Not that ho. The other ho. My hand to god.
My stunningly expensive 15 euro webcam turns out to be super-sensitive to infrared light. I popped an R72 infrared filter on the front and got some surprisingly clear and usable images/video.
I apologize for the quality of an image; I was trying to screencap the scene while holding an R72 lens filter over the front of the webcam, which in turn was wobbly. My next step is to look at the fun and creative things I can do with a webcam, beyond the webstream and time-lapse projects I blogged about on the other site.
Star trails and astronomy immediately come to mind.
Suggestions, please. :]
Well, only four minutes late in going up.
Huge thanks to one young Ms. Lernihan who stood transfixed by the waves.
Everyone else: I’m alive. Didn’t do anything stupid. Stop sending emails. :p
I’ll give a fuller writeup of today’s photowalk at Lahinch in the morning, but for now I’ll just sign off with a huge thank you to Aafke and Rory for their unbelievable assistance in getting to and from Galway City!
The Plots is a plain, open field wedged in between the bottom of the Dyke Road and the Waterside in Galway city. The only remarkable thing I can discover about the plot is that it has been open land for at least 160 years.
A blog is turning sour when the author starts spattering his posts with apologies for the lack of exciting content and new posts, but truth be told: We live and die on feedback. This whole site lives and dies on the feedback and interest of my readers. So far, aside from my very few regular commentators (Hey @picaaf! :) my posts are met with an echoing silence unless I fall short of your expectations. Then I get instant messages, emails and the occasional phone call about the lack of great shots.
Not fair.
If you like what you see and you want to see more of it, write a comment! Tell your friends! Show it off to your family and retweet, repost, email, smoke signal, pony express, shout, whisper, gossip about, mock or praise my links! Take the five seconds to bash off a quick “great photo!” This blog – this whole project – lives and dies on your whim. If you like it, support it!
Very, very unfortunately vision my vision outstripped reality. I had the exact shot in mind and a great setup, but come to stitching time the whole thing just fell disappointingly flat. But really, what are lazy Sunday’s for except try try trying again?
Earlier this week, I ran a very small contest on the Boards.ie photography forum to process two of my photographs, one of Galway’s Williamsgate Street and the second of Galway’s St. Nicholas’ church. I had some great responses on the thread in question, but the outright winner was Brian Healy, who won the voting by a clear margin.
To hear from the man himself about his method of and choices for processing:
I processed these in Adobe Photoshop CS4. I used the Silver Efex plugin from Nik Software to do the main conversion and then used curves adjustment layers with masking. I also did some dodging and burning on the church photo.
Silver efex is a specialist black and white conversion plugin, it allows for targeted adjustments of individual areas without the need for selections. You can also use different colour filters, toning etc. For these shots, I also used the ‘burn edges’ feature, which gives a vignette style effect, but you can use it on each edge of the photo individually. In the photo of the street corner, I used this on the left and right to draw attention to the centre of the photo. I used it on all sides of the church photo but more subtly.
The curves adjustment layers was just basic S-curves, and masked out in places where I thought it looked over contrasty.
I did some dodging and burning on the church, on a separate layer. I used a soft brush, about 5% opacity and adjusted down the opacity of the whole layer afterwards.
Finally, I sharpened the photos using Nik’s output sharpener. Again, this allows for selective sharpening without the need for complex selections.
To view some examples of my own photography, go to: www.brianhealyphotography.com
I have a range of prints for sale, and am also available for weddings, portraits, commercial photography etc.
I am currently based in Tipperary but am available nationwide.
