We called into Murphy’s Ice Cream in Dingle this morning. I bought a chocolate and mint ice cream mix. If you’re in the town you really should call in for a scoop or two! Yum!
The business is run by brothers Sean and Kieran who I had hoped would be there but unfortunately they were out. They blog at Ice Cream Ireland and both have twitter accounts: Sean, Kieran
Oh wow! We really have a beautiful country here in Ireland! We are just back from a week in the town of Dingle, Co. Kerry (or An Daingean as it’s officially known, why can’t they have both English and Irish names on the signs? It’s silly. Locals stencilled “Dingle” on many of the signs anyway!) and it was both amazing and refreshing. 7 days without Internet access. Could you survive? I admit I was tempted by the local net cafe but I resisted and we wandered the roads and explored the beaches of that rugged coastline instead.
Weather is always a concern in Ireland and it rained and it poured and gales blew for the first 2 days of our stay. Thankfully that completely changed for most of the remainder of the week and the blue skies were filled with white fluffy clouds casting shadows on the distant mountains. Breathtaking.
Bringing a 23 week old baby away on holiday does present it’s own difficulties but Adam enjoyed himself and made a huge impression on everyone he met. He was generally well behaved while out, and I have to thank the kind staff of the Old Smokehouse Restaurant for their patience as we made 2 trips there with him. On the other hand, the grumpy floor manager of the “Happy Garden Palace” up the street didn’t live up to his establishment’s name. Nice Kung Po though.
Photos will appear in time but tomorrow we’re going to head down to Kinsale for a look at Haydn’s Kinsale Gallery where some of my work is on display. Adam’s been down there already and now it remains to be seen whether any of the pieces attracts a buyer or not. Thanks Damien for mentioning the gallery too!
In other news, WordPress 2.3 came out and I need to upgrade my blogs. WordPress MU will need to be synced with the new release but it will also need a separate upgrader. Upgrading one blog and adding 3 tables is simple, but when you need to do tens of thousands (or millions) of them, you don’t want all of them doing it at the same time or your database server will melt.
Oh, and not one person mentioned the All Ireland. 🙂
Update on Sunday: Jacinta and I visited the gallery today and we’re impressed! Haydn’s son was taking care of the shop and I noticed a number of the larger prints had sold a couple of copies. Two of my images are visible behind the door if you look carefully at the second image: Innovative Streets and Rusted and Abandoned.
Random thoughts that have occurred to me this Sunday evening after spending the weekend in Killarney, Co. Kerry in the south-west of Ireland.
An Fear Marbh lies in the distance as seen from Baile na nGall.
Here are a few shots from around Cork and Kerry which I have stitched together using Autostitch.
Click on any image for a larger version although the larger images have been saved at low quality setting to save on file space and bandwidth.
Cork City
Baile Na nGall
Field Near Youghal
We went down to Killarney this afternoon, and while there visited Torc Waterfall. It’s a beautiful location, the walk up to it is through a tree covered path surrounded by green-mossy rock and vegetation. I snapped a few shots up there so imagine my surprise when I saw that someone had posted a photo of the falls on Photosig a few minutes ago!
It’s unlike any of the ones I took, and it’s nice for me to see a different perspective on a beautiful scene!
The picture above is a panorama made up of 3 hand-held shots taken in Sneem, Co. Kerry.
Stitching them together in the GIMP was fairly easy – adjust colours and brightness, line them up using semi-transparent layers and then use a layer mask and a gradient to make the joins mostly invisible. The tree branches were a bother though – I had to clone out some of them!
I really should document some of this stuff as this was a good example – because of the sunset each photo had very different light qualities and it was important to fine tune and match those colours.
This is the Parish Church in the village of Sneem. Outside were several pyramids built by James Scanlon in 1987. Nearby is a statue of Isis and a plague underneath saying:
A GIFT FROM THE PEOPLE OF EGYPT
“ISIS”
TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND
—
PRESENTED BY THE AMBASSADOR OF EGYPT
H.E. HUSSEIN MESHARAFA
10TH JULY, 1993
Where were you today? I spent the day in Sneem, Co. Kerry and took several photos of this picturesque village and surrounding area. Very cold today but worth the visit just to get out and away from the world for a short while!
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