I’ve been a member of Palmerstown Camera Club since I joined in September 2017. They have a monthly photography competition split in to Novice, Intermediate and Advanced. Since I had been a member of Mullingar Camera Club for two years, I signed up as an intermediate level rather than novice.

Each month, there’s a theme. You submit a colour and a B&W print and then also a projected image which is always an open theme, though many people stick to the main theme anyway.

So far, I have won a place for one or more of my images in every competition. I started off with 3rd place for my projected image. My prints were grand but not up to scratch. They were existing prints from Mullingar.

In Round two, I also got a 3rd place position for my projected image. I didn’t expect a place for my prints as they were only “good” and again, not particularly interesting.

Round 3 had a theme of architecture and this one I took seriously. I came second in the projected and first in B&W Printed.

Round 4 was friendship but unfortunately I couldn’t enter as I had injured my knee and was on crutches. A pity but what can I do? There’s no way to hand in my prints if I’m off my feet and I had no way to get them printed either without getting someone else to do it all for me.

Round 5 was last night. The theme was Reflections and Silhouettes. I was looking forward to this one as I had a great colour reflection of Lake Matheson in New Zealand. It came 2nd and the judge said it was very close to coming 1st. I also took 2nd for my Projected Image of Hobbiton.

Overall, I’m happy with the direction my photography has taken over the last 6 months or so. I’ve also got a lot of compliments for some of my work on Instagram, in particular, the images I take with my phone. The camera on the Galaxy S8 is pretty good for a phone. In fact, the top middle image above of the train station was taken on my phone.

Feel free to follow me on Instagram and Flickr by the way.

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When I arrived, darkness had mostly fallen but it was still a little bright out. A long exposure pretty much looked like daylight with the moon looking like the sun. That wouldn’t do me much good so I walked to the Glendalough hotel to kill an hour or so. I had already eaten dinner a few hours before so I ordered a dessert and a coffee and over an hour later, I headed back to set up my camera.

It was now fully dark so I needed the light from my phone to guide myself. I used the light on my phone to paint light on the tree and rock wall while leaving the shutter open. I discovered pretty quickly that night photography is very difficult. For one thing, I can’t see anything through either the viewfinder or the LCD screen.

I had to use best judgement along with light from my phone. I also brought a laser pointer so I could try and manually focus on the red dot.

Focusing was still very difficult but I suspect I will get a lot better with more practice. What I did notice after looking at the images on a computer screen was I still got the timings wrong. She exposures were mostly 30 seconds with the odd 15 second exposure and even still, I can see some star trails. In case you aren’t familiar with what I mean, let me explain. The earth is not only moving through space, it’s also rotating and because of this, the stars appear to change position during the night. You’ve probably seen the extreme effect if looking at really long exposure where someone has aimed the middle of the camera on Polaris, the north star and all the stars trail around Polaris. Here’s a random example of what I mean.

For what I’m trying to do, there should be no star trails. All the stars should be perfect circles or dots. What I was hoping to capture of course is the milky way. Unfortunately, even though it was a crystal clear night, the moon was practically full so I’m missing a lot of stars.

I’m also partially let down by my equipment. My Canon 700D is a cropped sensor DSLR so will not be as good at light collection compared to a full frame camera. My best lens is my 17-55mm 2.8 throughout so I opened the aperture all the way but I would be better off with a 1.8 or even 1.4 wide angle lens.

After I had taken my fill of shots at Glendalough, I drove back towards Dublin. I had a shot in mind though. The Great Sugarloaf just off the N11 dominates the local skyline. I had decided to take a picture of it as I drove past it earlier but it was too bright. Now it was just perfect. I pulled in to the side of the road and set up my camera and waited for a car to come past so I could capture its lights as it drove past. Unfortunately I was now closer to civilisation so there were far lass stars visible.

