my favourite things: Spain, Photography & travel with friends

This June I get to do three of my favourites things all at once: photography, with friends in Bilbao, Spain.  Iñaki Hernandez a Bilbao born, now Limerick resident for 20 years, and critically acclaimed architectural photographer, is organising a workshop for 5 days in his home town.  For some time I've been considering a visit to Bilbao and when this opportunity to not only get to Bilbao but to go with friends to do photography, I just couldn't let it pass.  From my previous posts you will know I love Spain, and I love to travel and do photography with like-minded people.  I am very familiar with southern Spain but I am looking forward to seeing a completely different part of Spain, and to see what it has to offer from the point of view of the sights, the people, the food, the architecture and the culture.  It promises to be great craic! Roll on June!

MagCloud Magazine

Have you ever thought about what to do with all those photographs you take, only a small proportion get printed and used in competitions. My mother in law says I never see real prints of your images and seeing them on the screen is not the same. I have to agree, we take many thousands of images and virtually none get printed. To be fair probably 99.9% deserve to be consigned to my Lightroom catalogues and never see the light of day, but that leaves a fair few that deserve a viewing. Well I'm a great fan of Blurb they make fantastic quality books, and I've posted on this before here. Recently I heard about another publishing web site by HP called MagCloud from a guest speaker, Sean McCormack who had mentioned it in passing, so I decided to give it a try. You can create Flyers, Pamphlets, Magazines and Posters. I thought I would try the magazine and brand it Lens Flare like my web site. I was thinking if the quality was any good my daughter could produce her own magazine as a sort of portfolio and give it to perspective employers or clients.

You can use a number of publishing tools like Adobe In-Design or Quark, but I used Photoshop to create the required PDF file. They provide templates for the different sizes and formats. It was easy to upload and order. The problem was that I did not receive it but I have to say the customer service was excellent once they heard this they ordered another 3 copies and had it couriered to me by FedEx and I got it in a few days. I have to say I was very pleased with the quality and would be happy to recommend it, and it is not too expensive in particular if you order a large enough number.

Here is the cover and two of the spreads:

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Halloween

It's that time of year again, time to keep the pets indoors and the children outdoors! My daughter Sinead is studying Theatrical and Media Makeup and put it to good use for her Halloween parties.Her are some of the photos.

Gordon Bennett Rally

At the weekend a friend and I headed to see some of the vintage cars taking part in the Gordon Bennett Rally.  The Rally is organised by the Irish Veteran and Vintage Car Club every year.  They select 3 separate routes for the cars to take and it is run over the weekend.  There can be up to a hundred cars taking part and the participants come from far and near, this year two cars came from Australia.  James Gordon Bennett (1841-1918) born from an Irish Mother and Scottish father and who owned the New York Herald Tribune.  To promote the Tribune he sponsored many different sporting and expedition events such as a balloon and airplane race and a yacht race which eventually became The Americas Cup Yacht Race. In 1900 he sponsored the first international motor racing event held on a closed circuit The Gordon Bennett Cup Race.  The fourth race was held in Ireland and these races paved the way for Grand Prix racing.  Today the event is primarily a tourist event held every June bank holiday in the midlands. We headed to Burtown House to catch some of the cars.  When we got there many of the cars had gone but we saw quite a few.  Burtown House itself is also very nice with a cafe, gallery and lovely gardens, well worth a visit when in the area.

