Links to local places are to my pictures of them, or from them.
BUY images here as digital downloads and as A3+, A3 & A4 prints and special orders of larger sizes - including two auroras from 2015 & 2016!
Introduction
I’d say almost everyone with an interest in nature, the skies and the outdoors knows now that much of the northern hemisphere was treated to a stellar display of the Aurora Borealis on Thursday night the 10 and 11 of October – following a major coronal mass ejection from the sun two days earlier. Indeed, this is the best year for the Northern Lights since 1989 and 2003 - here’s an archive video from RTE of the displays just before Halloween, 21 years ago (you may have to accept cookies to get it to play). We’re getting lots of auroras since the current sunspot cycle, solar cycle 25, is proving more intense than expected during its "maximum" phase and this is likely to continue into next year. Also, we’re much more aurora aware nowadays with all the coverage they get in the press and social media - such as in this excellent article in The Journal by Nicky Ryan with loads of great geeky background information too!
1. Diarmaid under the aurora at the communications tower at 10:27pm on Killiney Hill – with the Seven Sisters (Pleiades) above his head and Jupiter to his left (20s, f3.5, ISO 3200).
These cosmic displays are not all good, though. There were major power cuts in Quebec and the USA after the 1989 event and the 2003 event interrupted communications and damaged space missions. In 1859, the most powerful geomagnetic storm in recorded history, the Carrington Event, turned night to day in the mid-latitudes, was visible close to the equator, and had major impacts on the then new telegraph. While its exact strength is unknown, if it happened today with our huge dependence on electricity and satellites, it could wreak global havoc. Fortunately, we now monitor the sun for geomagnetic storms, generate space weather forecasts, and protect electricity grids, and communications and GPS networks. And the space weather forecasts also alert astrophotographers!
Last week’s event was the second this year, following on the auroras of 10 May that were also widely visible in Ireland. Unfortunately, I missed that one so I was longing for another chance and the adrenaline rose when my usual sources started pinging alerts on 9 & 10 October. These include Aurora Alert UK, Carlow Weather, Weather Alerts Ireland, and NOAA with their graphic predictions. NOAA also has top-notch "aurora tutorial" here. Met Eireann’s forecast’s for clear skies, mild weather and near calm conditions, sky-rocketed my anticipation levels! As I couldn’t travel north to dark sky locations outside Dublin, I was determined to give my local observation spots in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown the best go possible. Here’s the story of my ethereal experiences that night - and how I took and processed my shots.
My Previous (much fainter!) Auroras
Before I get to that, although I missed the 10 May event, I previously saw auroras in Ireland as I wrote in two earlier blog posts – but nothing like this time! The first was near Port Beach in Co. Louth in December 2015. As I arrived, I was thrilled to see “shimmering green curtains”. Sadly, these disappeared quickly before I could get a proper shot but I did get images of dimmer displays later. I was lucky again in March 2016, this time from my home patch of Killiney Hill when I photographed green auroras arcing right across Dublin Bay, despite the bright street lights - you can get prints of both events here. Since then, I’ve tried a few times without much success, most recently on 13 September when I went back to my Killiney Hill spot . . . to find a bush is now partly blocking the view there!
Barely visible grey auroras, even to the camera, over Howth from Killiney Hill on 16 September 2024. Even after developing in Lightroom, the final image was still a blotchy mess. This shows how special the event of 10-11 October was!
Shooting the Auroras on Killiney Hill
On 10 October, the last sunlight faded when astronomical twilight ended at 8:34pm. However, the half moon didn’t set until two hours later. So I got to Killiney Hill by about 9:15pm. By then, the setting Moon would be less bright than the suburban light pollution. As I made the short journey from my home village of Shankill, social media in general and my camera club’s WhatsApp group, Offshoot, were already oohing and aahing! I’d shared the aurora forecasts with them earlier. Maybe waiting until the Moon was low in the sky was a mistake, and I’d miss the show again! But the car park on Killiney Hill was jammers. Clearly, there were a lot of aurora chasers out! I went up to my 2016 spot, despite the bush, to look north over Howth and I met fellow Offshoot member John Fitzpatrick, he’s KillineyHillPark on Instagram. There wasn’t much happening, so he suggested we move to the nearby communications tower. I was doubtful, as we would be looking north east rather than north. But, as we approached, we could hear excited voices in the darkness!
When we emerged from some bushes and looked up, I gasped. Huge red and green bands were now lighting up the north eastern sky from Dublin Bay to the communications tower and it was action stations to get the tripod and camera set up. At first, I tried my Sigma 30mm f1.4 to get as much light as possible but that lens was not wide enough to make a good composition there. Fighting panic in case the display disappeared, I switched to my Canon 10-16mm wide angle lens. The aperture is only f3.5 at the wide end but I knew the high ISO capabilities of my Canon R7 are very good, and with the new Denoise feature in Lightroom, I hoped I would get clean images.
With auroras from the horizon almost to the zenith, I went as wide as possible at 10mm – and used the wall separating us from the cliffs of the disused Dalkey Quary as a leading line. There were lots of people around, so I volunteered(😊) a few as foreground interest. The first was Diarmaid with his hat in the colours of my native Cork – sure you couldn’t get better than that, boy! As it happens, it wasn’t a Cork hat but a Cuala one, the local GAA club who have the same colours. Diarmaid held very still for the 20 second shoot and it was incredible to see green auroras high in the sky over the tower, as well as glowing red patches and another green band along the horizon (image 1). Never did I ever expect to see such bright auroras so high in Irish skies! You can also see the Seven Sisters star cluster over his head. The very bright “star” to his left is actually Jupiter! Five minutes later, along came Maria, capturing the aurora with her phone, so I made that part of her shot story (image 2). As you can see, the green band over the tower has disappeared but the reds, purples and blues are more intense as is the green band on the horizon. Later, I’ll write about how I processed my shots.
2. Maria capturing the Northern Lights at 10:32pm. See how the green patch over the tower has gone (20s, f3.5, ISO 3200).
Auroras over Dublin Bay from Coliemore Harbour
By 11pm, things were dying down on Killiney Hill and John had to leave but I’d been hearing that people were getting great views from nearby Sorrento Park so I thought about heading there and I checked Coliemore Harbour on Dalkey Sound on the way. At the harbour, there wasn’t much visible from the road with its bright street lights but I went down to a darker corner at the left hand side of the harbour wall. As my eyes dark adapted, again I saw large red and green bands draped between the sea and the high sky (image 3). This time, I was on my own basking in another astonishing auroral display! I was nearly overwhelmed watching glittering shafts reaching for the heavens - outshining even Jupiter! But, not so much that I stopped taking pictures! The shafts were followed by multicoloured curtains stretching along the horizon from north to east and also included Mars, Jupiter, Pleiades, the Plough and Orion as detailed in the shot captions (images 4-11).
3. Auroral curtains over the dark corner in Coliemore Harbour in Dalkey at 0:24am – including my camera bag! The Plough is above Howth Head (30s, f3.5, ISO 1600).
4. Glittering auroral shafts rising from between the Kish (middle white light) and the Muglins Lights (right) behind the Dalkey Islands at 0:13am. Or, could this be a STEVE? The Seven Sisters are half way up just to the right and Jupiter is outshone in the brightest pink shaft! The twin bright stars, one above the other, near the bottom left are Castor and Pollux of the Gemini constellation and the third bright “star” to the right of them is Mars. Orion's belt is rising to the right of the red Muglins light (20s, f3.5, ISO 1600).
How the Camera sees the Auroras Differently from my Eyes
So how did I take and process these shots and were the colours really this bright? To take the last question first – no, not to my eyes, or anyone’s! Our eyes are not built to see colours well in low light – especially when light pollution stops full dark adaption. So, In fact, that’s the wrong question! Even without light pollution near the poles, aurora’s don’t look as bright as we see them in photographs (image 1a). This is described by travel blogger Kristin here, and in much more detail by photographer Ewen Bell, here. And, as an aside, check out the first auroral shot ever taken here!
But were the colours really there? Absolutely! And my task as the photographer is to use my camera and Lightroom skills (see processing images 1b-1e) to show them to you as best I can. In particular, a camera can collect auroral light over many seconds whereas your eyes only see what passes through from instant to instant. You wouldn’t ask that question of an astronomer or a microbiologist about their images of distant galaxies or microorganisms . . . subjects that are totally invisible to your eyes but still real!
1a. The first shot with tonal edits showing it roughly as I saw it from memory, although the reds were probably a bit more obvious on site.
All the images were taken with a Canon EFS 10-22mm f3.5-4.5 lens attached to a Canon R7 with a Canon EF to R adapter but any modern DSLR or "Mirrorless" type camera is good. What's more important is a wide angle lens. If you don't have one, you could try taking a series of vertical images with the lens you do have and merge them into a panorama with Lightroom - just make sure that there is an overlap of about third of the frame between each shot. My kit was mounted on a Manfrotto tripod with a 410 geared head for precise adjustment of the camera’s position. As the R7 is a cropped sensor camera, the field of view of the 10-22mm lens is equivalent to 16-26mm on a full frame camera, approximately. Settings were usually 20 seconds, f3.5, ISO 1600 or 3200, and at 10mm except where otherwise noted in the image captions.
