Feckoff.net

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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Took this this evening - its my first attempt at HDR photography.

That’s St. Canice’s Cathedral in Kilkenny, shot from Michael St. across the river.
Click it for the flickr page with bigger sizes.

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I came across this handy thing on the boards.ie photography forum ages ago. It’s BigHugeLabs’ flickr DNA web app. It’ll tell you all sorts if interesting stuff about your flickr account - here’s mine.

If you scroll right down to the bottom there’s an ego surf section that you can use to find out where your flickr photos are being used around the web. All of my flickr stuff is tagged as creative commons so I’ve found a good bit of it around without anyone telling me. The most used of my pictures seem to be the ones I took of exotic cars in Germany, which is not surprising to me, as they tend to be my most viewed on flickr too, as well as a shot I took of an aircraft traffic jam in JFK airport back in February. Apparently there was a bit of outrage in the US over passengers getting stranded on planes for hours shortly after so it came up high in search results and got used in a bunch of articles as a result.

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Got back home from China (again) late last night. The 12 hour flight from Shanghai was fine except for the fact that I was stuck sitting beside the smelliest, most ingorant bollix I’ve ever had to endure that kind of time with in my life. I also had several hours to kill in the dump that is Heathrow terminal 1. I arrived in Shannon at around 9 last night. Got out to the long term car park at around 9.30 to find my car’s battery completely dead I really did not need that after being on the go for 24 hours between travelling and airport hanging about!
Fortunately the airport has a jump start service and they arrived after about 10 minutes and got me going.

Here’s a photo of Shanghai at night. I took this last Sunday night. Forgot to change the time on my camera so the EXIF data will have the GMT timestamp on it. I was very busy with work this time around and ended up taking bugger all photos.

Click it for the flickr page and larger sizes.
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Here are some photos I took in Shanghai on Friday, over on my flickr

A sample:

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Here are some photos I took as I strolled around Suzhou last night. All at ISO1600 (it was pretty dark) with my trusty cheap nifty fifty Nikkor lens.

Here’s a sample:

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I’ve just put in an order for one of these from one of my regular eBay sellers (this time not a Hong Konger). My camera bag has been lacking a proper wide angle lens since I got it. Should arrive next week
I’m going to bring it to China with me - hopefully I will have some free time to put it to good use.

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Pix.ie is a new Irish photo sharing site, much like flickr, but more generous. All accounts are free and you get 500MB per month worth of photos to upload. I’ve been trying it out over the last few days and I like it a lot. The people behind it are getting some feedback from users in this thread over at boards.ie.

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I went along to the practice session in Faugheen this afternoon with Finn. Took well over 200 photos, most of which were rubbish. I filtered out the better ones and uploaded them to Flickr. Check them out here. All of the photos are straight from the camera besides being cropped and/or resized for the web. The ones on flickr are available up to about 2000px wide/tall.

Here’s a sample:

Good craic
Unfortunately the rain started coming down heavily about half way through so they stopped the session to let everyone fit wet tyres. It got too wet to safely use my camera without worrying about damaging it by then.

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The pop-up flash on my Nikon D50 appears to have died. It pops up but won’t fire at all. I’m not happy.
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