Buying a House in Ireland – It's mine!

And I’d be moving in except that the vendors want to varnish the floors in their new house first. My solicitor told me to go over there, get the keys, and change the locks.
I’m more conciliatory and I’ll give them 24 hours. After all the stress of the boundaries and everything.. *grr*
Later… My solicitor got in touch and put on the pressure. They moved out tonight and I’m in! I helped Ger and his father-in-law move stuff out and we finished around 8pm. His wife Liz doesn’t like me I think, but then she made my life hell over 3 broom sticks and a bit of twine.. Here starts another phase in my life!

Digital Prints – buy, buy, buy!

PhotographyBLOG reports that the growth of digital prints is accelerating at twice that of digital cameras. I’m not surprised really. So many more people have digital cameras these days that not all of them are computer geeks with huge collections of photos on their PCs. They want tangiable photos they can show their friends and family and don’t want to crowd around in front of a noisy, nasty computer.
When I eventually move into the new place (there’s always delays!) I’m going to get large format prints of some of my photos to hang around the house. Spectra Photo in town do 8″x6″ prints for 99¢. Anyone know a cheaper shop or site that supplies to the Irish market?

Misc Photo Stuff

Right, it’s late. Just back from another excellent gig and in need of sleep! Here’s what’s open in my browser tabs right now…

  • Photo of the Week on photo.net – amazing star trails and a dramatic foreground!
  • Practice Mutha, Practice – practice makes perfect!
  • I’m now listed on photoblogs.com
  • A review of Noise Ninja, and announcement of a free photo noise removal tool called Helicon. Neither has a native Linux version so I really need to get Wine working.

How to sort 16,000+ photos

If you work at Sports Illustrated and you’re covering a major sports event you’ll be very busy! This is a fascinating article showing a typical digital workflow in action! I thought I had a job to do with 350 photos but that’s peanuts compared to what these guys do!

Steve Fine is looking at two pictures every second. He’s been keeping up that pace, with frequent short interruptions, for over four hours, and he’ll keep it up for three more.

St. Patrick's Day Photos!

Here’s a few photos from the parade yesterday. I’m uploading more to an online gallery but that’ll take longer. I’ve narrowed down the images I want to display, but there’s still 88 of them there! That’s a lot of post processing in the GIMP to do! (Auto-colour correction, maybe crop, resize, unsharp-mask)
When the Chernobyl van and flat passed, the crowd cheered and clapped Adi Roche and the people on board! Not pictured here, but several members of the New York Fire Department were in the parade. As they passed, they were cheered and clapped as well which was great to see!

Post-processing: one-third of the job

It’s true. Taking a photograph is only one part of the final image. The rest is what you do afterwards, whether that’s in the dark room or on your computer. Andy Williams posted a couple of his photos, including the before and after shots. It’s amazing the difference that a few minutes in the GIMP will do to a photo! Then, you have to ask yourself, how much is too much?