If you don't have a big camera, nowadays, modern mobile phones less than two or three years old can also take very good auroral images, and your phone camera can see colour when you cannot. You'll need a mini-tripod to keep it steady, or failing that, stabilize it as best you can on something solid. Use voice control to "Shoot" as well, if you phone has it. There are lots of guides to auroral smartphone photography and apps - two are here & here. However, to get high quality images from you phone, you'll need get into the nerdy manual shooting settings and, if your phone allows it, shoot raw images to develop in Lightroom later - see below.
5. A vertical view of red and green auroral curtains over the Kish Light (right) with Jupiter at right at 0:27am. Again, Castor, Pollux and Mars form an “L” low down. (30s, f3.5, ISO 1600).
6. The same scene just two minutes later at 0:29am showing how quickly the displays change (15s, f3.5, ISO 1600).
Developing my Auroral Images
Once the shots are taken, I develop them in Adobe’s Lightroom – the desktop classic version. As with these auroral images, when I take shots that will need work to develop, I always shoot in raw image format, The camera saves raw images as unprocessed digital data and does not convert them to JPEG’s that are much harder to edit later. Unprocessed raw images are often called digital negatives – by analogy with film negatives. Nineteenth and twentieth century photographers, such as Ansel Adams, applied many analogue enhancement techniques when making prints from their negatives.
As you can see from the first communications tower image as taken in the camera (image 1a, above), as well as the colours being washed out (image 1b), the tower is falling back a lot because I was using a wide angle lens, made worse by shooting from a slightly lower position. I corrected this in Lightroom using about a -80 vertical transform, some levelling (image 1c) – and then checked the constrain crop box to eliminate the white areas (image 1d). This has the effects of stretching the stars a little, especially at the upper corners. The later images from the harbour didn’t need such a transform but I found the built in electronic level on my R7 wasn’t as accurate as I expected in some of my early images. In the dark and the auroral exhilaration, I didn’t notice the sloping horizon but again I was able to correct it in Lightroom afterwards. Later in the shoot, I added a hot shoe mounted spirit level to double check.
1b-d. The raw file of the first image as imported from my camera in Lightroom with no edits, followed by transforming to correct for the tower falling back because it was shot at a wide angle, and lastly, the transformed image with the constrain crop option applied. See how noisy these are compared to the final images.
After the images were squared up, I set the white balance to auto, and then used the tonal sliders in the Basic panel, to set exposure, contrast, darks and lights to roughly bring out the colours. Next, I used Lightroom’s AI powered Denoise tool in the Detail panel. Whoa you say – AI?? Isn’t that for making fake photos? Just as Meta did recently by suggesting that if you missed the auroras, you could simply fake them with AI! While Meta’s images may be art . . . they’re definitely not photographs! The Denoise tool, however, is something quite different. It’s not adding stuff that was never there. Instead, it’s removing something in your image, digital noise, that was NOT in the scene. And, the high ISO and long exposure settings used for astrophotography makes digital camera electronics more prone to generating this noise that significantly degrades quality. In short, AI Denoise is not faking something into your image, it’s removing digital capture artefacts that have nothing to do with reality. Once the Denoising was done, I fine tuned the tones and then added Dehaze up to +47 (in the +30’s for the Coliemore images). This is much more Dehaze than I’ve ever used before but it really worked to bring out the auroral colours (image 1e).
1e. The first image showing final tonal and detail edits.
I did not remove anything from the images as shown here in this blog post, such as ships’ lights on the horizon and the aircraft light trails around Dublin Airport some 15km to the northwest, because they were part of the story of the night for this post. However, I did take out transient plane & ship lights for the prints and downloads here – along with my camera bag! But, I've left in the lighthouses.
7. A horizontal view of red and green auroral curtains over the Kish & Muglins Lights with the Seven Sisters and Jupiter, and Orion’s belt at the bottom right at 0:26am (30 & 15s, f3.5, ISO 1600).
8. Intense red aurora at 0:33am over Howth and the Kish Light and the L of Castor Pollux and Mars is to the right, low down. Part of the Plough is visible to the left (15s, f3.5 & ISO1600). Getting so much red is really rare at out latitude - check out this excellent explanation for the different colours.
9. An intense patch of colour near the horizon at 0:44am over Castor, Pollux and Mars, with Jupiter, the Seven Sisters, and most of Orion at the bottom right (15s, f3.5, ISO 1600).
10. Red and green auroras and the Plough over Howth and the Maidens Rock at 1:24 as the magnetic storm was weakening a bit (20s, f4.5, ISO 2500 at 22mm).
Conclusion
So that’s the story of my most recent encounter with the, for once, not so Northern Lights, and my best by a long way! I hope these images of the Aurora Borealis are worthy of the deities of the dawn and the cold north wind, whose names Galileo used to characterise these beautiful geomagnetic displays.
11. And finally, some lunatic trying to call home at 1:46am after the red auroras disappeared (20s, f3.5, ISO 1600).
My article in the February 2022 issue of Astronomy Ireland.
It was my second comet shoot, following Neowise over Lough Ree on the River Shannon in 2020 Comet Neowise by John Coveney. I’ll do a follow up blog about that in a few weeks time – and I’ll also include previously unpublished shots of Neowise over Dublin landmarks.
Comet Leonard was much dimmer than Neowise, at least when it was visible from Ireland, so I wasn’t sure if I could get it at all, much less get a good picture. I’ve been an active photographer for over 20 years now, starting with birds and then expanding to people, places and wildlife. One of my regular “places” over the last decade, or so, is my long-term lunatic project around Dublin Bay the City Centre Irish Moonscapes. For this, I usually shoot the Moon in a land or sea context. So, I’m really chancing my arm at this astrophotography lark - ahem 😊. Other than my long lenses, I don’t have any specialist gear such as a star tracker or a lens warmer lens warmer. . . yet! So, this blog post is definitely not a guide to astrophotography. It’s more a journal of my intermittent meandering into this nocturnal imaging niche.
Since I started actual astrophotography a few years ago, mainly of planets and comets so far, I’ve used Stellarium’s free planetarium software. I use the computer version on a large screen at home for planning. But the Stellarium programme doesn’t automatically show comets – they have to be added manually via a deep dive into obscure settings. Fortunately, this blog How to Add a Comet to Stellarium by an American nature photographer, Martin Belan, clearly lists the sequence of simple steps required to add a comet – it’s one of several similar links on Google.
Stellarium screenshot showing the complicated comet addition menus . . . unless you follow Martin Belan’s guide .
On location, I use Stellarium’s phone app to confirm object positions in the sky and to slowly build my familiarity with the heavens. When using the Stellarium app at night, the first thing is to press the Six Squares menu icon at the bottom left to show the Eye button. Use this to turn on and off Stellarium’s red filter to protect your night vision. It takes at least thirty minutes for your eyes to become fully dark adapted – and longer for older people. However, a glance at a bright phone screen will quickly degrade your night vision. Unfortunately Stellarium’s red filter only works when you are using the app, so I also use a free android app, Twilight, from the Google Play Store. This applies a reddish filter to the whole phone screen in every app so I can use other apps such as Google Maps or Photopills – but not, of course, do any mindless social media scrolling during the darkest hours 😊. And of course, for safety reasons, I never publicly post my shoot locations in advance!
This reddish filter is not great but it’s better than nothing and I also turn down the screen brightness. This also helps save the phone’s battery, especially if it’s cold. Of course I also have a head torch with a separate red light for protecting my night vision, as well as a battery pack to keep the torch and phone charged. It’s often said you should be able to use you camera in the dark, but that won’t help you find your way home across dark unfamiliar terrain after a shoot – been there, done that – and once was quite enough!
Stellarium app screenshot showing the Six Squares menu icon (left) and the Sensor Mode and red filter Eye icons (right)
The Sensor Mode tool in the phone app – accessed via the shaking phone symbol - is also very handy. Just point your phone up in the general direction of the object you are looking for and Stellarium automatically shows a zoomable image of the sky in that direction. Sometimes though, you might want to turn off Sensor Mode to stop the image of the sky jumping around as you move your phone, especially if you’ve zoomed in. You’ll also want to turn off the Sensor Mode if you just want to familiarise yourself with the stars in a patch of sky, perhaps while you are looking at the phone in your lap. I believe the phone app can also show comets, but I don’t yet know how to make this work – nor can I find a link on Google. If you know, please tell me in the comments.
You’ll also need to ensure your phone’s compass is calibrated – and it’s best to do this in advance of a shoot. If you don’t, the Stellarium phone app may appear to be “looking” in the wrong direction in Sensor Mode. Firstly, you’ll need to be outside to get a good GPS signal. On an android phone, press the My Location circle near the bottom right of the Google Maps screen, and then zoom in on the blue circle that shows where you are – and expand it. Then lightly top on this blue circle to bring up the Your Location menu – don’t press too hard or you’ll drop a pin instead. Finally press the Calibrate button – depending on your location it will give you options such as moving your phone in a figure eight or taking pictures of a shop front. I think the figure eight option is more likely if you are in a rural dark location doing astrophotography. This is as much as I’m going to do on compass calibration and location accuracy in this post so, if you want more for android phones or any information on this topic for iPhones, you’ll need to Google it, sorry. If you have suggestions for either operating system, please add them in the comments.
