Daily Blog

All evening I watched to see the sunset develop. Around 6pm Ihad not taken any pictures, it really felt that we would get a good sunset. At 9.45 things looked very promising, I went up slaugher hill and waited . but the sun dropped behind some clouds and so I waited some more. Usually the best time to photograph sunsets is for up to one and a half hours after the sun actually sets. There were some pastel colours in the sky but they faded fast and disappointed I headed home.

So I am posting a panorama taken from the same place I went to today, this was taken just a couple of days ago.

Still recovering from the party ! Did not get out to take any landscapes today. Did have some fun in the studio, here is a photograph of my son Barry and his girlfriend Georgia.

Well the attendence for the sunset was fairly poor. I actually slept in myself waking 15 minutes after the alarm should have gone off. My sister and my nephew John returned to bed but Aisling( my daughter) and myself decided to go out anyway. We were too late for Old Head so decided to go to Kinlooery Lough instead. We arrived about two minutes before the schedualled sunrise. The lough was lovely with low lying mist. The sun never actually broke through. butwe took a few pictures anyway,.







To mark the occasion we took a picture of ourselve



I then took a photograph of Aisling.

I did not get out today at all, so I am postinmg a picture taken last night.
I loved the pink sky in this photograph of Croagh Patrick



Tomorrow is my Birthday, I will have reached the grand old age of fifty. To celebrate a half century some of my family have agreed to come to view the sunrise at Old Head ! Sunrise is at 05.09 we will see how many of us make it tomorrow!!

This evening I went out to play golf with my friend Neil who is visiting from Wales. We went to the Clew bay Golf Course a small nine hole private course overlooking clew bay and Croagh Patrick. The scenery is only fantastic. I brought my camera , which I am sure breaks all the rules of etiquette of golf, but I knew the views were going to be good. We had a great game and I lost , but I won really because I got a couple of great pictures!


The first is of a tree which has been shaped by the atlantic winds, just as we approached the first tee I noticed the small cloud in the sky above .


Nearly three hours later we approached the same tree as the sun set.




On the way home we took a small detour up slaugher hill and got the last of the sunset

This morning I was out with my friend Paul who has set up a business providing cycle tours on electric bikes. The bikes are amazing and make going up hill very easy. We started in some woodland before meeting Aly Donald who took the group out on Clew bay in kayaks .

This morning I was driving from Claremorris when I spotted this horse in a field of buttercups.




This evening I was teaching a night class in Ballyhaunis on the way home I spotted these two horses they seemed to be eating the reeds in the water.



The picture was taken at 10pm and it was quite dark, I had no tripod with me so had to put the iso up to 800 aperature F4 so there is very little depth of field.

They say one of the disadvantages of digital photography is that many photographs are taken but only a few are chosen to become prints !! This means that in years to come we will not have copies of photographs because they will die with our computers. When I got my first digital camera A Nikon 950 it came with a 16mb memory card. Last week Patricia bought me 3 memory cards each with four Gigabytes of memory !! Will this improve my photography or mean I will print more pictures, probably not. It does mean I can take more pictures. When I used a Mamiya film Camera I only got ten pictures on a role of film I was much more disciplined about what I took. It was costing too much every time I pressed the shutter, therefore I was careful when I pressed it, making sure everything was just right, afraid to waste film. Now I can take over 200 pictures on each card, and there are no processing costs so I can and have become less disciplined often I can look at whole memory cards and wonder just what was I thinking at the time! It always amazes me that no matter how many photographs I take on a day out when I review the pictures there will always be a favourite one or maybe two. So I work on these one or two and the rest are left unseen and forgotten in the computer vault! Well this evening as I had not got out with the camera I had to visit the vault. I am glad I did because I found this photograph in a file called “ Cong May 09”. Well its actually nine photographs stitched together to form a Panorama. I am pleased with it and wonder why I did not process it at the time I took it.

Well another month has gone by and the seasons continue to change. Last week I posted a picture of Croagh Patrick with some yellow gorse in the forground the gorse is now fading fast but is being replaced by the bog cotton, over the next few weeks whole ares of bog will be covered in a carpet of fluffy white cotton.




This picture was taken in a bog above Mulranny close to this wonderful old ruined cottage.




I really enjoy visiting sites like this and would always wonder about the people who lived in them.

Catlin

I have been in the gallery all day today, and have hardly seen a soul , but I have had so much processing to do that it has been great to get a bit of quite time to get things done.
I am posting some pictures taken yesterday.


Jenny

Yesterday I was leading a morning “workshop” on daylight portrait photography. Carol , one of the participants , brought her daughter Jenny and Jenny’s friend Catlin to act as models. They have all agreed that I can use their pictures on this blog.
We had agreed on a location and that we would not be using flash ( off camera Flash is another workshop!) but the weather was very misty with heavy cloud cover so this made for very challenging conditions. We were using shutter speeds as low as 20th second at f2.8 and iso of 800.!
Still with careful placement of the models and good camera techniques we got some good portraits.


Mother and daughter



Best of friends



the models take a break and shelter from the rain



tripods were required due to low light levels.



Angela, one of the participents poses for a picture.




Catlin 20th second F2.8 ISO800.



The last picture taken ,and my favourite.


Jenny and Catlin were great, you'd think they were modelling for years!

