Tag Archives: Photos

Wasps In My Composter!

Ah no! There’s wasps in my composter! Over the last few days there’s been an onslaught of small flies and flying ants! The local bird sanctuary is positively teeming with the little things that bite and buzz around your head! argh! “Kill Them All!”
Yesterday morning I noticed an unusual number of small insects around the garden composter, but didn’t pay it much heed as I was still recovering from the late night in Waterford on Friday.
This morning I got the zoom lens out to see exactly what they were and I wasn’t pleased.

According to this page it is possible to get rid of them: dose the heap in water until they leave. I think I’ll postpone doing that until the temperature drops. It’s expected to reach 26 degrees today and those wasps will be at their most active!

Later… it gets worse! *gulp* It’s scary having that many stinging insects in one’s garden!

Much later… after much discussion on , those insects are probably bees and not wasps. I still don’t want to get close to them, but they haven’t made an appearance yet today so maybe they’ve moved on.


Luckily, there are plenty of predators feeding on the insects ..

Seagull

First of the RAW images I took over the weekend at Sherkin Island. Forgive the grain, this was shot at ISO 400 under difficult light and the gull was flying directly outside our hotel room!

So far I’ve imported a few photos into the GIMP using UFraw and to be honest I don’t think shooting in RAW made much difference. I’ll reserve final judgement until later when I’ve had more experience with converting.
I ran into the same trouble I had before with corrupted shots. Looks like one of my CF cards is fscked. I’ll write to 7dayshop where I bought the cards, whatever good that’ll do me.

Running fsck.vfat returned lots of errors about clusters. I formatted and I’m running a test for bad clusters now. It didn’t find anything but I’ll run some more tests over the next few days. Meanwhile, here’s some more info on compact flash break-downs to digest.

I copied about 900MB of data back and forth to the CF card without a hitch. It might be a camera problem? They’re Viking Interworks 1GB cards. Anyway, I found two places, here and here that have reasonably priced cards.

Naval Ships in Cork Harbour

Today myself, Ryan and AJ went down to see the various naval vessels docked in Cork Harbour.
Ryan has already posted some great photos and here’s some of mine here. The URL will change but I’ll update this post when it does!
I had a great time, the Germans got a great kick out of seeing a crazy photographer lying down on the quay taking snapshots of a coiled rope, but they did pose for a photo afterwards! It’s a pity my camera crashed minutes later and several of my shots were ruined 🙁

Sit-in at city shop

I went into town this morning and came across this group of protestors on Princes Street. I didn’t know it at the time, but they were employees of O’Donovans Butchers, a 105 year old company with a premises on the street. They had all been let go the previous day. The Evening Echo has more on their front page.
The workers were protesting because they were laid off almost a week early with very little compensation despite many years of service in some cases.

Evening Echo

photoSIG – Torc Waterfall

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!

Horse

Today I took delivery of a new Canon 75-300 IS USM lens. It’s a nice zoom lens, although seemingly slated by everyone who has used more expensive lenses. That seems to be par for the course – the lenses I can afford aren’t up to much apparently.
On the way home I took a few photos of horses in a nearby field. Here’s one I liked..
Here’s a 100% crop fron the photo below. The shot out of the camera is a little soft but hover over the photo to see what effect a simple unsharp mask does for the sharpness of the image.

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