Fun!!!

Tags

amusements, B&W, event, ireland, wexford

Not all images need to be sharp, or clear, or colourful. Maybe an image that’s so far gone rubbish it might have an attraction about it. That’s what I thought about this one…right or wrong. It seems to have enough to identify but not enough to make it boring.

Stunt Show

Tags

event, extreme, monster_truck, racecourse, sport, stunt

Spent a pleasant evening with my 3 sons and 300 other people at Wexford Racecourse at a stunt show run by Extreme Events Europe recently. Quite surprised and really enjoyed it.

Enter the dogs

Tags

dog, greyhound, sport

A spell of late night shooting at Enniscorthy dog track. It’s challenging to get a photograph of animals running at break-neck speed in the dark and making it recognisable.

As ever, I can’t just put a shot in and leave it alone…but here’s two with differing finishes. Just don’t ask me who won!

Sometimes even asking why isn’t good enough

Tags

candid, man, smurf

A military enactment, an opportune moment…a question never to be answered…what was he doing?

A good night

Tags

wexford, LX3, camera club, pub, music

Like the Irish need a reason to have a good night?

ISO800, 1.3 sec exposure @ f2.8

A Camera Club outing…you’d have to bring a camera. But as well as the staged, lined up shots to remember the night by you have to get arty. Not that I call these arty, just seemed so at the time. Either way, it was a great night.

ISO 3200, 1/10 sec @ f2.8

ISO 3200, 1/6sec @ f2.8

All taken with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3, nice little camera that goes everywhere!

Wexford Male Voice Choir – 70 year Celebration

18th June 2011 – Wexford Male Voice Chior were celebrating 70 years in existence. I was privilaged to be invited to photograph the event by Chairman of the Wexford Male Voice Choir and avid photographer himself, Pat Sheridan.

Not knowing exactly what to expect I firstly ventured into the Green Room where the guys soon put me at rest with their relaxed and easy humour. 2 Hours later I had endured heat and lost bearings a couple of times but was delighted to witness the event and keep a record if it.

Celine Byrne was a special guest and she blew the audience away. It was the first time I’d heard a Soprano live and she lived up to all expectations.

Eamon Mulhall was a local hero in this concert adding to the crescendo of male voices to the meekness of the Wexford Ladies Choir but when both Eamon and Celine joined forces it was the stealing moment of the night.

An exceptional night, an exceptional display of vocals and an exceptionally well organised and executed evening. Here’s to the next 70!

The Dog Quietener

Tags

B&W, Black & White, Enniscorthy, greyhounds, kennel

Enniscorthy greyhound track. This guy used to read the form book, walk past the kennels then bang on a door. I found out afterwards that the dogs get nervous and waste energy barking. This guy was making sure that if he placed a bet he was going to be sure of his money by quietening down the dog.

A slideshow of my favourite sport

Tags

competition, kettlebell, kilkenny, slideshow, sport

I had the backing music in my head for about 1 month. Played it over & over & over so that I could piece together a slideshow of images to put to it. The problem was that I didn’t have the images. As it turned out this was the best approach because I knew what to look for. The following is a slideshow of thew Wexford Kettlebell Clubs participation in the second Irish Kettlebell Sport Biathalon Championships as hosted by Kilkenny Kettlebell Club.

Again congrats to the folks of Wexford Kettlebell Club. Hope you enjoy it!

Interesting techniques from Guy Gowan

Tags

Guy Gowan, Leenane, LX3, technique

I came across a method of processing recently as exercised and flaunted by Guy Gowan…I had heard of him before and got the usual “he changed the way I process images” comments. Now I can see why. I had seen excerpts of what he had done so I could work out his methodology.

Below are 2 images – your typical before and after. Nothing special just a club outing to Leenane, Co. Galway during 2010. It was taken handheld using the Panasonic Lumix LX3 in low light. The image was about 2 stops underexposed and had a green cast (as you can see).

Before:

 

After:

In Lightroom I raised the Exposure about 1+2/3rds of a stop. I didn’t worry about the bright sections to the right side as the Histogram said nothing was blown – I could have balanced it but that wasn’t the intention of this exercise.

So exporting to Photoshop I got to work on the colour cast. I saw by the Histogram (expanded version) that the greens were excessive so I added a photo filter magenta to bring the colour back…about 25% with Luminosity preserved. I tried to boost the blues a little but this served no real purpose so I left it as it was. A bit of noise reduction then with an interesting method of contrast boost.

The contrast boost utilises firstly a Levels layer where Auto is selected with “Enhance Monochromatic Contrast” checked in Options and 0% clipping. Then an alpha channel from the RGB Channel placed on a Curves adjustment as a mask for highlights was run. This was on a 50%/50% point and dragged down by 10%. Then I ran a levels adjustment on the Alpha Channel generated mask (Alt-L) and moved the sliders in to just past the edge of the histogram edges.This layer was duplicated, the mask was inverted and the Shadows were increased by 5% by using the same method but not placing a Levels adjustment on the mask as this had already been done on the prior layer. Then this was flattened and sharpened by using a LAB Mode Sharpening technique and only running a 25% opacity on this new layer.

I was quite happy with the technique, all of which is lossless and can be constantly re-adjusted once saved as a .psd file.

SACC Printed & Projected Images

Tags

competition, portrait, SACC, Stuart

On Sunday 6th December the SACC (Southern Association of Camera Clubs) round of the National Printed and Projected Images Competition was held in Clonmel. This was the first year that I was placed in the Open section of the competition (as opposed to the Intermediate). In the Projected Images section I came in third. OK, not earth shattering but nice to get some recognition.

This was the image that took third.

Out of the 9 images I submitted 7 are going forward to the finals and the club had 18 out of 30 passed on to the National Final in February. Fingers crossed again.