Eoghann Irving's Blog, page 7

Purple Wildflower

I’ve decided that I need to practice my macro photography more and flowers make an easy subject since they don’t run away from you. Don’t ask me what flower this is exactly, I haven’t the foggiest. It was pretty and conveniently located while I was walking around with my camera.

Since I don’t currently own a macro lens I’m re-purposing my telephoto zoom. This allows me to get some nice shallow depth of field, but does come with some challenges, not least having to kneel or stand a good distance away from your target. Normally flowers don’t require a fast shutter speed but if you’re dealing with a big zoom you need it to minimize shake.

In Lightroom I decided to emphasize the pastel elements of the photo so rather than darkening the edges of the image I lightened them. After that I dropped the Dehaze slider down just a smidge, reduced contrast and focused the sharpening on the petals of the flower, not the background. I find the resulting image to be pleasingly gentle.

Squirrel!

I was walking down the road in Harpers Ferry when I saw this little guy. Squirrels don’t like to stay still for long and they don’t like you getting to close so I was at the maximum end of my telephoto lens for this one (200mm on a Micro Fourth Thirds camera so 400mm adjusting for crop). A combination of it being the far end of the zoom and being a very overcast day left my shutter speed much lower than I would have liked and I didn’t quite nail the focus.

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So to compensate/hide this I scaled the photo down. It might not work in print but on a website I think I almost get away with it. Yes there’s a bit more grain than I’d like and not as much sharpness as I’d like but if you’re taking handheld shot from maximum range of a moving target and in poor lighting conditions you have to be willing to compromise a little I think.

In this case I’ll take the character of the image over perfect technical quality. I did do a little work on it in Lightroom though, mostly trying to tweak the sharpness a bit and to focus the eye more n the squirrel and less on other distracting elements. The major change I made was to go for a square crop. This helped to significantly increase the focus on the squirrel and to remove extraneous elements. Once again I’m using the rule of thirds, this time by having the squirrel’s eye right on the intersection of the bottom and left lines of the rule.

April 2020 Photos In Review

Just a few highlights from the photos that I took during April. I’ve been getting out and walking regularly as part of my effort to get a bit fitter and lose a fair amount of weight. I don’t take my camera on every single walk, but I do take it frequently because you never know what you may see.

Of course with the current Stay at Home orders in place my range of locations is very limited at times which can be frustrating, but I’m trying to see it as a challenge to my creativity.

At some point I’m going to have to develop some basic video editing skills but moving images have never really been my thing. The first thing I need to do is see what video editing options are out there (beyond the obvious but not cheap Adobe route) and which are suited to something simple like photo slideshows.

The White Tree

I took this shot on a recent morning walk around Harpers Ferry. Because of all the hills around the town the sun actually arrives considerably after official sun-up which is always interesting to factor in when trying to get the right sort of light.

I’ve taken variations on this shot many times before but this time I finally got the morning light hitting the bare tree that stands behind the old Virginius Island bridge. It’s something that only occurs for a fairly narrow window of time and only at specific parts of the year (winter and early spring basically).

[image error]Rule of Thirds in Action

Other than that it’s a pretty simple shot. The tree is the focus of the shot and lines up on the right third of the image while the bridge sits on the bottom third using the rule of thirds. Sunlight does most of the rest. Looking at it now I think it would have been good if I had aimed the camera just a little bit higher so the cross of the two thirds landed where the top of the stone wall of the bridge is. But that’s easy to say after the fact.

I did tweak things in Lightroom a bit to accentuate the effect. Nothing too strong, just tweaking the highlights and shadows to maximize visibility and putting a gentle circle fade on the image centered on the tree to increase the contrast of light to dark from the images edges to it’s focal point.

And for anyone who is wondering, yes the title is a Lord of the Rings reference…

Relaxation

Toothless may well be the most comfortable and relaxed cat I’ve ever met.  He just sprawls out anywhere in the house without a care in the world.

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November’s Photography

So I’m making a concentrated effort to get our regularly and take photos. I’m also trying to slow down and pick my shots, and I think I’d have to say it’s working. There are certainly occasions where I’ve taken more photos, but I don’t think there’s ever been a month where I’ve taken this many photos that I’m happy with.

