On the harbour wall

Kilmore Quay, Wexford Ireland. I had a need to use a polarizer on my lens earlier in the day when I took these shots. It was the first time and I liked what it did to images. So armed with this and the Sigma 10-20mm & the Sigma 24-70mm lenses I went to Kilmore Quay seeing as it was a fine morning.

The clouds were of a peculiar shape and looked like they were eminating from the Saltee Islands. It's not often that you get a quiet harbour either so I took full advantage with the image above.

There wasn't mich processing work to be done on this image but what was done can be seen on my site. I cloned out a couple of cars, leveled the image, added a little contrast and a strip of yellow colour overlay along the pier to give it a boost. Then I ran the Octave Sharpening that I keep harking on about. I masked out the boats so that they didn't look soo gaudy, and so it was.

Sunset in the Cull

Every 3 months or so there's a frenzy of activity within our local club and photographers with aspirations across the country. I speak of the RTE Weather Photo Competition. The summer event is just about to close for entries and the image above is what I've sent on. Does it look over done - yes, of course it does. What I've found is that the image is half covered by the presenter of the weather for the few seconds it's on and then there's a green band across the bottom of the image to show the presenters name. Something has to be strong to get by the initial selection process to survive being presented.

I first entered the competition for the spring of 2008. I was hugely surprised to come in 3rd runner up. I failed last summer but Autumn and Winter I reached the finalists selection with the Autumn image being presented throughout Christmas and was the first image of 2009. This spring I was again optimistic but failed...but my wife got her image in as a finalist. 

The image itself - this was taken in a place called Cull Bank near Kilmore Quay, Co. Wexford. It was almost an accidental shot as I was out in a hide to take some photographs of local wildlife but they failed to play ball. This, I spotted going home and thought of a good composition to show it with.

The image was taken from 1 exposure where I upped the exposure in lightroom in a virtual copy and blended both exposures in CS3. I boosted the saturation of the yellows and reds, and "fixed" the fence across the sun.  A run then of octave sharpening and masking for the edges of the fence and hey-presto. The original can be seen on my site, as ever.

On der fone

Duncannon Fort, Wexford, Ireland. On the June Bank Holiday in Duncannon many historical groups converge on the fort to present their depictions of history. Re-enactments, battles and displays of a military nature take place. It's a prime spot for presenting images which defy logic, such as the one above of a German officer with a mobile phone...yes, we know it's a modern day necessity but it does seem odd looking.

The processing was quite simple at this one. A slight rotation, an adaptive contrast layer and a mask on the face to bring up the detail again and then a B&W conversion in CS3. Then the Octave Sharpening that I referred to in an earlier post with the "flowers" masked out and the opacity changed to 75%. The original can be seen on my site.

As always contact me for any further info. Of course, there were other oddities too...such as 2000 years of history in the one image!