Anyway, as I scrolled through time on Stellarium on my computer last November, watching Leonard move in front of the stars, I thought of trying a composite to show this in reality.
Screen capture video of Stellarium showing Comet Leonard moving across the sky at the time of my Shanganagh Park shoot. Note d Boo near the bottom and the HIP 68785 “double” star at the top right (the dimmer nearby third orange star shown by Stellarium didn’t show in my shots). Note that using the Equatorial Mount option in the Stellarium programme to keep the stars relatively fixed as Leonard moved, tilted the orientation rightwards compared to my own images below. Once this is taken into account though, this simulation matches my images.
Given Irish December weather, a multi-night series wasn’t on. However, the forecast for December 5th 2021 was cold and clear, but breezy. So about 1am and dressed in all my layers, I packed up my ebike for a short cycle to a nearby fairly dark area in my local park. This is Shanganagh Park – between Bray & my adopted home village of Shankill. It’s near the southern boundary of Co. Dublin. The Park is in a narrow greenbelt between Shankill and Co. Wicklow. In the strong westerly breeze, I sheltered on the eastern side of a patch of planted woodland just above the cliffs overlooking the Irish Sea
Maps showing the location of Dublin on the east coast of Ireland (top right), Shankill (left), my darkish shoot location sheltered by trees in Shanganagh Park (centre), and lastly the location of the Cooley Peninsular for my second Leonard shoot.
My comet shoot station in Shanganagh Park – with Killiney Hill in the background. The streetlights there, over 4km distant, were the only ones I could see during the shoot. Note the foam garden kneeler for keeping my bum warm and, on the right, the 400 2.8 lens lit by the red bulb of my headtorch.
Stellarium said to look for Comet Leonard above Arcturus – rising about 2am in the northeast. Arcturus is in the constellation Boötes – the ploughman of the Plough according to the ancient Greeks. Arcturus is the brightest star in the northern sky and located in the groin area of Bootes, heavenly humour from an ancient - and presumably male - astronomer, perhaps?
Screenshots from Stellarium showing constellations around Comet Leonard during the shoot.
I thought I could see Leonard with my binoculars but I wasn’t sure, so I did “search shots” with my Canon 85mm f1.8 lens – set at ISO 3200 for 5 seconds to get as much light as possible. About 2.50am, I was delighted to see Leonard as a small greyish blur on the camera’s LCD – as in the next illustration
Uncropped unprocessed 85mm image of Comet Leonard between the HIP 68785 “double” star and d Boo, as well as two satellite trails with square ends (Canon 80D and 85mm f1.8 at f1.8 for 3.2 seconds at ISO 3200). Two bright stars in Bootes, Arcturus and Muphrid, are also marked. The curved line shows a roughly U shaped group of stars, one of the star patterns I used to “crab” my 400 f1.8 lens from Arcturus to Leonard. The inset shows a processed crop of this shot around the comet.
Once I knew I had Leonard, I reduced the exposure time to 3.2 seconds to reduce star trails using the Spot Stars feature on the PhotoPills app on my phone. This was a compromise between the 4 seconds given for the traditional 500 Rule and PhotoPills recommended 2 seconds. I kept shooting every half-hour or so, until the start of astronomical twilight at 6.30am – in retrospect I could probably have kept going until the start of nautical twilight about 7am. During my shoot, Leonard travelled about 925,000km at 70km/sec - about 2.5 times the distance to the Moon!
In between, I tried to set up my recently purchased second-hand super-telephoto – a 400mm f2.8 Mk1 IS – it weighs 5.4kg or almost 12lbs! I picked it up second-hand in Conn’s cameras in Dublin a little over a year ago. It was on their used equipment page - for many many thousands of euro less than their asking price for the current Mk3/RF versions at about €14,000. These current versions are only a little more than half as heavy as my Mk1. I was sure the Mk1 would be a very well used or even battered pro sports photographer’s specimen, but when I next ventured into Conns – always a dangerous experience as they always end up richer! – I couldn’t resist asking for a look. To my astonishment it was almost pristine. Apparently it had been almost unused for up to 20 years or so since this model first appeared in in 1999 . The reason it was so (relatively) cheap was because Canon no longer supplies parts for it. Anyway after getting it checked out by Eoghan Murray of f1 camera repair in Greystones in Co. Wicklow, I took a chance on it. With quite a lot of padding, it even fits in one of my ebike panniers.
So what was it like for astrophotography? Until or if I get a high spec star tracker capable of taking its weight and I can try it on a few deep space objects such as star clusters or galaxies, it’s too soon to say definitively. I would have loved to have tried it on Leonard as it passed the M3 star cluster two days earlier but it was cloudy in Ireland that night – what a surprise! Without a star tracker and/or GoTo mount, I had to painfully “crab” from Arcturus to Leonard, taking a test shot each time and checking star patterns on the LCD against the Stellarium app. And now after all the long scéal (story in Irish), here’s my best image – the settings were 1.6 seconds, f2.8 (of course!) and ISO 12,800. It’s notably better than the 85mm images, especially in capturing the comet’s green tone, but not so much that I wouldn’t be too upset if I had to travel light with just the 85mm lens and its one and one third of a stop wider aperture. The higher ISO due to the narrower aperture didn’t make sensor noise much worse. Again there are short star trails because I exposed for 1.6 seconds, instead of PhotoPills recommended 0.7 seconds.
Comet Leonard above d Boo – the brightest star at the bottom – taken with a Canon 80D and a Canon 400mm f2.8 for 1.6 seconds and ISO 12,800. Moderately cropped and processed in Lightroom.
In the few days after the shoot, I used Lightroom to reduce digital noise, to eliminate reds and oranges from light pollution, and to enhance Leonard’s natural green colour. The final step was a “lighten blend” composite of the four best 85mm shots in Photoshop. As I didn’t get the stars to line up exactly, I masked the stars out in all but the top layer and I just let the different exposures of Leonard shine through from the lower layers.
Because of these small miss-alignments, my image is not quite an astronomically accurate representation of Leonard’s movement against the background stars. Despite this, it’s plenty good enough for me to tell the story of Leonard’s appearance in Irish skies. It’s a memory that will stay with me for the rest of my days . . . and nights! This is just as well because it’s now leaving us forever! Like many comets, it is believed to have come from the hypothetical Oort Cloud of icy objects surrounding the Sun between 2,000 and 200,000 times the Sun-Earth distance. The Oort Cloud is hypothetical because objects in it are too small, dark and distant for even the largest telescopes to see from the Earth but it’s believed to be the source of many comets. Leonard had an orbital period of about 80,000 years, spanning about 3,500 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. On this spin around the Sun however, it got a solar gravitational boost that will kick it out of the Solar System - to roam the depths of interstellar space.
Final four exposure composite of Comet Leonard over Shanganagh Park Co. Dublin on 5 December between 2.50 and 6.30am. HIP 68785 is the “double” star above and to the right while d Boo is the brightest star toward the bottom.
Before I finish though, my Shanganagh Park shoot was not my only sighting of Leonard. Five days later, myself and herself had shnaked off for a couple days on our own to a nice B&B in Carlingford on the Cooley peninsula. Perhaps missing the central point of those few days 😊, I was out at Ballaghan Point just after 7am on the 10th of December. Although nautical twilight had begun, hence the blue background, I still got a shot of Leonard – and a meteor passing close by. Unlike the satellites in my shot above, this streak of light has a tapered end typical of a meteor as it burns up in the atmosphere. Perhaps, it was a late Leonid wishing Leonard farewell as it began its eternal interstellar journey!
Comet Leonard and a meteor from Ballaghan Point on the Cooley Peninsula in Co. Louth taken at 7.05am – the start of nautical twilight – on 10 December 2021 with a Canon 80D and 85mm f1.8 for 3.2 seconds at ISO 3200.
I was hoping to get a few shots of the terns at the breeding colony managed by BirdWatch Ireland and wardened this year by Joe Proudfoot. As well as the terns, there's a wealth of other nature and heritage to enjoy and photograph. Much of it is close enough for shots with a long lens without causing disturbance. I've a bit at the end on how I got my shots*.
I speeded from Coliemore Harbour across Dalkey Sound with Ken the Ferryman - he's open everyday from 10am to 6pm during the summer - weather permitting. The fare is €10 return and only €5 for under 18's. The crossing takes about 5 minutes. And yes, as in the song by former Dalkey resident Chris De Burgh, you don't pay the ferryman until you get to the other side - nor do you have to spend a lifetime preparing for the journey! But if you do want to swot up beforehand, read the island's conservation plan by Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Co. Council. It has loads of detail on the island's geology, flora and fauna, archaeology, and history.
Once you get onto the island, it feels surprisingly remote and calm even though it's only a few hundred metres from the trophy houses of Coliemore and Sorrento Terrace. This is especially so when looking out to Dublin Bay and the Irish Sea - and if you turn your back on the land, you can really disconnect!