Bloom 2012

Bloom is Ireland's largest gardening, food and family event.  This is the 6th year for this event which is held in the Phoenix Park Dublin over 5 days of the June bank holiday.  It is very well organised with plenty to do for all ages.  It has gardens, playgrounds, shops, restaurants, live entertainment and lots of things to do and to keep one entertained. Last year there were over 90,000 people who attended, this year was our first year and we went with our good friends Noelle and Clive.  I got a few nice photographs and here they are:

Garden Flowers

Last night I got a bit bored so I took out my camera, flash, macro lens and tripod into the garden to snap a few flowers, and I was quite happy.  Here's what I got:  

Camera Club Outing to Dublin City

Last night the club had an outing to Dublin City, and it was a beautiful evening.  A good turn out of about 20 people.  Myself Alison and Tony headed around the Grand Canal Theatre and the Liffey.  I enjoyed the photography and the company immensely and the couple of drinks in the ELY Bar at Grand Canal.  Great to be able to sit out on the open air and enjoy a few drinks.  Of course, time ran by very fast and we had a very quick dash for the train home which we nearly missed altogether, in fact they were locking up and the train was on the platform as we ran up the escalator. Any way here are a few shots from the night any feedback appreciated.

Camera Club Annual Weekend Away

Last weekend we had our annual weekend away and there was a great attendance, 30 in all our biggest ever.  We went to Ballinasloe and stayed in the Carlton Shearwater on the river Suck.  I haven't looked yet at the photographs but to be honest we were all having too much fun and enjoying ourselves to be too worried about getting any images. There were very late nights and sore heads the next day.  However, on the Saturday afternoon Gerry Morgan took a group of 14 of us out to Garbally College to do a tutorial on using flash outdoors.  Here are the videos: But first the group:

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Part 1 of tutorial:

Part 2:

Long Exposure, Purple Cast Update

In the last blog I raised the issue of a purple colour on a long exposure shot taken at the Giant's Causeway (see here).  So today I decided to see if I could find out the cause of this problem (thanks to Keith who also helped). The following sequence shows the variability of the problem given different settings:

As you can see a slight touch of purple in the first image, as I widened to 16mm the more noticeable it becomes, but it gets very obvious once the aperture is closed down to f/22. So what was the problem, at first I thought it was light leakage through the "distance window" so I "gaffer taped" this.

But that didn't solve the problem.  The problem is light leakage through the Eyepiece, once closed with the Shutter it was gone.

 

 

Giants Causeway

Our lovely daughters bought us a Groupon for an overnight with dinner in Dungiven Castle.  This has changed hands in recent months and it is a lovely boutique hotel though offially it's a 4 star B&B as you have to have 16 rooms to qualify as a hotel in Ireland.  Roy our host was very nice and we had a very good meal.  On the way up we were uncertain about the weather it looked like it could rain at any moment.  We arrived around lunch time, had lunch and afterwards decided to take our chaces and head to the Giats Causeway, and we were very fortunate as it was a lovely sunny afternoon.  Sharon and I had a grand couple of hours taking photos.  Sharon took my D700 and I used the D800.

The above is a long exposure using a B&W 10 stop ND filter. However, I have a problem with the image, if you run the mouse over the image you will see the original colour image and see the problem. The purple colouring in the middle third of the image. If anyone has any ideas on what this could be I would appreciate the help. The technical details are: Nikon D800, Nikkor 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0, taken at 25.0 secs at f/20. I used the B+W 77mm 110M Multi Coated +10 Stop Neutral Density Filter - F-PRO Mount

I have a couple of ideas I want to try out and I want to check results between the D700 & D800 using the same lens, but in the mean time any ideas on what the problem could be is much appreciated.

 

Addendum:

I forgot to mention that the tide was coming in and a huge way broke over the Causeway soaking me up to the knees but worse still, it splashed my lovely new D800 and shiney new 3 Legged Thing tripod.  I quickly turned off my camera and started to dry it off with Sharons silk scarf.  What a scare, but all appears to be fine now, everything works.  Though on Sunday night I decided to take a closer look at my tripod (Brian), and I could see it was still wet and had some salt deposits.  Fortunately, you can take the whole thing apart, which I did, over the next couple of hours and cleaned it, dried it and oiled it again.  Whew scarey!!

