New Images

Just recently I spent some time looking round the Pontoon area and in particular around lough Conn here in Mayo for potential images. Though an early morning start did yield some useful images this colour image was taken in the middle of the day. Contrary to summer, at this time of year the light can be good enough for worthwhile landscape photographs throughout daylight hours. The colour photo above was taken around noon on a very calm day which made it perfect for reflections. The hill is Nephin and this and its reflection were my subject that i constructed the image around. Though it is said rules are there to be broken, I would hasten to add that using some will always yield a better image than not using any. One of these with landscape photography and a subject like this is to use a wide-angle lens and find some foreground interest, in this case the small shrubs and rocks. If possible fill the frame with interest and arrange items so that the vieweres eye is led on a journey to your main subject. Here the eye travels from the foreground along the curve to the right and on to the distant hill and reflection. It is a composition that aesthetically pleases, nothing jars on the eye.
The other image was taken in the evening with the sun low near Mulranny, a lovely south facing village in County Mayo that has varied scenery from sea and sand, to estuary, hill and village. What this means is that a photographer's time is never wasted here. On this particular evening the low sun and backlit sheep were what attracted me. It was all about the light and I always feel these images work best in black and white which allows the viewer to appreciate the strong contrast without the distractions of colour. The main consideration was to prevent flare from ruining the image. A lenshood was used and this allowed just enough flare to complement the dramatic nature of the light without compromising the image.
Take care and happy shooting!

Winter landscapes

This winter I looked forward with eager anticipation to capturing some images of my local mountains, the Corraun hills, on film/file. As I can literally take the shots from my own front door, which is exactly where these two images were taken from, this was never going to prove too difficult. All I had to do was wait for a decent fall and point my lens east to the Irish mainland (I live on an island) over Achill Sound, make a reasonably pleasing, dramatic composition, and SHOOT! Here are the results which, I am quite pleased with.
One has to be careful that snowy landscapes do not end up seriously underexposed. This is easily acieved with todays modern digital cameras which tend to do it all for you. In the old days with conventional film we would have to take a reading off 'middle grey' which meters were calibrated for - a 'grey card' was used if you were really serious which you carried with you as an essential part of your kit. Nowadays, so much can be corrected at the editing stage in a digital darkroom, including brightness, contrast, colour saturation, hue, among many other things.
So, here are my images after a heavy snowfall, taken with the 300mm telephoto end of a zoom lens and tweaked just a little in my 'darkroom'. I hope you like them.