Once you do get to the other side, be sure to read the sign on the landing pier to avoid trouble ahead and leave the island and its inhabitants as you find them. That's the last ferryman song reference, I promise! Also, here's a link to the information sign on the plaza above Coliemore Harbour.
Here's warden Joe showing us the off-limits Lamb Island where many of the terns nest. We weren't ogling the topless kayaker - honestly! Joe runs guided tours at 12 and 2pm on the weekends he's there.
The most prominent built heritage features are St. Begnet's church, the Martello tower and its associated gun battery. The island's conservation plan describes archaeological finds dating from the mesolithic period 8,000 years ago through the Bronze and Iron Ages, the Middle Ages and right up to the nineteenth century. Here's a great Wikipedia Commons map from the island's Wikipedia page that shows most of these features .
Dalkey Island is within two EU nature conservation designations defined by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS). These are the Dalkey Islands Special Protection Area (SPA) under the EU Birds Directive and the Rockabill to Dalkey Island Special Area of Conservation (SAC) under the EU Habitats Directive. The island is also part of the proposed Natural Heritage Area (pNHA) "Dalkey Coastal Zone And Killiney Hill" that will eventually be protected in national law by the Wildlife Acts. Currently it's safeguarded in the county development plan. Again the conservation plan has a very good description of the island's natural heritage features.
The Geohive Map Viewer from Ordnance Survey Ireland provides maps of Ireland's built and natural heritage. Red dots on this screenshot show the main archaeological sites and the pNHA is outlined in blue. The SPA covering the island and the waters immediately around it is bounded by the curved line. The remaining hatched area shows the nearby parts of the SAC that stretches 40 km northwards to Rockabill Island off Skerries in north Co. Dublin. If you go into the Geohive viewer and select the relevant layers in the data catalogue, you can click on these items to get their code numbers that will allow you to access lots more information via the National Monuments Service's Historic Environment Viewer and on the NPWS's listings of protected sites.
The National Monuments Service describes St. Begnet's church as a fine pre-Norman structure that survives to full height despite modifications, including the fireplace and the side window that were added during the early nineteenth century by workers building the nearby Napoleonic era fortifications.
The lichens on the church's inner walls have probably have growing there for the last two hundred years since the workers left. I think they're Cladonia from checking Irish Lichens. Warden Joe told us there's almost none lower down - starving goats ate them during the big snow of 2010. Nowadays, happily, Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Co. Council takes hay out to them during hard winters.
Centuries of salt and storm exposure hides the details on this cross-inscribed stone - even with sharpness, contrast and clarity pushed well up in Lightroom. I might do better another time with evening side lighting that would provide shadows to highlight the carvings.
Here's a few phone shots of the Martello Tower. It's one of nine surviving of sixteen built from Bray and Sandymount between 1803 to 1805 to counter a Napoleonic invasion that never came. Check out the Irish Martello Towers blog or the Wikipedia list of Dublin's Martello towers for much more on these coastal lookouts. If you look carefully from the Dalkey Island tower, you can see the tops of its neighbours to the south on the flank of Killiney Hill, and to the west near Bulloch Harbour. Of course that was the whole idea so that news of an invasion could be signaled along the coast in those pre telegraph times. Both of these towers are privately owned and hard to see from nearby roads. The Killiney tower is sometimes open to the public but you'll need to drop a few million euro to buy the Bartra tower as the country's priciest one bedroom house! Here's a link the map of the coastal walk route between them.
Next is the associated gun battery although only a few Martello towers had these.
Here's some Mallow and, I believe, orange Caloplaca lichens on the battery ramparts.
The main drama of the day was when Joe shouted that a Peregrine Falcon had caught a tern - I managed to get a few heavily cropped shots as it flew past the apartments near Coliemore Harbour with its prey. Predation of one protected species by another is always a quandary, but now that Birdwatch Ireland has removed rats from the island – a much more damaging predator – hopefully the breeding seabirds can tolerate occasional Peregrine strikes. From a conservation point of view, it's good that the Peregrine took a juvenile tern rather than a breeding adult. Juveniles have a much lower chance of surviving to breeding age whereas the predation of a long-lived adult could result in the loss of breeding attempts in this and future years. Later another Peregrine flew past, this time a recently fledged juvenile as shown by it's brown plumage.
Next are some shots of the terns themselves - this time at the sub-colony on the main island. These are Arctic Terns - the main species nesting on Dalkey & Lamb Islands although there are also a handful of Common Terns. There are warning signs and roped off areas to ensure human visitors don't stray into the colony but even 30m or so from the rope, the Arctic Terns approach you aggressively and even draw blood from your head with their beaks if you go closer - of course I didn't! The trick is to stay well back from the roped off area as they approach briefly to check you out. When they realize you are not coming any nearer they fly back to the colony. If you are ever near a seabird colony and terns or gulls are dive-bombing your head - you're way too close!
Apart from the risk of attack, please also remember, that it's illegal to photograph birds' eggs and nests without a license from the NPWS. Check out this excellent article from BirdWatch Ireland with loads of advice on avoiding disturbance of breeding birds.
In spring, Oystercatchers move from their usual winter habitats on the Dublin Bay shoreline to nest on grassy parts of offshore coasts such as Dalkey Island. If you are within 50m or so of their eggs or chicks, you can't miss them "kleeping" anxiously around you. Despite the occasional disturbance from human visitors, a few pairs have raised several chicks this year on the island, One large chick followed its parent to the seaweedy shoreline to forage.
Here's a recently fledged Pied Wagtail that was also bred on the island - they look very tatty at this age!
Here's a group of roosting Shags and Cormorants on the rocks of Lamb Island watching a regatta outside Dun Laoghaire Harbour!
There's also a mixed breeding colony of Herring, Great Black-backed and Lesser Black-backed Gulls in the bracken on the outermost part of the island - largely hidden from the mainland. Here's three shots of adult Herring Gulls from various angles, followed by shots of nearly and newly fledged juveniles.
Next we come to perhaps the most attractive of our large gulls, the Lesser Black-backed Gull (LBBG), with its yellow legs and dark grey back contrasting with its black flight feathers. When you're near their colony, they are much less aggressive than their bigger cousins, Great Black-backed Gulls (not pictured here). They will also attack people too near their nests - and much more forcefully than the smaller Arctic Terns! In contrast, Lesser Black-backed Gulls just fly over for a look - but if they are calling loudly at you, again you are too close!
I was so happily snapping the LBBGs just before I left the island that I didn't even look at them properly! It was only when I was going through my images a few days later, I noticed two shots of a much darker bird with almost no contrast between the black flight feathers and the very dark mantle feathers. This is typical of the race intermedius that breeds in the Netherlands, Germany and southern Scandinavia. Separation of this form from the lighter graellsii that breeds in Britain and Ireland is complicated because the two forms overlap in The Netherlands - the so-called Dutch intergrades. Joe Hobbs' "A List of Irish Birds" says that intermedius is probably a rare winter and passage visitor. A search of Irish Birding pulled up about 43 reports going back to 2009. These reports include a well documented one seen by Collins Bird Guide author Killian Mullarney in the gull colony on Great Saltee Island on 18 June 2016. Several records of this dark form have also been well-documented in Co. Kerry between 2013 and May 2021. So this was nice birding bonus on a photography trip - but I wish I had noticed it on the day! I would have liked shots of it with the resident LBBGs and also flight shots. The bird was searched for the following weekend but not seen.
For many people, the real wildlife stars of the island are the seals and it was great to see people watching them from a safe distance so that they could comfortably haul out on the rocks. Exploring Irish Mammals by Tom Hayden and Rory Harrington tells us there are two species of seals in Ireland - Grey and Common - but the latter is the rarer of the two in Ireland! Key features of the larger Grey Seal include its long flat or convex "roman nose" - versus Common's shorter face with a concave profile. Up close, the shape of the nostril openings is also useful - almost parallel in Grey but V-shaped in Common. With one possible exception, the head shapes of all these seals match Grey Seal, as does the nostril shape where I can see it. The possible exception is the nearly black one in the seventh shot - a pup from last year I believe. On first look, the face appears to have a concave profile but I think that's just the angle of view and when I look at the nostrils closely, they don't meet at the bottom. According to Hayden & Harrington, the great variety of colours, as seen in this shot, is also consistent with Grey Seal. The degree of wetness of the animal also influences the coat's colour somewhat - note how slick the recently hauled out seal in the fourth shot is. Having said that, the wet and dry portions of the coats of the seals in the sixth shot aren't hugely different. Other clues to the identification of these animals as Grey Seals are range and habitat. A census of seals in Dublin in 2018 found that of about 120 seals found in the area, only 5-7 were Common seals and that most of these occur on North Bull Island - although one was seen in the Dalkey Island area. The intertidal sandflats of North Bull Island are also the favoured habitat of Common Seals, whereas Grey Seals prefer to haul out on rocky shores like Dalkey Island.
The other mammalian stars of Dalkey Island are the herd of feral - that is gone back to the wild - goats. These were first introduced to provide meat and milk to the builders of the Martello tower and battery. However, the current flock are not their descendants but a later introduction. Due to the small size of the island, they have suffered population crashes because of disease, starvation and perhaps inbreeding but as I said previously, nowadays the Co. Council supplements their winter feed with hay.