The above shot is what I was actually trying to achieve however. This is the same shot where I’ve replaced my dull sky with a proper shot of the milky way from a royalty free website. I did that using photoshop but any image editing software can do the same thing. I’m not sure this particular shot is technically possible to do naturally due to the light pollution from Dublin but it’s certainly achievable with my equipment and a really dark sky. I did once see the milky way from Dun Laoghaire pier. That was in 2003 and I was astonished I could see it with my own eyes being right there in Dublin. I would say with urban sprawl, that’s no longer possible.

I hope to get out again for some night photography sometime soon. Unfortunately the best time to see the milky way in Ireland is during the summer where it stays bright until after 11pm and true darkness isn’t until well after midnight.

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I have been on Flickr for years but only in the last year have I really tried to make use of it for proper photography rather than just somewhere to store snaps. Their excellent free 1TB of storage is amazing although it doesn’t replace a good cloud drive for backups of RAW files as Flickr only stores JPEG files. If I can digress a moment, Mega offers a free 50GB. I signed up recently to store newer RAW files. Of course RAW files are massive so that 50GB is nearly half way gone already but it will do for now.

Last weekend, I headed to Lough Boora to take some photos. The weather was cold and overcast with sunny spells which made for some interesting cloud formations. I took over 100 images over the course of about three hours. I wanted to experiment again with long exposures using my ND1000 filter as well as just find some interesting scenes. I didn’t stray too far though due to time as I had to get back home to watch the Ireland vs Italy Rugby match at 2:30 so I stuck to the sculpture trail. This is where they have placed a number of pieces of art/sculptures around the place.

One of them is called the Sky Train. It’s an old train used for transporting peat and it has been raised up with a bit of an arc. I first saw images of this on Flickr and I wanted to try and get some good shots of it myself.

One of my images went nuts on Flickr. My phone battery practically died from all the notifications of people favouriting it. Ordinarily, I might get between zero and 5 favourites but this was insane. And it wasn’t just favourites either. There were comments and adding to galleries/groups.

This is the image that caused all of the fuss and for no real reason. I uploaded 4 images at the same time and added them to an album called Lough Boora. This is the one that people latched on to.

It has had about 4800 views with 280 faves and 15 comments. It also won a Monochrome Guru Award and was added to their group as well as a number of other groups that I’m not a member of. As far as I can tell, this image ended up in Flickr’s Explore pool and as a result was added to a closed group called In Explore which only shows images from Explore.

The image itself was taken with my ND1000 filter attached to my EF-S10-18mm lens at 10mm with an ISO of 100 and comprised of 5 shots at varying shutter speeds between 10 and 30 seconds. These RAW images were then processed in Digital Photo Professional (comes with Canon) and exported to TIFF. I then merged them with Photomatrix Pro to make it HDR and convert to B&W. I then saved the resulting image and brought it in to photoshop to adjust the levels to what I wanted. There’s some overexposed grass which I left. I did try darkening it but it took away from the image. I think the overexposed grass combines with the light behind the train to highlight and frame it so it works better. I cropped the image to take a signpost out of view.

The image has a slightly fuzzy, dreamy look known as the Orton Effect. I like the image so I ordered it on a large canvas. Hopefully it comes out well.

This one is called System 30, a long metal sculpture like a serpent. This particular crop looks like a pair of headphones. In fact if you click here, you will see the same image rotated clockwise so it’s a sideways view of the river but it shows the headphones better.

This is the same train from the other side and in colour. The process was similar to the first one except in colour and there were only three exposures. This time the camera was facing the sun so there’s a massive patch of overexposed sky unfortunately. The image at the top showing my camera in front of the train was taken during one of the exposures. The only alteration to the scene was during one of the exposures, a pair of cyclists had appeared and they took pictures of each other in front of the train. this resulted in a blurry ghost on the left hand side. I used photoshop to remove it.

These triangles in descending size are pretty interesting but I didn’t get any interesting shots I’m afraid. This is the best of the lot so I uploaded it.

