Surreal Landscape
Just messing about – this was taken with an infra-red filter on the camera (mainly to increase the exposure time) and then I panned the tripod as the shutter was open.
Hawk
Taken at a display by ‘Animal Magic’ in Killaloe. They were there as part of the Brian Boru festival.
Blue and Green
Oh dear. Another blog post drought. This was taken at Brian Boru’s Fort, near Killaloe.
Killaloe Time-Lapse Video
Here is the video I was talking about the other day. Just a quick note on how it was done: I set my camera on a tripod on my balcony and set it to fully manual exposure(you don’t want the exposure suddenly changing in the middle of your movie) and fully manual focus (obviously enough you don’t want the focus to change half-way through either). I also used a small aperture and a ND Filter to give a long-ish shutter speed. A long shutter speed is preferable because you want a little bit of motion blur in your shots, so that they will blend together a bit when you combine them. Then I connected the camera to my laptop via USB, and using Nikon’s Camera Control Pro in timelapse mode, I set it to take one picture every ten seconds. I left it run until the battery in my camera died, and it took 1700 pictures.
When I had all the photos, I imported them into Lightroom, made some small adjustments, and synched all the photos up so that they looked the same. I then used a piece of software called VideoMach to put them all together, at thirty frames per second, which gives a smooth video. That’s about it!
Here’s the video:
Killaloe at Night
This is a combination of a load of one-minute shots taken from my balcony last week. As you can see there’s quite a lot going on. The reason it’s lots of dots rather than a continuous line is because I left a gap between each shot. The reason for this was because I was actually taking these shots to make into a time-lapse video, which is below the picture. I have another, much more impressive one of these to post but I’ll leave you in suspense because I only have a limited amount of stuff to post at the moment! If you’re really interested just check my youtube account…
Star Trails During the Day??
Just in case you were wondering, this is what happens if you take a long exposure at night, when there’s an extremely bright moon in the sky, and set your ISO to 1600. Of course, I did this just to show the readers of this blog what would happen if they did it, to save them some embarrasment. I never would be so stupid to do this accidentally myself, oh no…
Incidentally, somebody very kind out there nominated this incompetent old thicko’s blog for the Irish Blog Awards 2009, heaven knows why – out of some misguided notion of pity, perhaps 
But seriously, thanks a million to whoever nominated me, it’s much appreciated. As I’ve said elsewhere, the knowledge that one person likes my blog at least enough to bother sending in my name for nomination is extremely satisfying. It’s an honour to share the same page on an internet with what is an excellent list of photoblogs.
P.S: Expect lots of high-brow, well-thought out posts over the next few weeks, as I try to pander to the judging committee. It’s like Oscar season for blogs.
P.P.S: Actually scratch that, I’ve had a better idea. I’m going to rename the blog to reflect the new content emphasis.
What do you think of “Photos of Scantily-Clad Ladies and Ponderings”?