So that's it - I'll finish up with another sign - the one marking Lamb Island as off limits during the terns' summer breeding season. I learned a lot during my visit of a few hours but there's a lot more to see on future visits.
* Photography Info: I used my Canon 100-400 MkII lens mounted on a 7D MkII camera - sometimes supplemented with a 1.4x Mk III teleconverter to get almost 900mm (full frame equivalent) at f8 and still with autofocus on the central point. While this is a very versatile combo, I should stress that addition of the teleconverter, by limiting autofocus to the central point, makes it much harder to get long range shots of birds in flight. The speed of autofocusing is also much slower - and a delay of a tenth of a second is an eternity for flight shots! As I was travelling light with just binoculars, camera and lens- well relatively light - this lot still weighs 5kg - I used my Huawei P20 Pro for wide angle shots. I often do this in night mode - even in daylight! Night mode uses some sort of HDR (high dynamic range) to avoid blowing out detail in very contrasty midday scenes. These look a bit overdone on the phone screen but they're fine on the computer, especially if I reduce contrast and clarity a little in Lightroom.
** Acknowledgements Thanks to several birders who gave me additional information on the forms of Lesser Black-backed Gulls.
These moonshots – mainly around Dublin Bay – are my long-term photo project since 2008. Seeing one of them in front of so many people this morning makes up for the 3am summer starts and the freezing winter nights – although having said that, when I do get out there, I love being on own on the bay capturing the moonlit landscapes. You can see, and buy, many more of them at www.johncoveney.ie/moonscapes.
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Last February, I took my lads to west Donegal for a few days during mid-term and I hope to post some shots from that trip in the future. On the way home, we detoured during a winter afternoon’s fading light for a quick run to St John’s Point on the south Donegal coast - not to be mixed up with another St. John’s Point lighthouse on the south coast of Co. Down in Northern Ireland. There’s fairly typical Irish low-lying farmland along most of this little-known peninsula but it opens out to an area of exposed bare grassland at the tip – where there are magnificent views of the whole of Donegal Bay from Slieve League in the west to Mullaghmore and Ben Bulben in the south.
The light wasn’t great, and I only had time for a quick walk around, so I just took my phone. It was also cold, breezy and exposed so it would have been hard to keep the big camera steady on the tripod . . . and OK, OK, I was feeling just a bit lazy as well! But of course, my camera phone is not just any camera phone, it’s the Huawei P20 Pro – then the world’s best camera phone until it was overtaken by the recently launched P30 Pro. I was pretty pleased with the quality of most of these shots – all the more so since I didn’t use the phone’s RAW shooting capabilities, just JPEGs, albeit improved a little afterwards in Lightroom.
Here’s my first image, a Panorama that I stitched in Lightroom from a series of phone shots. As the lighthouse had not come on at that stage, I used Photoshop to composite in the flash from one of my later shots. On the knoll in the background is the World War II watch station were two crews, of two men each, did twelve-hour coast watches from 1939 until the war’s end in 1945.
Next is a view of the lighthouse compound with Slieve League to the west in in the background. This is followed by a view of Ben Bulben to the south. If you look closely you can see just the castle at Mullaghmore underneath and to the left of Ben Bulben’s nose. The quality of the Slieve League shot is not as good as the others, but I’ve included it to tell the story of the Point's views.
Next are two closer views of the lighthouse.
Finally, as I walked back around the outer wall of the compound to the car, I came on this view of the lighthouse through a closed gateway. The relatively sheltered ground between the wall and the Lighthouse would probably have been used by the lightkeepers to grow potatoes and vegetables before all Irish lighthouses were automated since the 1990’s.
You can get more information on this hidden corner of Donegal at these links from Great Lighthouses of Ireland, the Wild Atlantic Way and the Commissioners of Irish Lights. There’s much more information on the EIRE signs and the associated watch stations at these links from Eire Markings, Coast Monkey, an RTE video and an Irish Times report on the restoration of a similar sign in Co. Dublin, and a list of all the signs and watch stations on Wikipedia.
In my view, the St John’s Point sign is one of the most interesting because it’s directly underneath the route that was taken by wartime British aircrews using the Donegal Corridor. This was a shortcut to the Battle of the Atlantic, across the Republic of Ireland from Belleek to Ballyshannon. It was used by RAF flying boats based at Castle Archdale on Lower Lough Erne in Fermanagh in Northern Ireland. These flying boats located and sank, or helped sink, hundreds of German U-boats and warships – most notably the Bismarck. If they had not, the German Navy would probably have strangled the Allied war effort and its marine supply lines from the USA - and D-Day may never have happened.
Despite our neutral status, Ireland’s wartime Taoiseach, Eamon De Valera, agreed to the Donegal Corridor when he was under intense pressure from Britain and the USA to join the Allied war effort. As the war progressed, our neutrality leaned increasingly towards the Allies. However, in January 1941, before the USA entered World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December, the war’s outcome was far from clear.
Irish neutrality during World War II was and is controversial because we did not join in the fight against the brutal fascist dictatorships of Europe. On the other hand, we would have been allying ourselves with the British Empire against which we fought a bitter War of Independence only twenty years earlier – as well as with the brutal communist dictatorship in the USSR! Ironically, as I write this, there’s a discussion on the radio on whether the use of Shannon Airport by US forces on their way to the Middle East and Afghanistan compromises our neutrality in 2019!
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The final series of Game of Throne kicks off today, so here's are a few shots of the real Dragonstone that I got on my holidays in the Basque Country in July 2018. In reality, its the islet of Gazteugatxe - and no I haven't a clue how to pronounce it either!- near the town of Bermeo - more at The Best of the Basque County Guide. The chapel on top, Gaztelugatxeko Doniene or (San Juan de Gaztelugatxe in Spanish) is dedicated to St. John the Baptist who is even reputed to have visited! It has been rebuilt several times and originally dates from the 10th century . . . when maybe there were dragons! It has been used as a defensive refuge by the Lords of Biscay and it was also attacked by Sir Francis Drake who looted it and the threw the hermit living there into to sea! Unexpectedly, of course, it was also raided by the Spanish Inquisition looking for witches who were reputed to hold ritualistic meetings there.
The first two shots were taken on my first visit there during the day when my son & I climbed the 241 steps in 80m to the hermitage. The first one is a stitched panorama taken for 10 seconds at f16 and 17mm at ISO 100 with my Lee Filters "nine-stop" combination (6 stop Little Stopper plus the top end of 3 stop graduated filter). The second one is an automated panorama I made with my Huawei P20Pro as we started back down. As they were daytime shots, I had to clone out quite a few people!
This was such an incredible site that I went back early the following morning to get the remaining three "golden hour" shots. On this north facing coastline, the sun rises high enough over the landward hills to light up the islet at about 6am. The third and fifth shots were exposed for 120 seconds at f11 & f16 with the same combination of filters, while exposure of the bridge arches was for 30 seconds.
So here are 26 shots I like from Sunday’s event on 29 July 2018. There's many fewer than in my previous posts as I was experimenting. I particular, there were lots of duds when trying to combine the planes and the rides. The main trick in doing these was use a small aperture - typically f16 to try to get both rides and planes sharp or nearly sharp. As a consequence, I needed to use high ISO of about 1600 to maintain high shutter speeds of around 1/1,00th of a second.
The Red Arrows at Mach 1, . . . well nearly!
High Flying with the Red Arrows.
High flying with the 75-year-old Catalina PBY-5A.
Which way is up? With the Blades Aerobatic Team
Huawei P20 Pro mobile phone shot of the Red Arrows
Round and round with the Red Arrows
An acrobatic flyer at the Bray Air Display
Aer Lingus's 1936 Shamrock
The Blades Aerobatic Team
Pitts Special S2S the "Muscle Biplane"
Pitts Special S2S the "Muscle Biplane" - with Bray Head in the background.
The Blades Aerobatic Team with Bray Head Acrobatic Team
Spectators watching the Bray Air Display
Crowds at the Bray Air Display
Scary Chairy Planes!
A Hairy Ride!
Even Hairier!
A stylish pair!
Adam Banks from Kimmage, Lorraine O'Reilly from Ballybrack and Dave Rogers from Beaumont.
Daniel Michalik, Aneta Malanowska and their twin daughters Nadia and Ines, from Navan and Poland.
Charles Chamburuka, Constance, Chamburuka, Erinora Makunike, Ethel Makunike and Andrew Makunike, from Newbridge and Zimbabwe.
Darren Delaney, Thomas Kinsella, Jessica Delaney, Barbara Delaney, Mikey Campbell and Martin Delaney (seated), from Windsor.
Megan Cleary from Mayo, Connor Parker from Dublin & Auckland New Zealand, abd Sarah Clune.
Dimei Lai from China and Charlene Tam from Hong Kong, both working in Dublin
Dimei Lai from China and Charlene Tam from Hong Kong
Oh the wildlife shot - an adult Mediterranean Gull moulting out of breeding plumage - calmly flying past in "airshow - what airshow?" mode.