I put together a little video of all my edited photos from November, see what you think:

Filed under: Photography

Less is More

One of the biggest changes I’m trying to make with my photography is adjusting my expectation of success. With the essentially unlimited storage of digital cameras I’ve always taken lots of photos. That isn’t going to change, but the number of those photos that I use is decreasing. If I can get 2-4 solid images out of a trip I’m going to be very happy, and I’m trying to look at even 1 as a success.

So if I’m only going to use a handful of images, why take so many photos? Two words… practice and experimentation. Expert photographers can perhaps visualize a shot and know what will work and why. I can’t, at least not yet. I need to try different angles, different heights. The more photos I take the more I learn. What I won’t be doing is wasting time trying to rescue the unsuccessful ones.

Which is what happened to me this morning.

I went out to try and get some photos of Christmas lights. The best time is not when it’s completely dark (as people assume) but the blue hour right before sunrise or right after sunset. At that time not only do you get awesome colors, but there’s some interest in the sky to go with the lights.

My problem in this case was location. I just couldn’t find the angles to make a composition work. Too many extraneous elements. Power lines where I didn’t want them; stop lights sneaking into frame; roads that stopped me positioning myself where I needed to be. The image in this blog is the only one that really spoke to me (and even it is not great).

One of the mistakes I made, and which I will rectify next time I go out shooting Christmas lights is that I only took my wide angle lens, not my telephoto lens. If I’d been able to go in much closer and focus on single elements rather than trying to grab the whole scene then I think I would have come away with stronger images.

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Filed under: Photography

Facts Are Not Convenient, They Just Are

We are so desperate to confirm what we though is in fact correct that we suspend critical thought. This is not a new feature of the human psyche but social media seems to have amplified it.

The “facts” we should question the most are the ones which confirm what we already believe.

Filed under: Musings

Fresh Start

I scrapped my website.

I’ve been paying for a server and hosting a eoghann.com with a WordPress blog on it for fifteen years. Before that I had another domain and a different site. At this point it’s just so much digital detritus.

I think I wrote a few good articles and posted some good photos but none of it really matters and it certainly doesn’t justify the money I was paying for the hosting every year. I made a local backup and briefly toyed with locally hosting it on my Ubuntu server, but… why bother?

There’s a lot to be said for a fresh start rather than lugging an ever growing weight behind you. There’s a notion that we should keep everything, archive everything but that presumes either that everything you do has value or that there is some way to identify the valuable. In the case of blog posts neither of those things are true.

The old blog is offline permanently and at some point I’ll redirect the domains here. What am I going to do with this new one? No idea, I’m sure I’ll think of something.

Memories

Sounds trigger memories in a way that words never can.

It’s the Summer of 1989 and I’m 17 years old. I tried to pin the timeframe down a little tighter, but I can’t. The memories all squish together. It’s just this one moment that stands out clearly.[image error]

I’m in the car because we’re driving from my parents house to Carradale on the West Coast of Scotland. It’s a trip that my family made at least once every year (and those who life in Scotland still make). We’d drive up there, rent a house and spend a week or so enjoying the countryside.

[image error] Back then of course the internet wasn’t a thing (invented but not accessible) but the place we usually stayed didn’t even have a television, which was a hardship even in that primitive age. The adults seemed unconcerned about this shocking absence, and the kids made do with games of Monopoly which seemed to run all week long.

Anyway, I’m in the car. It’s a long trip, not so much in distance as in time. If you’ve ever driven in the Scottish Highlands, you’ll understand. Five[image error] hours in a car is close to eternity for a teenager. But I came prepared! Inspired by the Batman movie (I can’t remember if this was before or after the movie’s release) my childhood interest in comic books has been renewed and I’ve purchased both the Batman Movie Adaptation and discovered Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, a revelation to me at that age.

So as the gorgeous Scottish scenery rolls past, largely unappreciated by me, I read my comics and I listen, courtesy of my Walkman (not actually a [image error]Walkman but an off-brand), to Del Amitri’s new album Waking Hours. The cassette, hands up if you remember those, only runs for around 45 minutes so I listen to it several times over before the trip is complete.

That’s it. Nothing unusual or particularly memorable happened on that drive. I’d taken the same trip many times previously. It’s not a momentous event in my life.

And yet, this morning I put in my headphones, pressed play on Google Music and Kiss This Thing Goodbye played. The memory came back as it does every time I hear that song. And I smiled, as I do every time.