One From Dun Laoghaire

The Sentinel












End of East pier, 2 second exposure




What a miserable day. Anyway I went out for a walk this evening becauase I was fed up being stuck indoors with the rain all day. Here are a couple that I took along the way.

Kung Fu

Staff fighting form

One of my brother from earlier on in the day. Took about 2 hours to properly seperate him from the backround so that there were no white lines left behind.

I've been editing some more of the pictures from the UCD ball, I never got around to finishing them at the time because the exams were approaching rather too quickly for my liking. I'm very gratefull that I was shooting RAW (a more flexible format for editing later) because the camera had a lot of difficulty setting the exposure correctly with the harsh and very quickly changing lighting. Here are a few of the ones that I liked more on the second visit.

A tougher edit

I left over some of the Yosemite photos to process at home, this is one of the ones that I wasn't sure about at the time, but having processed it now, am quite fond of. A lot of the difficulty in taking good photographs is the limitations imposed on you by the dynamic range of the camera: you don't want to blow highlights out, but you also want to retain the detail in the shadows. It's for that reason that a lot of landscape photography is taken either early in the morning, or late in the evening. Beacuse it's not as bright you're more likely to get all the detail that you want in a photograph. It also gives you a certain glow, as the sun casts different colours and longer shadows as it goes through the lower portion of the atmosphere.

An Irish summer...

The young


The old


A couple of pictures from the Dun Laoghaire/ Seapoint area yesterday. I'll let the pictures do the talking on this one!

Still life

I was never very good at drawing in school. And my art teacher could hardly be said to have enoucoraged me along the way. I think that's part of the reason that I love photography, it allows people who can't pait to capture things none the less. With photoshop you have a whole plethora of tools available to you which allow you to get an image to look the way you imagined it. For photojournalism those options are naturally limited, you want to represent things in as natural a way as you can, given the limitations of the medium. However for other compositions you're free to do what you want to a picture to get it to look how you want, and this is one example of that from me recently. Not entirely sure about the effect, but it's intersting so I thought I'd post it none the less!

Fauna

Home again!/ Flora

Arrived back safely! Here is the last full series of Yosemite pictures that I intended to post here. Yosemite teems with wildlife everywhere you look, so even someone very poor at capturing animals/ plants like me has a good chance! Hopefully I'll see everyone soon, a much less selective bunch of pictures will be going up on Bebo soon too.

Homage to Ansel

Leading lines


Lower Yosemite Falls


Upper and Lower Yosemite Falls

You can't come to Yosemite without thiking about Ansel Adams, probably the greatest landscape photographer there has even been. He made Yosemite his home, and decades later his images still have an enduring quality that would put most modern work to shame, in spite of the facilities aforded by digital editing etc. The Ansel Adams Gallery is located in the village, and I had a great time wandering around looking at the magnificent pictures. I couldn't resist having a go at a couple of black and whites myself, and although they pale in comparison, I'm happy enough with the result.

''There's nothing worse than a sharp picture of a fuzzy concept'' - Ansel Adams

Rolling Thunder II/ Chasing the rainbow

Lower Yosemite Falls raibow, 7.30 AM


Bridalveil falls, evening


Birdalveil falls, mid-afternoon



There are spectacular waterfalls everywhere you look in Yosemite. However you have to be a bit more lucky and well prepared to catch them with rainbows. I've been chasing them around the park for the last few days and here are the best few.

Sunrise

Bridelveil fallls




Yosemite falls




Looking back from the base of Lower Yosemite falls, sunglight in the mist being thrown off it

Got up at half 5 this morning. Some would justifiably mad, but I think it was worth it!

first impressions of Yosemite

Sunset over Half Dome

Departures, Airports, Arrivals

Rays of the sun dipping out of the clouds

After the sun had dropped below the horizon

What I was cropping out by using the zoom lens... Also look for the window reflection on the tail of the plane in the foreground!

Arrived in Yosemite today, not had a chance to take any pictures yet though! Planning to head out in a couple of hours to try and catch the sunset. I'm happy to leave the humididty (70-90%) of Washington behind for the still very hot but more manageable California summer. To get here we flew via Denver, and here's a couple of shots I got of the sunset through the airport window! I used my 70-200mm zoom lens to get this as it cut out the airplanes in the foreground.

Arlington

Headed up the Arlington National Cemetery today. Although you've all seen pictures of it (or at least have now ;) Nothing can really give you an idea of how many graves there are. They just stretch out in front of you in every direction, accross beatifull rolling hills, draped in the shade by overhanging trees. A fittingly serene place for a graveyard. The picture of the soldier, in full dress uniform is a member of the honour gard at the tomb of the unkown soldier. It was incredibly hot (around 30 degress celcius) with humidity at around 80%, but he kept walking up and down, paying service. How he manages to do it without pausing to mop a brow, let along pass out from the heat and the heavy uniform is beyond me!

A couple more from last night

Roosevelt Memorial, beside the reflecting pool

Jefferson Memorial

The Monument from the WWII memorial

Here are a couple more from the series of night shots that I took last night.
The first shot is an intersting one, it's taken with my new lens' image stabilisation feature. It allowed me to take a shot at 1/3rd of a second without even having to use a tripod (which I did have with me at the time, but by the time I'd have set it up, there would have been lots of people in front of me again).

Pain = gain

Sunset dissapearing into the haze
What it's all about... 15 second exposure, iso 100, f12, tripod mounted.


So today I walked for 3 miles in the stifling heat, not entirely sure where I was going in order to try and get a good shot of sunset over the Potamac. With me I was lugging my camera, tripod, case, and two heavy lenses. Unfortunately the haze hanging around the edge of the sky decided to gobble up the sun before it got to the lowest point in the sky. So that was a bit annoying... However not one to be overly dettered, I had a back up plan ready and headed over to the Tidal Basin which is bordered by the Roosevelt monument and overlooked by the monument. About 40 minutes after sunset, the colours in the sky were just perfect. The aforementioned haze reflected the city lights to give a red glow, and the sky was a deep blue. Good things come to those who wait...