Clougherhead Beach

Clougherhead, Co.Louth last Sunday (28th Oct'07).


I went over to Port Head, this time during the day, to shoot a B&W image of the landscape. However the weather was on-side but the tide was not. So a change of plan and we went to Clougherhead and had the family picnic on this beach. This beach has not got the detailed rocks of any interset, so again a change of plan. A simple approach was used. A image of the waves coming in with a reflection of the clouds in the wet sand.

What The Duck

Strobist.com

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Lough Ramor

This is a image taken this morning down at Lough Ramor, Virginia, Co. Cavan.
I was waiting for a customer to open and drove down to the lake. I had my Canon 400d camera with me and the standard lens that comes with the camera.


A wonderful morning mist was on the lake. Not a thing was moving except for the fish jumping out of the water. It's time like this you wish you had your full armor of cameras and long zooms lenses with you but I would not leave them in the car nowadays. So I had to make do with what I had. I was very pleased with the images this lens gave me all things considered.

Donabate Beach

This is a image of Donabate beach with Howth in the background to the left and the Dublin/Wicklow mts to the right.


It was taken at sunrise one Saturday last year. I also have a colour version of this image in the Sunrise Sunset album if you want to have a look.
I like this B&W version (of course I would say that) because it shows the shape and texture of the sand, rocks and cloud formations.

Mushrooms

When out with Navan Camera Club on Sunday last (22-10-07) to look for mushrooms to photograph. Yet again a colour image.



This was taken in the wooded area between Navan and Trim just off the main road. We must have looked a sight to people passing by in there cars. All the flashes of light coming from the trees.
We found a good few different types of mushrooms. Now all we have to do is name them.
This was taken with the 100mm macro Canon lens. I have this lens for a good while but only starting to use it now. The manual focus and wide open aperture gives a very small dept of field and its hard to know were to focus and what f/stop will give to best image.

What The Duck

Black & White Conversions in Lightroom

Click on the title to link to movie tutorial from LightroomNews posted by Martin Evening.


"Do you want to know how to get the best black and white conversions out of Lightroom? This short movie tutorial on Lightroom black and white conversions starts with a few basic tips on how to use the Auto-Adjust Grascale button in conjunction with the White Balance sliders. I then show how to use the target adjustment tool in the Grayscale panel to pick the areas of a photograph that you wish to lighten or darken. Finally, I demonstrate how to desaturate the colors via the HSL panel and achieve a grayscale conversion. The main advantage of using this method is that you can usually achieve smoother looking tones and dark, contrasty skies that are almost completely noise-free."

Killiney Bay

This is an image of Killiney Bay, Dublin a couple of week ago. I was on a family day trip to Bray and to visit the Aquarium. You could see the clouds rolling in. We sat down for our packed lunch just are it started to rain very heavy. There was no way I was going to drive all the way back home to Navan. We decided to take the scenic drive way home along the coast road. Thanks to the GPS system in the car I was able to find the road. Along the way you drive past Killiney Bay and the Dart rail line. The clouds started to break up and the sun was started to shine again. We stopped at this location and walked down and over the railway bridge to the beach. This is one of the images I took .


When the sun came out I was running around to find different location with rock formations in the foreground. The background was covered with the mountains ( The Suger loaf as it's called ) and clouds. I got in total about 5 different images of the bay and was well pleased.

Sunrise Sunset

I am starting to take some colour photographs and they can be seen at the following link SunriseSunset. This is a Picasa Web Album containing all my images from Sunrise and Sunsets across Ireland.



Getting up at about 4:30 in the morning to travel to the east coast and be ready at the location around 30mins before you see a bit of light for the Sunrise images. The Sunsets are from the west coast taken between the hours of 7:00 and 10:00 in the evening depending on the time of the year. I have to thank the guy's from "Viewpoints" for starting me on this colour photography path. I am starting to like these colour images, but I will still be taking all my work in Black & White have no fear. So as I said follow the link to the SunriseSunset web album and post your comments here.

What The Duck

Camus Bay Again

Here is another one of my images from Camus Bay further on the road.



This image has the Twelve Bens in the background. If I can remember right Sarah was with me for this image and she was using a 8 euro disposable camera. Now that's an images I am not going to post as it would but me to shame. With all the high-end Canon digital gear I used and she could get a very good shot with a little old disposable.

Canon TS-E 24mm F3.5 L Lens

Just got my hand on the this lens. It's the Canon TS-E 24mm F3.5 L Tilt & Shift lens.
When you take it out of the box you will see that the Tilt and Shift standards come from the factory oriented 90º out of phase with each other, meaning you can use rise and swing together but not rise and tilt. This orientation is set up wrong for Landscape photographers. You can modify the lens and on the Digital Outback Photo website (link here) it shows how to do this modification.

Canon Camera Museum

Experience the Canon Camera Museum (link here)
We bid you a warm welcome to the Canon Camera Museum, a virtual museum in which you will find everything you ever wanted to know about Canon cameras. The Camera Hall is a database^* of historical facts about our film cameras, digital cameras, digital camcorders, still video cameras and lenses. In the Design Hall, rediscover the visual appeal of our many products through the years. The Technology Hall explains the many advanced technologies incorporated into our cameras and takes you on a tour through a virtual lens plant. And the History Hall introduces historical facts about our cameras and the technologies that have gone into them.
We have “constructed” each hall with a variety of interactive, entertaining and informative contents in order to bring the world of Canon cameras to life. Now that you are here, stay for a while and discover for yourself the many wonders of cameras from Canon.

What The Duck

Kinvarra Bay

This image was taken this May on a Navan Camera Club weekend trip to The Burren.


On the way down we stopped at Kinvara on the N67 going towards Ballyvaghan.
The place was packed with people taking photographs of Dunguaire Castle that I went for a walk around. Just past the castle there is a walk way over the wall and down to the water front.
This is one of the views you will come across down there. No people. Also I have an image of the castle in the background from this point which I may post at a later date.