Author Archives: Donncha
Sunday Times: All About Pensions
The Sunday Times last week published several articles on pensions. There’s some good advice lurking there so go read them if you’re planning on living until after retirement!
- Comment: Kathryn Cooper: The grim truth about pension performance UK orientated, but reveals among other things that some institutions may add funds to their portfolios simply to increase charges.
- Choose the pension that fits – if you’re self-employed, starting a pension now before the October deadline can reduce your tax bill for last year as well as this year!
- The pension planner’s pension plan – what would the expert do?
- Can I save enough to retire on two-thirds of my salary? – Gulp! At age 36 he would have to save 18% of his current salary!
Flight Over Water
Caught in mid-flight at the Lough, Cork
Post processing:
- Converted from RAW with gimp-ufraw
- Rotated and cropped a much larger image, this is why the extra mega pixels are handy!
- Cleanup with Dcam noise, sharpen with unsharp mask.
- Colour adjustment with colour mixer.
- Resize and unsharp mask again.
- Duplicate Layer. Bottom layer is blurred with a radius of 15 pixels, and brightened significantly.
- Set layer mode of top layer to “Overlay” to give the soft light/starry light effect.
Us Day
October 1st is here and Ray and co were on the radio this morning encouraging everyone to get out there and take some photos! They were originally meant to broadcast from 11 to 1, but they locked themselves in the studio until 2pm! The discussion did degenerate into talking about handbags but it was great anyway!
I bumped into Ryan but he went his own way after half an hour. To be honest, it wasn’t a great day for me – frequent showers meant I had to wear a jacket, but between showers it was reasonably warm. Add that to a late night last night and I was struggling to keep my interest going. I have a few good shots which I will submit to Today FM, and eventually they’ll appear here too, but as Ryan said, there wasn’t much happening in the city.
It’s looking like a nice evening so I may take a walk about later around Blarney, you never know what might happen!
Edit: There’s a possible 51 shots from my walk around town that I’ll edit and submit. I have to work on them properly, but Bibblelite does a great job batch converting RAW files to Jpeg, and getting the colour balance right. Dcraw and UFraw both have problems with auto-wb on the Canon 20D in my experience.
Later still… I realised today (Sunday), that ufraw doesn’t keep the exif data when I import RAW files into the GIMP. If they check that for date and time info they might presume I was cheating and posting older images. I could tell them, “RAW images on request” I suppose.
Dig!
Digger in Ballincollig
Industry Push and Pull
Industry Push and Pull – great piece on how things are chugging along in the photography industry. Digicams get bigger sensors, DSLRs have to compete, full-size 35mm sensors won’t always be expensive..
Run Doggy Run!
Dog in Blarney
Blending RAW images
This Flickr: Technique discussion talks about blending two exposures to maximise highlights and shadows.
It’s a simple but very effective technique, and of course if you use RAW files then you’ll already have an advantage over Jpeg.
Santa compensated after jets scare Rudolph to death
I’m glad Santa was compensated but what does this mean for kids around the world on Christmas Day?
Will Prancer or Dancer take up the mantle of head deer now?
(Thanks Kate for the link!)
"Us" in Ireland
Ray D’Arcy who presents a show on Today FM wants everyone to take photos next Saturday! The photos will be collected and printed in a book titled, “Us” with all proceeds going to charity. The book will capture a snapshot of Irish society that day.
To submit your photos, email them to us @ todayfm.com on Saturday. Photos will not be accepted before that date but I think they will accept contributions afterwards because not everyone has access to a computer at the weekend.
They’re targeting the mobile phone brigade too, and I’m sure Vodafone, O2, Meteor and 3 and ringing their hands in glee at the prospect of so much gprs data being transmitted across their expensive networks!
One issue I haven’t heard mentioned is that of model release forms. A release form is required if a photo is to be published commercially (although news items differ I think?). I emailed them about an hour ago but it was near the end of the show. Hopefully they’ll respond tomorrow.
I’ll be out taking shots on Saturday around Cork City, and perhaps elsewhere. I’d love to have a photo published! 🙂
Later… looks like they ignored my email and text about model release forms. Hope they don’t get into trouble over that.