Arrived back in Mayo late last night after a couple of days in London to visit the Chelsea Flower show.
While these pictures have nothing to do with Mayo I thought I might share a couple of them with you.
Our trip started with the flight from Dublin to Stanstead on Ryan air. I always feel a little uneasy getting on an aeroplane so my feelings of unease were not helped when I noticed the registration number on our plane as we approached to board !!.



The Chelsea Flower show itself was great.





The indoor tent was amazing with fantastic floral arrangements and miniature gardens that looked like they are established for years.



There were plenty of photographers taking advantage of the opportunity to take photographs.This one seemed particularly engrossed in what she was doing.



On the journey home I was safely buckled into my seat when I was asked to move to let a Ryan air pilot sit in beside me.... in row 23!! . Anyway whoever was in the cockpit did a grand job and we landed safely in Dublin.

On the drive home last night there was a fantastic sunset so we stopped at Craughan in Roscommon to photograph. Craughan is an ancient site said to be the inauguration place for the kings of Connaught.

On tuesday evening i went to one of my favourite locations for twilight pictures. It was very very windy, so I decided to try and show the clouds moving.
I used a three second exposure, but I had to use my camera bag to weight down tripod to stop the wind moving the camera

I went out to murrisk on tuesday specifically to get the gorse bushes. I had seen them a week or so ago but the sky was very grey.




Anyway the Gorse has nearly finished. But they still put on a great display, they aklways remind me of the old "John Hinde " postcard of the late sixties early seventies.

I went out to Murrisk abbey this morning and was delighted because the visability was so good.


I will be away for a few days but I hope to arrange to post a few pictures anyway. It seems I can post and the website will publish on the correct day ! we will soon know does it work!

This evening I taught a nightclass, we were using Photoshop elements and had loads of fun. Everybody created signatures in photoshop to “ sign" their digital images. We also used motion blur to give a panning effect and worked with the gausion blur tool on some portraits.



After the class I still had time to catch the sunset. As you can see the tide was out, but the water left reflected beautifully after the sun dropped from sight and the colours really developed

This morning I visited Moore Hall. Its a great place to visit. The hall lies in the middle of a large wood with lovely walks. The hall itself is in need of some repairs, the property might suit someone who has an interest in DIY !! Sorry I could not resist that !
Today the hall looked great, it was bathed in sunlight and as I approached from the deep shade of the trees it looked spectacular. I could imagine horses and carriages coming up and down the avenue and life being good for the halls occupants.




Anyway having photographed the hall I turned my attentions to the woods and was amazed by the numbers of “Lords and Ladies” that were flowering under the deep shade of the trees. It seemed a very appropriate place for the Lords and Ladies to gather!




I headed back to Westport to open the Gallery for 10.30, I was halfway there when I realized I had left my filter bag on the forest floor when photographing a birds nest orchid, So I drove back and retraced my steps. It was a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack , but after 10 minutes or so I found it.




The good thing about going back was that I approached the hall from the side and took this picture from within the woods.

Today was the hottest day of the year so far in Mayo. The sun was very bright. I had a small window of opportunity to get out with the camera this morning around 8.30 before the day warmed up. I had a ten minute walk in the woods at Breaffy House Hotel in Castlebar.




I am still testing the sigma 24 – 70 zoom , so I only carried it , the camera and a graduated filter. Unusually for me I did not bring the tripod. I really enjoyed my few minutes in the woods, the light was really interesting with lots of dappled light and areas of shadow and highlight,and I was delighted to find the lovely violets and early purple orchid.









Even though there are no skies in the pictures I still used the graduated filter for two of the photographs to balance up the exposures.

Traffic to the website has continued to rise. Since I started doing the blog in January the number of visitors and visits has increased steadily . Numbers of visits have gone from 300 per month to over 800 per month and “unique visitors” from 180 to over 400. I know in terms of the world wide web these are very small numbers but I am delighted with the increase. So thank you for visiting and thanks also to all those who sent me feedback through the contact page or by putting comments on the blog and on facebook.

The morning was again very grey and this evening I had a one to one class so did not get out for any new landscape pictures , so I had to go back to the archives again. This picture of a small cottage under Croagh Patrick was taken during April.

The day started very grey and so while I was out this morning I decided to photograph some flowers using the method I introduced a few days ago. The picture shows some “Lady,s Smock” or “cuckoo Spit” which seems to be very plentiful at the moment. Remember now that this photograph is made in the “wild”, the flower has not been picked, by putting a small sheet of Perspex behind the flower I am able to isolate it from the background.




This evening I had a one to one lesson with Aiden. We had a really good session, we started just doing some theory and then visited a waterfall about 5 minutes drive from the gallery where we put the theory into practice before going back to the Gallery where Aiden processed his picture and printed it in Black and White.
I took a few pictures while out, still experimenting with the borrowed lens, this was taken at f4.5, I like the differential focus.

So here is the picture I could not find yesterday ! I had no sooner finished the blog yesterday when I found the picture in the folder I had originally looked in!! It was taken using a sigma 24-70 2.8 lens that I have borrowed from a friend . I am in the market for a short zoom and really want a 2.8 for low light weddings. Has anybody any views on the Sigma lens ? Ideally I would get the Nikon but it is very expensive. So your views if you have experience of this lens would be most welcome.