Feckoff.net

We got a lot of lightning here over the summer, but its been quiet recently. Until tonight.

Well, I got back from Vegas on Monday night. Great weekend, but I am utterly shattered after it. You can check out some photos here.
Here’s a sample:

I didn’t lose too much money gambling either – mainly because I stayed at the cheap tables in places like Hooters rather than the expensive ones in my own hotel, the MGM Grand. Also, Vegas has a serious lack of free wifi – the only place I found any was at the airport. Hotels on the strip charge extra for it!
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I’m still in America, and this weekend just past was their Labor Day holiday, which meant a 3-day weekend for me. I ended up going on a nice road trip with a few other Irish ex-pats here, it was fantastic. We went from Clovis to Ruidoso, where we stopped off for some food and watched a few horse races. After a couple of hours there we went on to the White Sands National Monument (and, er, missile range). This is the single most surreal place I have ever seen in my life. The white sand in question is not actually sand, but fine gypsum powder. It is unique to New Mexico. Here’s a photo:

And another for good measure:

We then spent the night in Las Cruces, New Mexico where some drinking was done. The following morning we continued south to El Paso, Texas, which is right on the Mexican border. From there we stopped by Fort Hancock, Texas – the place where Andy Dufresne sent his postcard back to prison before crossing the border after he escaped in The Shawshank Redemption. Despite not crossing the border, we got stopped by the US Border Patrol about 20 miles north of the border as we were heading back towards New Mexico. If we hadn’t got our passports with us that would have resulted in hours of waiting around while they verified that we are allowed to be in the country.

A few hours later we arrived in Carlsbad, New Mexico, but by then it was too late to go into the famous caverns. We did get to watch about half a million Mexican free-tailed bats exiting the cave for the evening though, which was pretty spectacular. We spent the night in Carlsbad and returned to the Caverns in the morning. It took a few hours to tour the caverns but was well worth it. The caverns are both a US national park and a UNESCO world heritage site.

Next stop was the Bottomless Lakes state park outside Roswell. Another beautiful spot, and the closest thing to the seaside you’ll find in landlocked New Mexico.

After that it was finally time to head home, after 3 days and approximately 850 miles. Good times! Lots more pictures on flickr.

Got home from Chicago yesterday morning and tried to stay awake to combat the jet lag. I failed later in the day and slept for 12 hours last night! Anyway, had a good time and took tons of photos, which you can see here. Here’s a couple of samples.

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I’ve uploaded a new set of photos of lots of classic motors from today’s Durrow Vintage Rally to my flickr.

Here’s a couple of examples:

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As mentioned on twitter yesterday…

More of this kind of thing on flickr.

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Spent some time messing about with the D90’s video mode some more last night. Here’s the result. I would embed it here, except that Vimeo disables hi-def when you embed. I didn’t bother uploading it to flickr since they seem to compress the crap out of video. Also, all that muck you can see is on the car, not the lens

(Sigma 10-20 @ 20mm, f/8)

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I used my spanky new D90 to capture this clip this morning:

Crazy bastards.
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I went to the practice session for tomorrow’s Faugheen 50 road races this afternoon. They were very fortunate with the good weather – I got sunburned, which is quite rare in this part of the world! Last year it rained pretty much non-stop.
Anyways, I brought my camera with me and took several hundred photos. As usual, most of them were horrendous, out of focus messes. I picked 20 of the better ones and stuck them up on flickr.

Here’s a sample:

Click it for full size.

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I took a drive down to Mahon Falls in Waterford today. Its a natural beauty spot in the Comeragh Mountains, easily accessible by road from Dungarvan or Carrick on Suir. It was beautifully sunny on the way down but once I got up into the mountains the clouds became very low and dark very fast.

I’ve put a few photos on Flickr here (took ages to upload a mere 20 or so MB, I need faster upload speed). I had another go at HDR although this time from only a single exposure. I used Nikon’s RAW software to generate JPEGs with 7 different exposure levels from the one RAW file (.NEF in Nikon land) and then fed those into Photomatix and fiddled about with it to get the following.

Straight from camera:

HDR’d up the ass:

Click the photos for the flickr page with full size versions available.

In the past I would never do anything more than cropping or rotating a bit to fix lopsided shots but I think this photo really benefited from the tone mapping shenanigans of Photomatix. Which do you prefer?

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