Thomas Fitzgerald Photography

One of my Ideas to increase productivity during the year was to take a different subject each month and work on mastering it. I had decided to do flower photography for the month of January. Unfortunately due to the bad weather I haven’t really been able to get out to the florist to get some good flowers. Anyway, I managed to get some reasonably decent specimins from the supermarket and set about working out some setups last night. Here’s the first result of my experimentation. I think it’s fairly good.

The lighting setup is pretty simple. I have my 430EX flash connected to my 5DII off camera to the left of frame. I’m using a lastolite tri-grip diffuser to soften the light, and I have a piece of white card on the other side to bounce back to the shadow areas. Oh, and it was taken with the Canon 100mm Macro Lens. I used Live View and zoomed in so that I could manually focus the lens accurately. Autofocus wasn’t getting me anywhere on this one. Live View makes getting a good manual focus a snap though. More to come.

From my twentyten365 Project.

It’s quite popular at this time of the year to start a “one a day” photo project. I attempted to do it last year but it didn’t work out to well. Anyway, I’m having another go at it this year and I’ve set up a special blog over at Tumblr to keep them all together. I’ll post shots here too but I wanted somewhere to have a nice clean record of my year in Photography. Please have a look and subscribe to the RSS. Hopefully I’ll make it through the full year this time!

Here are some more iPhone pictures from my recent visit to the west of Ireland

There are a lot of bright colours in the city, and there are wonderful textures and patterns to be seen everywhere…

This was a table cloth on a very cold outdoor restaurant.

Discarded cans frozen in ice. One person’s trash is another person’s art exhibit!

Heading home on the train.

Using my favourite iPhone Application, ShakeItPhoto I spent much of Friday taking faux Polaroids of Galway city with my iPhone. ShakeItPhoto produces some great analog weathered images straight out of the app with no processing and I love the look it gives. Anyway, here are some of the photos I took while wandering the extremely cold streets of Galway City. More to come later and I’m putting together a virtual exhibition of them all too.

Though strictly here on Holidays I can’t help but use the opportunity to take some photographs. Actually I’m giving my 5D Mark II one last chance before I decide whether or not to sell it (more on that later). The town is certainly a rich source of potential imagery and I’ve taken quite a few, but it’s slow going through them on my laptop, especially when I’d rather be out shooting than wading through the 5D’s huge files in Lightroom on my slow laptop drive. Anyway, here are a couple of pseudo HDR shots taken near the Railway station in the centre of Galway. Despite being in the middle of the city there is some beautifully run down grungy textures to be found.

More to come later as I go through them!

It has been a while since I played around with my macro lens and it’s also been a while since I took some stock photography so I decided to have an impromptu photoshoot in my sitting room today and see what I could come up with. I had planned on shooting some coffee beans (which I did later on) but while I was setting up I found an old light bulb on the table. It was one of those ones with the complex filament and I thought it might look good close up. And sure enough it did. I took some over all shots of the bulb but I found that picking out the details made far more an interesting subject.

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