Sunday Times – stories and articles

From last week’s Sunday Times:

  • Sig Hansen – fisherman and skipper on the Berring Sea, one of the deadliest jobs in the world.
  • The pen is mightier – how a pen saved the astronauts of Apollo 11 on the Moon!
  • Sin cities – Britains’s inner city streets are awash with guns. Here’s the story how one minor incident ended up with the deaths of many and cost the police £5m to resolve.
  • American royalty – What was it like to grow up surrounded by the Kennedy family? Christopher Keddy Lawford tell us. Part 2 was published this week.

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!

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.