Dublin

I just got back from two great days in Dublin training with my friend David Newton for Canon Ireland, we covered both HD Video on the first day and flash photography and digital retouch on the second.

As I was delivering the retouch bit I had to grab a few snaps before presenting, I quickly nipped down to the gift shop to get some humorous props - an apple and a tiny squeezable "stress pint" - despite the stupidity of the subject matter the model did a great job and I got a few images I was happy with - lighting tuition from Dave here - one speedlight through a brolley from the top left.

Colour










































Black and White










































Candid!

Few Scottish Black and Whites

I'm in Dublin at the moment doing some work with Canon Ireland and Adobe but before I nip out for a Guinness I thought I would drop a few more black and whites from Silver FX Pro, Scotland has some really breathtaking landscape and I can't wait to visit again next month..

Riga

Last weekend I was in Riga in Latvia, the city has some of the most beautiful architecture, I have only had a tiny amount of time to process the pictures but I have a few to share now:

Black and White

I have been unable to blog the last few weeks owing to an intense work schedule including the UK iPad sales training and the Adobe CS5 tour - both encompassed a ridiculous travel schedule and very little time to take any pictures..

Before I post the best of the lot I will share a few black and whites that have been sitting in my photo library.

These are a few of my recent black and whites, the first two from Ko Phi Phi in Thailand and one from Jumala in Latvia, all processed from colour RAW's in Silver FX Pro from Nik software - a truly incredible plugin suite that has consistently given me great black and white images with its flexible tools. I added digital ND gradients to the top Thailand image and the Latvian photo and used a combination of control point masking and photoshop levels to get the crisp rocks in the second picture.

Mental Ward Wasteland

As a contrast to my previous post on French chandeliers I enclose another perspective on architecture with a second example of an abandoned building, although more than adequately captured by my friend Adam on his own blog I wanted to share my own images.

The asylum was housed in a hospital district of Northampton surrounded by functioning medical buildings, its odd to see something so obviously decaying amidst staff and facilities going about business as usual. There were vague signs of renovation in the main building (as seen in the first image) but the grounds and external reception buildings were a complete mess, signs hanging off the wall and floors full of holes.

I also had a peculiar and unexpected experience when exploring the site, knife wielding teenagers..

When leaving the main block building to explore the reception area I walked around the corner and nearly collided with a 12-14 year old boy running towards me with a 7 inch kitchen knife in his right hand. Upon seeing me his reaction was to look very surprised and run in the opposite direction yelling to some unseen others. I guess this sort of things is a bit of a hazard when walking the untrodden path but it was still quite bizarre, I later saw a group of kids when leaving the site but declined taking any pictures of them - my reasoning being its very hard to predict the behaviour of people who are afraid of being caught in a place they shouldn't be, even more so when they are carrying weapons.

French Decadence

I recently dug out some old pictures from my last trip to Paris in September - large interiors are tricky to capture even with a wide or super-wide angle lens especially on cropped sensor cameras - These first two are photo-stitched interior panoramic images made of a few shots to get all the lavish details. All the stitching done in the new Photoshop CS5 and the edges cleaned up with the new 'content aware fill' tool - very useful if you want to extend the edges of even complicated architecture!

















I took a liking to the chandeliers for some reason..

Moscow Ice Fishing

I have (finally) gotten around to looking at my pictures from my last Moscow trip in April.

I stayed, for a portion of my time in Moscow, in a flat in the south of the city. A more lower-income area than the west-side I usually stay in, the south of Moscow shows more evidence of poverty with homeless people collecting in corners of tube stations and sleeping in the street in the middle of the day.

A peculiar activity I came across was ice-fishing in the local pond, a rather strict, utilitarian affair surrounded by a highway and blocks of flats. Apparently people will spend all day fishing through holes cut in the ice despite the obvious danger!

These pictures were taken at the end of April with the ice starting to melt making this activity all the more risky.