There are swans in the lakes and I was hoping to catch them taking off or landing. Alas I didn’t capture it but I could hear the feckers. If I was at one lake, I could hear them flapping their great wings and slapping the water with their feet at the other lake. I think they were teasing me. I took a load of swan photos but this one was the most interesting as a droplet of water was falling from his mouth.

My catalogue of images is expanding and candidates for my L panel are starting to appear. At least I had one day where I was winning at Flickr though. It was a nice feeling.

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Over the weekend just gone, I went to Howth on Saturday and then the lakes around Mullingar on Sunday.

The first set of images are from Lough Owel just past Mullingar on the N4. There’s a car park and you can walk down to the water where you will find a pier and diving platform.

The water was crystal clear and Lough Owel is rather deep so it’s the perfect lake for swimming in during the summer. Back when I was scuba diving, my group often went there in the winter when visibility in the sea was too bad.

You can see what the polariser does with clouds in this image. It was a very bright day and even at about 4:30 in the afternoon, it was still pretty bright in between the clouds blocking out light.

The real reason I was here was to try out my ND1000 filter. I had my new tripod with me and took a a long exposure shot. It took a few goes to get the right exposure. This one was a 10 second exposure at f22 and ISO 100. Without that ND1000 filter, this image would have been pure white. The result is rather interesting because it actually looks like a lake of ice. You can see the clouds are blurred with movement also.

After I was done taking photos on the platform, I moved away and a couple went down to explore. I noticed a massive, long tube like rain cloud and thought it was a pretty dramatic contrast so I took a picture of them on the diving platform.

Before I left, I noticed a sailboat heading towards the diving platform so I started taking pictures and caught this. The sun was straight in front of me which washed out the image somewhat but the polariser saved the image somewhat and I think it works pretty well.

This was my first visit to Lough Owel actually. I’ll have to explore it a little more. Time was against me. I wanted to get to Lough Ennell for sunset.

Lough Ennell is the lake that’s closer to where I live. I went to the spot I normally go to because there are always swans around and I wanted to take some pictures of them. I took plenty of photos of the swans but to be honest, the flock of little gulls were more interesting as well as proving some much needed practice at photographic birds in flight. I liked this image in particular because it shows three gulls in formation with varying wing positions. The middle one is the one I focused on.

As the light was failing, I decided to try the opposite side of the lake at Lilliput. I had never been there but I figured it was worth a shot.

On the whole, it wasn’t as interesting as I had hoped but as the sunset began, I noticed how the calm waters reflected the tyres so I took a few images and this seemed the best one to me. There’s a swan in the top right but it’s not really adding to anything. If the swan had been closer to the tyres, perhaps stretching its wings, the shot might have been better but for now, the colours are nice.

There was an interesting moon visible too so I took a quick photo with my 250mm lens. I thought nothing of it at first but when I was going through the images on Monday, I noticed that I could zoom in and see some pretty good definition.

I converted it to black and white and adjusted the gamma slider and highlights until I ended up with a rather decent looking attempt at a moon photo. I was pretty happy with it as it was a spur of the moment shot without even bothering with my tripod.

The day before, I was in Howth. There are usually seals in the harbour and they didn’t disappoint. I have lots of photos seals but none are particularly interesting. The birds were a little more interesting though so I took a few shots. The one above is a Starling that was perched on a railing. It’s really a practice shot but the colours were nice.

Next up was a Herring Gull. To some people they are a menace but they are grand. I love their eyes and this fat gull was standing on the ground near a bench where people were eating crisps so it was placid enough to take a photo of without flying away.

I took a load of pictures of Ireland’s Eye in the distance but they were crap I’m afraid. I’ll have to try and visit the island some day.

I am going for my L panel (licentiate) in May so I have only a few short months to take some interesting photos worthy of a panel and get them printed and mounted. I’m not sure if any of the photos I have taken in the past will be included yet.

This weekend, weather permitting, I’m hoping to visit Lough Boora in Offaly for the first time. It’s a drained bog and these days is a park full of wildlife and art installations. I have seen some amazing photographs taken there so I’m hoping I can get something decent.

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