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As part of my preparations though, I went back and looked at my shots for the last lunar eclipse in Dublin – an effort that I never got around to blogging about until now. Both timeanddate.com and space.com provide excellent information on celestial events and they told me that the partial phase of the eclipse began at 2.07am and the total phase was between 3.11am and 4.23am with the maximum at 3.47am. There was an additional penumbral phase at the start and end when the moon was in the edges of the earth’s shadow but during this stage, the shading is so light that it is hard to see any difference in the brightness of the Moon. Unfortunately, I slept it out on the night in question, so my sequence starts just after the maximum at 3.54am and I finished around the end of the partial phase at 5.34am – still in a totally dark sky (for Dublin) because astronomical twilight did not start until 5.22am. At the time I had little idea on how to do an eclipse time lapse and I made several mistakes on the night, hence my title on how NOT to do this!
For the 2018 eclipse, I also read up from several sources that give lots of tips and ideas for different kinds of eclipse shots as follows: -
- A handy introduction from Wikihow.
- A good overview from Photography Life.
- An interesting article from Dahlia Ambrose at Lightstalking.
- 22 tips from B&H.
- And old article dealing with film from Weatherscapes - with useful exposure tables.
- Another old one going back to film days from Fred Espenak at Mr Eclipse - and a variant of this published by Nikon.
- A spectacular one minute video time-lapse over several hours by Jean-Luc Dauvergne.
The first step in photographing any eclipse is finding a good location to shoot it from. The Photographers Ephemeris told me that the from the North Bull Wall, the moon would be over the Poolbeg chimneys – one of my favourite locations for moonshots in Dublin.
Once I finally got there, my camera settings for totality, or blood moon phase when its much darker, were 8 seconds at f8 and ISO 1600 at 37mm on a Canon EFS 18-55mm lens mounted on Canon 7D Mark II. Here’s a shot of my setup on what was a very clear calm night – note the camera in vertical mode on the tripod, my cable release to make sure there was no vibration when doing the exposures, and my camera bag hanging off the tripod further dampen vibration.
During totality, I used the 500 rule, as explained by David Kingham on Petapixel, to make sure the moon’s motion did not cause it to blur. In my case, the exposure length multiplied by the focal length and the 1.6 crop factor came to 473 – i.e. just little less than 500. As always for night shots, I level up everything before I start, and I focus at 10x in live view with both image stabilisation and autofocus off. Here's a single exposure from the sequence.
During the partial eclipse phase, I kept the aperture at f8 and started at 2 seconds at f8 and ISO 200 dropping to 0.25 second at ISO 100 by the end. My goal was to get both the bright and dark part of the moon but this precluded getting detail in the bright part. I decided this wasn’t that important given how small the moon was in the frame anyway. Nowadays, I have two cameras and a tripod for each, so next time I might try dual exposures with settings for both the light and dark parts of the moon, although this would further complicate the stacking.
Once I had the shots in Lightroom, it was quickly clear that a shot during totality when the exposure of the moon was approximately balanced with the nightscape should form the base shot. As in many of my moonshots, I adjusted the white balance toward the blue end, in this case around 2250 Kelvin to get a blue-orange balance between the sky and floodlit areas that I like. I also added a graduated filter in Lightroom over the bottom to tone done the floodlit buildings and to open up the shadows – as well as adding some clarity and sharpness. Sharpening was set to about 100 and masking to about 50 with noise reduction to about 60. Back then, I tended to use the Camera Landscape calibration but nowadays I prefer to start from Adobe Standard because I find the Camera landscape option a bit garish. These develop settings were copied to the remaining 24 shots in the sequence. Subsequently, I changed the white balance setting to auto for the partial phase shots because I thought the settings from the total phase made the moon a bit too blue.
Once the shots were processed in Lightroom, I prepared the final shot in Photoshop as follows: -
- Export all 24 shots as JPEGs, resizing to 2,400 pixels on the long side. My moderately high spec Dell XPS 8500 desktop with a i7-3770 3.40GHz and 16GB of Ram (well it as fairly high spec when I bought it in 2013!) would struggle to stack 24 full-resolution JPEGs. To help keep track of the layers in Photoshop, I numbered the filenames in Lightroom’s export module.
- Export the base shot again as a full resolution JPEG – typically the first one- and label it no. 1. This file needs to be full resolution as it will comprise most of the image whereas the lower resolution of the moon exposures won’t be noticeable because they are so small in the frame.
- Reimport these files into Lightroom and then do Photo > Edit in > Edit as Layers in Photoshop. If you have numbered your files correctly, your base layer will be on top and the rest of the exposures will be in layers in start to finish order. You can also get these files into Photoshop in layers using Bridge - use Tools > Photoshop > Load Files into Photoshop Layers.
- Note that the base layer will be in a much bigger canvas because it is full resolution image. Hit Ctrl O to fit this layer in your window.
- Select the top layer with your base image & decrease its opacity to about 50% so that you can see the next layer.
- Select Free Transform using Ctrl T and drag the bottom right corner of the top layer until it is the same size as the next layer. Hold the Shift key while doing this to maintain the aspect ration (relative proportions) of the top layer. When you are done, reset the opacity of Layer 1 to 100%. This will align the top layer with the rest of the layers without losing any its pixels.
- Do a rough crop to the size of layer 2 while holding the Shift key to maintain proportions.
- Hit Ctrl 1 to maximise the cropped image in your window and fine tune the crop to align the image size in Layer 2.
- Select all layers and set the Blend mode to Lighten – this simple trick shows the lighter moons from all the layers in the top layer. Note, that my sequence is not properly aligned because I accidentally moved the tripod in the dark due to rushing because I was late. I also did not know the correct shot intervals to space out the moon exposures properly – next time I would do an exposure every five minutes or so. The key thing is to have an alarm on a timer so that you stick to the same interval between shots throughout the eclipse. If your camera has intervalometer you may also be able to set it up to shoot automatically – but it would be best to practice this in advance!
- Turn layers on and off to identify near duplicates and delete those you don’t want to reduce the final file size.
- Use Free Transforms (Ctrl T) to move layers around with the arrow keys to line up the moons and position them approximately equidistant from each other - other than layer 1 with the full res version. Again, turn layers on and off to see which exposures you are working with. This step is only necessary of you have not been able to keep your tripod in the one position for the entire eclipse. However, it is important that several shots are shot with the tripod in the same position to keep establish the line of the moon’s travel during the eclipse. Finally, be sure to preserve the relative order of the exposures so that the sequence looks natural.
- Because of all the Free Transforms, the ground in the shots is now in many different positions so a mask to show only the moons must be applied to all layers other than the top one to deal with this.
- Zoom in on the moon in a layer other than top layer and select one of the red moons. For this image, Magic Wand settings of Tolerance 30 and Contiguous worked well. Contiguous is important to avoid selecting similar tones on other parts of the image such as the ground. I modified the selection by applying a three-pixel smoothing and expansion and a five-pixel feather – you may need to tweak these selection modifications to ensure that the moons coming through from lower layers blend well with the top layer.
- Ensure your foreground is set to black an add a layer mask, this will hide all of the layer other than the moon itself. If you want to reduce your file sizes, you can permanently delete the parts of these layers that you don’t want by Applying the masks – but it might be better to wait until the end to do this unless your computer is really struggling.
- This masking darkened the moons a little – I’m not sure why, but I dealt with that later with Lightroom tweaks of the final image. To get the Moon in the top layer to match these darkened moons, I also selected it and darkened it slightly with a localised Brightness and Contrast adjustment layer.
- Repeat steps 13 and 14 with all the moon exposures – this is the most tedious part of the procedure. Even if you didn’t have to do the Free Transforms in Step 11, these masks will be necessary as the exposures of the ground will differ as the eclipse progresses. Sometimes saving a selection from a previous layer and moving it with Transform Selection worked and this speeded things up a bit – although I sometimes I had to reapply the feather.
- As you work on doing these moon selections at high zoom, you may also see that some of your Free Transforms positions from Step 11 need tweaking.
- When I was working on the masks for the exposures in the partial eclipse phase, it was easier to use the elliptical marquee tool with the Shift key down to make a circular selection based on the bight crescent.
- In one case, a moved moon ended up behind a star so the star was cloned out.
Once the image was completed, I brought it back into Lightroom for some final tweaks including boosting the whites to make the partial phase moon exposures a bit brighter. I also added another graduated filter to the bottom to cancel out the effect of this on the buildings. OK, I think I’ll stop the photoshoppery now!
Overall and despite the various issues, I am pleased with this image. Despite arriving late, I got exposures from the peak of the eclipse to the end of the partial phase and I think the composition works well with the Poolbeg chimneys. Because of all the transformations, it not a scientifically accurate record but I’m happy with it as a picture of a special night out for me.
This shot is available to purchase in my new land and seascapes gallery– prices are in the gallery.
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Anyway, I headed for the Great South Wall in Poolbeg yesterday morning as a spell of wet weather with southeasterly winds arrived at high tide. As it was only a neap tide, I wasn’t expecting the pier to be overtopped by the waves like on a previous visit, but I still hoped there might be a nice long exposure shot to be had. When I arrived however, I could see a jogger heading out along the pier, so I rushed to get set up on my usual perch in the shelter of the blockhouse in the last car park - and I wasn’t disappointed as there was spray sheeting across the pier as he ran back. It wasn’t dangerous, but I was glad it was him out there and not me! The exposure was for 1/250th of a second at f/5.6, and ISO 400 at 220mm, using a Canon 7D Mark II and a Canon 100-400mm Mark I. Thanks to StenaLine for the loan of the ferry!
