Hyah!
Mountains Gandalf!
Views from my eyes on a trip around the world.
Ireland is my world
Who needs somewhere else.
It’s hard to not feel like I was being rewarded after my super depressing post a while back.
But it’s all chance.
It happened to be sunny.
Lets give it four hours, it’ll probably be icey.
Shannon to Sligo, doable, need to reach Shannon first.
I do and stay up too late chatting about LUE.
0500 ding ding, up you get sunshine.
Weetabix: check Sultanas: check Soya milk: check.
Ice was forecast, but there is only a light dusting, no need for water, just get in and go.
The county councils seem to have learned from their mistakes as there is a new an abundance of grit dirtying my recently washed car. But at least I can drive at the limit now.
I fly along the motorway trusting that other cars will have their fog lights on. I always regret my driving afterwards, but in the moment getting to the surf supersedes anything else. It is a stupid choice to drive this fast.
My back and neck begin to ache and I’m getting a headache. I realise I’m sitting hunched right up over the steering wheel. The combination of concentrating on the small distance my lights give and the oppressive fog pushing down on top of me is wearing me out. I feel claustrophobic, as if the fog is physically pushing me down into crouch.
There is no let up. I get to Tuam and decide I can take a break. Half an hour power nap will relax me a bit and give the fog time to clear a bit.
I hit the road again with a bit more brightness. I don’t know if this is better or worse. No there’s a few idiots who think because it’s past 7am they don’t need the lights. One car happily flashes me back when I try to get his attention. But as I continue the fog starts to lift a bit.
I begin to get horrible flashbacks to my last adventure in fog.
I arrive in Enniscrone too early despite my mid-trip nap. It’s still foggy.
Freezing Foggy.
I meet up with Cain, we chill for a while talking about what to do. The wave I came up to shoot won’t be working for another few hours so we cruise the coast looking for something to keep us occupied.
We find a little bay with a few waves coming through. There’s a bit of slab around the corner but tide is already too high for it, although it’s hard to resist the barrels I can just glimpse over a ridge of grass.
No point jumping in the water, much more likely to get shots from land despite the distance.
I start wandering looking for interesting angles. Land shooting is bloody boring but you make up by being able to move around to get different angles and actually compose shots properly.
And you have more options of things to shoot during the lulls.
My battery is almost dead now. I regret not arranging some signal with Cain before hand. He stays in picking off the best ones, always trying something interesting.
Eventually he comes in and we head back to the house to refuel ourselves and our electronics.
By the time we get all our stuff together it’s time to head over to the main event.
We arrive to a seething cauldron of white water.
Yeah Cain I think I’ll just shoot land here as well.
Ferg, Shane and Dyl are there as well and don’t waste time suiting and booting and entering the fray.
Dodging bombs is the order of the day, Shane nabs one followed by Dylan.
Ferg sits patiently out the back, waiting for something none of us can see.
It comes and he strokes in on the absolute wrong side of the peak. His knowledge becomes apparent as he sits tight letting the lip fold right over him, embracing and enclosing him. Fergal doesn’t seem to mind he had his line set before the wave even appeared on the horizon.
Cain is surfing a board much too big for the conditions and pays for it a number of times before he finally cranks hard off the bottom and tickles the face with his right hand. Braking just enough to get hosed by the spit then exit moments later to the hoots of all.
Do what you’re supposed to.
Seamus “Airdrop” McGoldrick
Damo Conway. Having Fun.
Still not completely happy with the workflow.
I definitely prefer the sliders in PS to messing with a curve, maybe I just need more experience.
Ok So I’ve Ubuntu running for nearly a week now, and I’m getting used to my new tools.
I only managed to get Picasa working this morning as there is a bug in the 2.7 version which nobody seems to be trying to fix since the 3.0 Beta version works fine apparently, so at the moment I’m letting build it’s library of shots.
