Run!
The Cork Ladies Mini Marathon took place last Sunday and we were blessed with a beautiful sunny sky and a warm day!
I arrived just before the start with Matt and we struggled through the crowd to get to the front before the race started. I held my camera high trying to get crowd shots when my attention was caught by a young woman who asked me if I wanted to get some shots from upstairs! I followed her and another man into their office where they let me capture the crowd from high up!
What’s it like to have dozens of people cheering and waving at you? Look at the pictures below to find out! Personally, I was on a high and couldn’t believe my luck!
I forgot to get the names of the couple who helped me but one or both of them work for Oran Group whose office was where I shot from. Hopefully they’ll leave a comment here!
Later… Thanks Christine for letting me into the office!
Pictures from last year are also available. It was a lot more fun this year though!







I figured out a handy trick for making dodge/burns more natural. Blur the layer containing your burn/dodge work which will remove any distracting marks!
Maybe I should write a small tutorial on that one..
It’s not just your camera, it’s your technique.
The letters mentioned here point that out:
Never forget that all the great photographs in history were made with more primitive camera equipment than you currently own.

Someone posted a link to their first wedding job to the Canon EOS forum on dpreview.
The Wedding Photojournalist Assoc. was suggested later as a source of inspiration because those photos are so important to the client, they have to be perfect!


This is only one of many shots I took today. I’ll post more over the next few days including photos of the Mini Marathon too!
Later.. This image was selected as photo of the day at Digital Photography Blog!

Dcraw is an amazing open source app that decodes many RAW formats to a more usable format for computer manipulation. It’s used by many commercial programs including Google’s Picassa!
It outputs pnm files, but with a little command line magic it can be used to convert a directory of RAW files to Jpeg.
Canon cameras produce RAW files with the extension “.cr2” so:
for i in *.cr2; do dcraw -c -a -n -h $i | ppmtojpeg > `basename $i cr2`jpg; echo $i done; done
This produces low quality jpeg images alongside your RAW images which makes it useful when browsing the directory with a file manager that doesn’t understand RAW.
You could have the camera produce the low quality jpeg images but why sacrifice the space on your media card?
It goes without saying that this will work on any UNIX platform that Dcraw supports!