Once the jogger had gone, I settled down for the original target - some long exposure shots. After some playing around, I found that relatively short exposures of about 0.5 to 1 second worked best to show the spray well while retaining some movement in the waves – longer exposures smoothed things out too much. And of course, the relatively short exposure only slightly blurred the ship – thanks this time to P&O for their freight ferry! The exposure this time was for 0.6 seconds at f/9.0, ISO 200 at 190mm, with the camera mounted on a tripod and with a Lee Little Stopper (6 stop) Filter on the lens.
For the final shot, I wanted just a bit more context than I could get in a single frame, so I took three shots to make a stitched panorama in Lightroom – here’s an excellent tutorial on doing these from Photography Life. The exposure was for 1 second at f/13, ISO 200 at 320mm – again on the tripod and with the Little Stopper. All the edits were done Lightroom i.e. cropping, white balance, exposure, contrast, dodging & burning, and minor levelling adjustments. In particular. I used Lightroom’s graduated filters for dodging using both the exposure and dehaze sliders to emphasise the spray. I used the Radial filter to emphasize the jogger by darkening him.
These shots are available to purchase in my New Land and Seascapes gallery.
]]>As usual, I turned to The Photographer's Ephemeris which showed me this good alignment looking north east from Myrtleville over Roches Point Lighthouse at the mouth of the harbour. When I arrived, I was delighted to find a perfect full Moon in a clear sky - the line up worked best from just outside the well known Bunnyconnellan Restaurant. I exposed the first shot for two seconds at f16 and ISO 100 at 190mm using my Canon 100-400mm MkI lens on a Canon 7DMkII - as always on a tripod for these long exposures. Using the 500 rule and taking account of my crop sensor, 2 seconds is about the longest shutter speed I can use to keep the moon sharp at a focal length of around 200mm.
Once I had this shot, I walked back towards Myrtleville Beach to see people playing at the waters edge - eventually one of them stood still for long enough to make a sharp silhouette against the reflected moonlight. This second shot was was exposed for 1.3 seconds at f11 at ISO 800 at 250mm. It was taken at 5.16pm, twenty three minutes after the previous image which was itself taken twenty minutes after sunset. Note how there is almost four stops less light in the second shot taken at the end of civil twilight than in the earlier shot taken in the middle of civil twilight - three for the difference in ISO and one for the difference in aperture. Actually, its a little bit less because of the slightly shorter exposure. I guess the difference would actually be a bit more if there wasn't a full moon.
The final shot was taken from the beach itself at 5.40pm for 30 seconds at f11, ISO200 at 28mm using the EFS 17-55mm lens. By this time, well into nautical twilight, it's impossible to avoid blowing out the moon and I'm not worried about the 500 rule because its just a blob anyway. Instead I want a good long exposure to smooth the sea. I was complaining recently that I didn't get many moonshots in 2017 and I'm normally very pleased if a twilight trip nets a single good shot - so I'm thrilled to get three on a single evening on the first day of the year. Hopefully its a good omen as there will be thirteen full moons in 2018. As the next one on January 31st will the second of the month, it's a so-called blue moon - although it will be just the same colour as normal in this part of the world, at least. In Asia, Australia and North America this "blue moon" will also coincide with a total lunar eclipse so it will actually be a much redder moon than normal - a "blood moon".
I'd like to wish all the reader's of this blog A Happy New Year - hopefully the light will continue to win out over the dark for 2018!
I didn't add that many images to my moonshots project in 2017, with cloudy weather not helping on several occasions. Here are three that I did like. The first is a crescent moon taken at dawn on a February morning with an Offshoot group - I previously blogged about it here. The two remaining shots were from early November. The first, the Hunters Moon, was taken in Dublin Docklands as it set behind the Samuel Beckett Bridge and The Spire. It was published on the back page of the Irish Examiner a few days later. The second was a very different image taken that evening in Dalkey. It was too cloudy to get a good image at moonrise but as the Moon moved higher into a clearer sky, a tree in Dillon Park was well silhouetted against the moonlit water of Dalkey Sound. All three images are available to purchase here.
For sale at www.johncoveney.ie/new-landscapes .
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I got this image at about 7-10m with my Canon 7D Mark II and 100-400mm Mark I lens using aperture priority and auto ISO. I also set the minimum shutter speed to 1/1,000th of a second – high shutter speeds are essential for small birds because they often seem to have a sort of a shudder that causes motion blur. With the aperture set to 5.6, the widest available at 400mm, the ISO automatically went to 1600. This may seem high, but it’s not a problem for modern DSLRs – and even 3200 or 6400 are worth it to get a sharp image. I recently become a convert to using Auto ISO because there’s no messing trying to change settings if the light changes. This especially important if I only get a few seconds to get a shot of rarity as was the case here. Today, the light was fairly flat and I was shooting at ground level, so I used evaluative metering – the camera’s automatic option. If I was shooting a small bird against the sky, I would use spot metering to ebsure the bird was not too dark. Finally, I used the smallest spot focus – the tiny box inside the small box in the viewfinder. This can be harder to get on your subject but with so much clutter from the surrounding vegetation, I needed to be sure I was getting a single focus point on the bird.
Before I got the shot of the Red-throated Pipit, we had a few false alarms with Meadow Pipits and this allowed me to get a comparison shot under similar conditions. The Meadow Pipit was a bit further away so I’ve cropped it to about 1/16th of the area of original versus about 1/8th for the Red-throated to make them look approximately equally in this comparison shot. In life, the Meadow Pipit is marginally larger but the difference is not likely to be noticeable in the field. The key point of the comparison, however, is to show the much more contrasty look of the Red-throated Pipit and the strong wedge-shaped mark on the lower side of the throat. The edges of the tertials, just visible on the birds lower back are also noticeable paler than on the Meadow Pipit. As is the case with so many first-year migrants, this bird does not show the eponymous red throat other than a hint of buff in the centre. Only adults show the full feature. To finish, I was well pleased to get good shots of a difficult bird that I’ve only ever seen in flight previously.
]]>It was also great to see all the other panels, especially the successful Fellowship panels from Catherine & Scott MacBride - clearly the best photographic couple in Ireland! Sadly, two other panels from my club, Offshoot, did not make it through today but they were close enough that I’m sure they will do so next time.
I’d like to thank the following for help with my panel :-
- My family for giving me time, space and encouragement for photography.
- Steve Crozier of 360DPI and Offshoot for loads of advice and for mounting the prints to his ever-high standard.
- Sheldon Fine Art Papers from whom I bought my Epson R3000 printer, printer ink and Canson paper. I used Canson Photosatin for my test prints and Canson Baryta for the panel prints
- Fellow Offshoot members Matt O’Brien and Olive Gaughan for reviewing drafts of the panel as well as all the Offshooters for their encouragement over the last six or seven years.
I’d also like to thank all the IPF for running the distinctions process and Carlow Photographic Society for hosting today’s session
OK – enough of the tearful speeches! Here’s the statement and the panel shots.
I've been lucky enough to see a total eclipse previously - myself and herself took advantage of a fairly cheap Ryanair flight to Beauvais to catch the 1999 one over northern France - and a weekend in Paris didn't go amiss either! As I didn't have a decent camera then, I'll have to catch at least one more! Maybe, the next American one in April 2024 - and the American annular eclipse in October 2023 would also be spectacular. Closer to home, the next big dates for Europe are in Aug 2026 when a total eclipse will sweep over western Iceland and northern Spain - a good place to see this would on Majorca low in the evening sky where totality will be about 20 minutes before sunset. In August 2027, a monster eclipse will sweep over the extreme south of Spain, and continue through north Africa and Arabia. Over the Straits of Gibralter, it will last almost five minutes and a whopping 6 minutes and 22 seconds in Luxor in Egypt - the second longest of the 21st century. The longest was in 2009 was only 17 seconds longer and the longest ever eclipse will be in 2186 at 7 minutes and 39 seconds. Most eclipses last one to two minutes depending on how close you are to the centre line - and they are over far too quickly! Sadly, I'll be long gone before the next total eclipse in Ireland in 2090 - it will start about teatime on 23 September if you think you might catch it! Totality will clip the extreme south west of Cork & Kerry and last almost one and three quarter minutes at two of my favourite birding haunts at Mizen Head and on Cape Clear. Maybe my kids might live long enough to be there for me!
Anyway, when I realized there was going to be no eclipse shots, I saw there would be a nice blue hour panorama of the Samuel Becket Bridge and the Convention Centre - with still water in the river and no wind to shake the tripod. Although, I've shooting in Dublin's Docklands for years, I haven't previously done this shot. Because it has been been done by so many others, I wanted to get a good one and I'm pretty happy with this blue hour effort with strong reflections sweeping from the bridge to the Convention Centre, onto the PWC buidling, and finishing at the Cill Airne restaurant boat. It's a Lightroom stitch of six vertical shots using the Canon EFS 10-22mm lens. Each was was exposed for 30 seconds on a tripod at f16, ISO 100 at 22mm. I cropped the resultant panorama to a 3:1 ratio, made some exposure adjustments to brighten it a bit and cloned out a few cranes. Email me at [email protected] if you would like to purchase a print.
