Category Archives: Photography

Isn’t this photo one of the cutest kitten pictures ever? Either that, or he’s preparing to jump and snatch at the hand of the photographer.. Yes, I know cats, they’re evil sometimes! *grin*

For the last few days I’ve noticed that the boat used by the workmen on Saturday was tied up in the middle of the river. This morning I stopped and took some photos of it, and played around with a few tools in the GIMP.
I’m sure I used them before, but the “Colour Enhance” tool and “Filter Pack” are very useful for adding a little more atmosphere and feeling to a photo.
The steeple reflected in the river is Holy Trinity Church on Father Mathew Quay. That church itself makes an imposing sight, especially when it’s lit up at night!

I uploaded the last photo above to photoSIG too although trying to attract the attention of visitors there is quite difficult as “boat on river” photos are two a penny there!
Forgot to say, I’m still very impressed by the Linux 2.6 kernel. I had 3 2560×1920 images open in the GIMP, and I had modified each several times so that the undo-buffer was filling up nicely. Under Linux 2.4 my machine would have been unusable, but Mozilla Firefox (with about a dozen tabs on 2 windows), Xchat and Thunderbird all remained responsive and none of them were swapped out! (The machine has 512MB of RAM, so Linux 2.6 doesn’t work miracles, it just handles resources much better!)

Amazing image of an emergency ejection from a low flying plane. Be warned that it’s a huge 3008×1960 pixel image and you probably don’t want to download it if you’re only using a modem!

My father’s finally in the market for a digital camera. After many years using a Pentax SLR he has seen the light and wants to take the plunge into the digital world!
He saw that the Nikon Coolpix 3100 was available from Argus at a knock down price of €320 or so. I have no idea how good that camera is so I fired up Google to find out. A review of the camera compared it unfavourably to the Canon PowerShot A70. A review of that camera looks very promising, especially for my dad, who’s used to the manual controls of an SLR. Dpreview also compare the Nikon to the Canon which was useful. Looks like the Canon has the edge on picture quality.
Unfortunately, the Canon A70 is priced at €500 in Argus! So much for the two cameras being similarly priced!
This morning I asked the guys on #linux for camera sites that ship to Ireland and the prices on technikdirekt.de, cam-ireland.com and even amazon.de are much better than high-street Irish prices. (Well, duh! Surprised? Nope!)
Here’s some more reviews of the Canon A70 for future reference from DCRP Review and Steve’s Digicams.

This is what you’ll see.. Click on the thumbnail for a larger image and description.
function display( img, text ){document.image.src=img;document.descriptionform.description.value=text}

           

Short but interesting article on taking portraits “on the street”. There’s a fine line between this and street photography. Is this photo I took in Chicago a Found Portrait?

APOD has an amazing picture and story today about a huge star that exploded 170,000 years ago. The gases produced are seen expanding out at huge velocities and temperatures!
Then there’s a picture of a solar eclipse on photosig. I’m jealous, because for some reason, *every* time there’s such an event over Ireland the sky is cloudy. Every single time. *grrr*

The photo.net photo of the week is a stunning one! Really unusual perspective, and the colours just jump out at you!
And while we’re on the subject of stunning photographs, here’s a beautiful image of a droplet reflecting the world around.