Time Lapse experiment

For a while now I've been interested in trying some Timelapse photos, though they're probably really videos.  Anyway yesterday I found a piece of software called LRTimelapse which works in conjunction with Lightroom t o create timelapses, see LRTimelapse.  I copied it down and had a look at some of the tutorials.  So this morning I decided to get up early and try some shots around the Estuary at sunrise.  It was very cold but a fantastic sunrise, see some of the shots below.  Of course I had to jump in and try one of the hardest things to do a timelapse of, the sunrise or sunset.  The problem is the steadily rising exposure of sunrise causes problems getting the exposure right throughout the timelapse particularly when using manual settings.  If you use automatic settings you get a flickering effect as the exposure of each shot can be minutely different to the previous one. I gave it a shot anyway, 8 seconds between each shot, using the interval shooting option on the camera.  The next problem is the size of the CF Card.  It takes 30 shots to give just 1 second of video, so you have to shoot a lot of shots to get just 10 seconds of video (300 to be exact).  If you shoot in RAW thats a lot of data that fills up your card quickly.  If you shoot in JPEG you can't manipluate the exposure etc. in post processing as well.  So a lot more difficult than I was expecting.  On the plus side this morning it was a great sunrise.

Here is the basic unedited version, as you can see the exposure brightens a lot, need to work on sorting this out, but I like the look of it.

Here are a couple of images from the sunrise.

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All comments welcome!

Happy New Year and the first shoots of 2012

Well 2011 is over and it was another tough year for everyone, and it doesn't look like it's going to get much better too fast.  So we may as well make the best of it. So far since Christmas I've been out on 4 shoots with friend from the camera club and although the weather wasn't the best for photography we had some good fun and it got us out into the open air.

The first shoot was the Wednesday after Christmas which Sheldon organised and called it a Wayzgoose, which according to Wikipedia is defined as: "A wayzgoose was at one time an entertainment given by a master printer to his workmen each year on or about St Bartholomew's Day (24 August)." Anyway about 8 turned out and we started at 7.45am at Highrock Malahide and 6 of us headed off to Glendalough for Breakfast and a few more shots.  It was a cold but mostly dry day we lst another 2 by midday but the remaining 4 of us headed off to the Avoca store for a fine meal and the first good day ended and I got home about 5pm.

Joe Doyle and I headed off to Dollymount the following Wednesday for sunrise but the sun only showed itself for about 30 seconds.  But I had a bit of fun again with my 10 stop filter, need a bit more practice though.  Next we headed to Howth for sun rise the following Saturday and the sun was kinder to us but not as well placed for the lighthouse as we hoped.  that afternoon we headed to the National Cyclocross championships - St. Anne's Park. We got a few better images there.  Anyway for what they're worth here's the best of the bunch.

Content Aware Fill Feature in CS5

Last night I was pleased to win the Advanced open section in our monthly competition.  I wanted to remove an element in the image that made it look very cluttered so I tried for the first time the Content Aware Fill feature introduced in Photoshop CS5.  It requires you to select what you want to remove select the option and it does an analysis of the surrounding area to decide what should be there.  It doesn't always work the way you expect but I was very pleased in this case that it worked perfectly first time, so here's a short video on how I used it.  To get a clearer view select the full screen icon in the bottom left hand corner of the video (after the words YouTube) and it will show in full screen.

I've also decided to show you the image as it came out of the camera and what I finally presented:

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The image after some cropping, toning and cleaning up:

Lucan Demesne

Last Thursday I was sitting at my PC looking at Gerry Kerr's website at some images he had taken the previous Monday night.  I looked out the window and it was such a beautiful day I decided to head off to the same location, Lucan Demesne and give it a go.  After Google maps and a few wrong turns I eventually found it.  I had a great few hours walking along the riverside in the beautiful summer sunshine and I took a few photos, no masterpieces but I still enjoyed myself.  I played around with a bit of post processing and here are a few of the shots.  If you roll the mouse over the first 4 images you can see the originals (well nearly original!). Now a couple of other straight shots.

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