Category Archives: Photography

This is an amazing action shot of a horse race! Wow!As the author says, “A wide angle put to good use in difficult conditions.” I can only imagine!

Lots and lots of articles via Photography Blog this morning!

• B&W – Take great photos in black and white! Good examples, and I believe B&W photography lends a dramatic atmosphere to any scene!
• Bokeh in Pictures – I had never heard of Bokeh before. Here’s a good technical description of an interesting concept, Bokeh is simply a way to describe how out-of-focus points of light are rendered. It describes the appearance or “feel” of out-of-focus backgrounds and foregrounds.
• Film users! Don’t be afraid to use your computer to manipulate and fix you photos! All the tools you have in your darkroom are also there in Photohop, The GIMP and related software!
• Confessions of a Gear Junkie.. Heh. My own collection of junk hasn’t reached the stage this author has got to yet!
• Becoming a Photographer – take a course, practise, do you have what it takes? Hmm, I won’t be giving up the day job any time soon!
• LCD vs CRT – LCDs are getting better but CRTs still have the edge in image quality!

Later … There’s a new issue of the Digital Journalist out. Looks like some good editorial reading there. I wonder if they have any comments on the recent photos from Iraq.. Yes, here it is.

Mike Spinak has written several articles on photo.net. He’s linked from the main page and is about obtaining maximum sharpness in your pictures. Excellent stuff. Must read some of his older articles too!

You know those days when you really couldn’t be bothered? Go to work, work the day through, go home, have dinner, veg in front of the tv, go to bed, repeat ad naseum. Everyone goes through troughs in life and Mark’s going through one right now. Here’s his plan for beating the blues!

On a completely different note, this is disturbing. Sensiti was in central London taking photos and looking for insipiration. He started taking photos until 4 minutes later he was approached by a policeman and asked what he was doing. It seems that the CCTV people monitoring the city noticed him walking around with a camera and suspected he was taking photos of children.
What would I have said if I was stopped on St. Patrick’s Day? Besides the parade photos , I took at least 2 dozen photos of the crowd before and during the event! Several of those are of kids looking in wonder and delight at the parade or simply bored and hungry, hanging on to their parents necks.
It’s a sorry, scary, state of affairs. for parents and photographers alike.

What to do? I hardly ever take photos of kids but if I do, I try to make sure people see my approach with a camera. Unfortunately, as Mark points out in the first article, pointing your camera at someone is often one of the hardest things to do as a photographer. so I don’t take many photos of people!
Much later… Here’s another similar story about 2 photographers on the subway in New York! The train was stopped so they could be interrogated by the police!

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?

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.

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.

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!