I also installed digiKam and UFraw while trying to get Picasa 2.7 to work. digiKam seems to be a more advanced version of picasa, with more editing options available. Although right now I’m not too gone on the digiKam interface I’m sure I could get used to it soon. One thing I dislike is that it takes a little bit longer to get to the editing than it does with Picasa where the editing tools pop up as soon as you view the big version of the photo, but it’s only one extra click so not the end of the world. Also in digiKam you have to hit update after making any changes to a RAW file to see the how the change affected the photo, this increases editing time and is a lot more annoying than watching the changes as you play with the sliders.
UFraw works a lot more like Photoshop, you pick one photo to edit at a time and you have a lot more control. Bonus points for actually showing the changes as they occur, even if there is a slight lag. There seems to be a good amount of room to play in UFraw and it’ll probably give me all the stuff I need to edit RAW shots in a way I’m happy with. One thing that got me was the lack of a straighten tool (which was very easy to use in PS), if it is there it wasn’t completely obvious (although I didn’t look that hard). Which meant I had to open the new jpeg in digiKam to straighten, as well as resize and add the watermark. Which I used to do in picasa anyway, so not a huge problem.
Below are
1. An unedited RAW to jpeg conversion.
2. A RAW edited using digiKam.
3. A RAW edited using UFraw and then digiKam.
Thoughts, comments and ideas welcome.
Ollie “The Fla” O’Flaherty stalling hard for the pit man.
Get your Buzz on.
What is fairness?
Something we think we deserve because we’re good people?
Who cares? Who decides? There is no fairness.
You try to be a good person, because if you treat everyone fairly well then you’ll receive the same in return, right?
Bullshit.
I’m sick of it.
And whatever about people you can forget about fairness from anywhere else.
Last 15 surf trips been skunks?
So what, so is this one.
This time all out hard work will pay off. Oh wait, there’s nobody keeping score about how diligent you are, the last time you got something worthwhile.
Waves? Sure here’s a perfect looking swell.
Photos? Hah you’re joking right? Here’s a fog so thick you can’t even see the waves from beach.
Dream on sunny-jim.
Ok, ok. Here’s some sunshine at a shite beach break and reef that isn’t breaking properly.
Good luck to you.
I’m sick of it.
There is no fairness.
From A Day in 2007.
Man I kept some awful shots back then.
Hugh Galloway has done a heck of a lot of good surfing this year. Here’s my entry for him for etnies you-tube thingy.
Here he is last January willing the cold away. It was better than it looks.
I literally only went to a handful of gigs, which is disappointing. Hopefully the 7D will inspire me to head into a few more. February brought Conor O’Brien from Villagers, new album due out some time in the new year. Keep an eye out.
I did manage to shoot a fair bit of non surf stuff which is good. I want to expand, getting stale and content never improved anybody.
Stacked logs in March.
Of course there was some cracking surf as well. I reckon 70% of my sessions this year were at everyones favourite death slab. I wish it wasn’t so damn photogenic, I kinda want to shoot other waves as well. Thing is all though, everyone ends up there if it’s any good.
Tom Gillespie in April.
Oh how I want a ski (and a helicopter, but more on that another time), managed to grab a lift on a ski in May by complete chance. What a session. Dan Skajarowski on a monster.
Unfortunately Liam Joyce had to head back to NZ for a while, but hopefully everything will work out and he’ll back over to us again.
Sneaky solo session in June.
I used to drive past this host almost everyday. I’ve always thought it has the best looking garden. I always get the urge to run around in the grass.
July ly ly ly ly ly ly ly.
Photogenic chap is Tom Gillespie, in and out of the water.
August parties, not for the faint hearted.
You don’t always have to look seaward. Sometimes it’s even better looking if you turn around.
Explorations in September.
Honestly it is Ireland. Really. Weird that water can bend and hold it’s shape like that.
October Coral.
Cold, short, dark days. There was waves, but I went surfing.
Pete Fleming on the lookout in November.
Cold? Did I say November was cold? That was a joke right?
Dawn breaks in December.
