Thomas Fitzgerald Photoblog

Swirling Dreams

admin — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 22:32:30 +0000

I had the opportunity this weekend to take some nice landscape shots in a small park in the hills of Wicklow county, here in Ireland. There is a beautiful waterfall, one of highest in Ireland and these are some shots of the copper coloured stream that flows away from the base.

Moody Dublin

admin — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:32:34 +0000

I got to this Image after playing around in Lightroom’s develop module with an otherwise bland photo. It just goes to show you that sometimes you can make something out of nothing!

Mushroom Madness

admin — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 22:12:15 +0000

Grafton Barber

admin — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:22:22 +0000

I love great old grungy neon signs like this one…

And The Crowd Goes Marching By

admin — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:59:40 +0000

Tree Moss

admin — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 21:06:57 +0000

With the horrendous summer we’re having here in Ireland it’s making it difficult to go out and take pictures. I know any good photographer should be prepared to go out in all weather but ben it’s bucketing down constantly it’s hard to get motivated. It’s also hard to hold an umbrella and a canon 5d at the same time. that said, my little Panasonic LX2 has been a useful traveling companion during the harsh weather and the other day while taking a walk by a local canal I noticed that the constant wet weather had sparked quite a degree of moss and lichen to grow on the trees that lined the canal, and when you look at them up close they really are quite fascinating and make great pictures.

Mushrooms

admin — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 06:45:33 +0000

I came across these little guys while out for a quick walk during lunch break from my day job. They were nestling beside some trees by the canal just down from where I work. Taken with my trusty LX2 and Processed using the Trial of Lightroom 2 which I’m giving a go at the moment.

Clover Field

admin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:48:42 +0000

Frozen Stream

admin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:35:15 +0000

I was watching some great tutorials on Kelby Training from Moose Peterson and have been wanting to try out one of the techniques he mentioned for a long time. Finally I got the chance on saturday and this is the result. Usually when I try do do long exposure stream shots like this I end up with the water looking like silver (in a not good way). The trick of course is to use a polarizer.

Just For Me

admin — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:23:46 +0000

Sometimes you can forget what got you interested in Photography in the first place. It’s easy when you’re doing professional work or in my case trying to build up a portfolio for some stock agencies, to loose heart and loose vision. You can become blinkered by what’s good enough to sell and start to ignore artistic or other possibilities right in front of you. I heard a great piece of advice recently from a professional who said that one of the most important things is to, every now and then, go out and take pictures just for the sake of taking pictures. Take pictures for yourself. Remind yourself of the joy of photography. Forget about what might sell and just go were your eye leads you.

So last weekend, in a rare bout of sunshine here in dublin I did just that. And I enjoyed it more than I’ve enjoyed taking photographs in a long time. Not that there was anything special, but I freed myself from self doubt and commercialism and just had fun. Because at the end of the day thats what it’s all about for me. Anyway, here are some of the shots I found interesting from my walk about in the dublin sunshine

(Incidentally, as an experiment I shot RAW+JPEG on my 5D, using custom picture setting. I normally only shoot RAW, but I was very impressed with the results of the JPEGS. All these are from the in camera Jpeg engine)