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I was happy enough to drive my ancient jeep through the sheets of salty spray in to get into position - but it never fails to amaze me how many people will drive their flash motors through such conditions - not to mention the numbers of walkers, cyclists and dogs willing to get soaked . . . actually, I suppose the dogs didn't have a choice! Just as I was setting up with the Canon 70-200mm lens - safely tucked up warm and dry in my jeep, a guy and his kid cycled across. It's probably just as well that I didn't get that shot as I would have had to decide if I should send it to social services :-)
It wasn't all drama and waves though - the spray also made a fab low rainbow!
Three of us met at 5.50 am on the East Pier in Dun Laoghaire just as the first hint of dawn was appearing in the eastern sky. The westerly gusts of yesterday had dropped to a moderate breeze but we were glad to use the top wall of the pier to shelter ourselves from the chill and to minimize the risk of tripod vibration. The crescent Moon was due to rise at 6.14am but the usual bank of cloud on Irish horizons meant it did not break through until about ten minutes later. We got several shots over the next half an hour or so, as it rose over The Muglins, the Forty-foot and the distinctive silhouette of Joyce's Tower & Museum in Sandycove. Then the sky brightened so much that the thin crescent was barely visible and that was it!
Irish news site The Journal.ie used the second shot to illustrate its morning article on the aftermath of Storm Doris.
I then heard from the Dublin Bus guy at Crinken of tree down in Quinsborough Road so I headed down there for a the second series of shots.
Clear up of fallen trees at Crinken Church in Shankill
Clear up of fallen trees and power lines on Quinsborough Road in Bray
Riders approaching our chosen fence.
Some of the Offshoot crew.
When we arrived, I was a bit worried about the the misty conditions but the neutral flat lighting was ideal to keep the focus on the action and to highlight the details of the horses and jockeys. I used my Canon 70-200mm f4 lens mostly, from a prone position to get mostly sky in the background. ISO values were typically in the range 800 to 2500 to get shutter speeds in excess of 1/1000th of a second at f4. As the bunch of horses pass in a few seconds, the high speed burst rate of 10 frames per second on my Canon 7D mark II shooting rate is a gift. I set the white balance to cloudy with a few minor tweaks afterwards in Lightroom. I then added contrast using the basic panel in Lightroom to adjust shadows, highlights and clipping, followed by some clarity and vibrance.
There were six races between 1 and 3.30pm with three circuits in each race - meaning I had eighteen chances to learn from my mistakes . . . ahem . . . not that I'm admitting to any such thing, of course! OK, OK, I had about one keeper in ten from the day :-). You can also check out Healy Racing's coverage of the day here.
A series of shots at a fence on the downhill run.
In the gaps between the races we chatted with and got a few shots of the stewards.
A second series of shots at an uphill fence approaching the finish
Trying a few panning shots
A finally, a shot of the outing leader, Mike Smith with one of the steward's horses. Check out his take on the day on his Flickr stream. Thanks Mike.
"I am not against the redevelopment of the site in principle but the nature and scale of the proposed development raises serious concerns for me as follows:
- It would interfere with the traditional boating and fishing activities and infrastructure of the harbour.
- It would interfere with the existing public access to the area – one of the few spots along this heavily developed coast where there is public access. On this point, I note the level of public access to the coast was considerably reduced with the loss of the Dalkey Island Hotel to apartments at Coliemore Harbour some years back. This public access is very important for families, walkers, swimmers, photographers, nature lovers etc.
- The scale of the development is much too large in the context of the existing building and uses.
- It would be exposed to north easterly gales and storms."
I illustrated my objection with photographs I've taken there over nearly ten years. Hopefully the planners in Dun Laoaghaire Rathdown Co. Council will bin this daft proposal - and the developers will replace it with something much smaller that fits into the existing scale of the Harbour. Given the Harbour is surrounded by dense suburbia, surely the traditional and public use of this small but stunning Harbour can be maintained. In any case, if there is an appeal to An Bord Pleanala, now that I have my objection in at the local level, I'll be able to have my say.
Sunset panoramic view of the Harbour on 3 Apr 2013 – showing the existing scale of the site.
Another View of the Harbour on 3 Apr 2013 – showing the existing scale of the site.
Gulls at the Harbour on a wet day on 16 Aug 2008
A Cormorant at the Harbour on 28 March 2009
If "Crabs Could Fly" the Irish Photographic Federation "Nature Photograph of the Year" in 2014 (taken 2 March 2011)
http://www.johncoveney.ie/blog/2014/2/-crabs-might-fly-is-a-winner
Grey Seals at Bulloch Harbour on 8 Nov 2010
Use of Bulloch Harbour by Boats on 16 Aug 2008
"Bringing in the Catch" at Bulloch Harbour on 11 Dec 2016.
“Saving the Boats” during a northeast gale at Bulloch Harbour on 30 Dec 2009
“Have a Seat” – during a northeast gale at Bulloch Harbour on 30 Dec 2009
"Pilot View” – during a northeast gale at Bulloch Harbour on 30 Dec 2009
“Have a Seat 2” – during a northeast gale at Bulloch Harbour on 30 Dec 2009
Northeast gale at Bulloch Harbour on 9 Nov 2010
Northeast gale at Bulloch Harbour on 11 Mar 2013
Bulloch Harbour during the big snow on 24 Dec 2010
Hire boats at Bulloch Harbour during the big snow on 24 Dec 2010 (when they are not in use during the winter, they are stored on the pier).
The blue cottage at Bulloch Harbour during the big snow 24 Dec 2010. The sheds to the left are part of the former Western Marine premises. The cottage would be dwarfed by the proposed development.
Colourful scout and fishing sheds at Bulloch Harbour during the big snow 24 Dec 2010 - these would be lost if the proposed development goes ahead.
Nocturnal view of the Bulloch Harbour hire boats during the big snow on 20 Dec 2010.
“A Rock of a Man” at Bulloch Harbour 29 Aug 2016
http://www.johncoveney.ie/blog/2016/9/a-rock-of-a-man-at-bulloch-harbour
These shots taken from the shelter of the steps on the north side of the blockhouse at the base of the pier - be prepared to get get VERY WET from spray on the way out in these conditions!! I used my backup 17-85mm Canon lens and my old Canon 7D Mark1 - no way I was using my best gear in today! The settings were f5.6, ISO 1600 at focal lengths of 22-26mm in aperture priority. As the light varied as shower clouds came and went, the shutter speeds ranged from 1/640th to 1/3,200th of a second. Had I used f11 instead of f5.6 I might have got the lighthouse a bit sharper but I had the camera and lens wrapped up in a rain sleeve similar to this, and it was just too difficult in the conditions to be messing with settings!
Calmer conditions in March 2012 with the 100-400mm at 250mm at f11 &ISO 200 on the tripod.
Updated on 9 Feb 2017 with screenshots of press usage
RTE - here
The Journal - here.
Afloat - here
SAFETY WARNING: There are under surface rocks in parts of The Forty Foot that have caused serious injuries. Check the signs on site before jumping or diving, especially at low tide when the drop is much higher and the water is shallower. There are no lifeguards on duty at Christmas. Here's some good advice from the Irish Water Safety Council - in short, Get In, Get Out, & Get Warm.
I was able to get a perch on a wall for clear shots with the 100-40mm lens – mostly at about 200mm but 400mm was useful for getting the shock on peoples’ faces as they resurfaced! Typical settings in aperture priority were 1/1,000 to 1/2,000th of a second, f8 and ISO 800. For the first series of shots, I used the Lightroom print module to compile collages – as I did previously for my post on how I shot Ladies Day at Navan Racecourse. In the second series, below, I got in much closer with my wide angle 10-22mm lens and composited them in Photoshop – more about that later in the post.
That brass monkey expression!
Here’s some detail on doing the collages with the Lightroom Print Module (Ctrl P). I typically start off with built-in templates such as Triptych or Custom 2 over 1. Using the Page Setup button on the bottom left, I usually select A4 and chose Landscape or Portrait as required. For the triptych option, the selected photos normally load automatically and you can tweak the layout with the Layout panel controls on the right hand side – using margins, page grid, cell spacing and cell size. You may also wish to de-tick the Keep Square box. If you wish, you can watermark each shot in the layout in the Page Panel (I put a single water mark on the whole collage with my website's built in facilities). In the Print Job panel, select Print to: JPEG File and then 100ppi, Quality 85, and sRGB for web outputs. Finally hit Print to File and select the destination for the files. A key tip is to use Ctrl Drag to re-position your images within their placeholders. Here’s quick tutorial on printing to file by Adobe’s Julieanne Kost.
Brrrrrrrr!
The Custom 2 over 1 operates a little differently, but I’m not sure why. Anyway for this one, use F6 to open the filmstrip and then drag your shots into the place holders. The Layout panel is replaced by the Cells panel from where you can select and adjust each cell individually. Another useful tip for collages is to use Alt Drag to duplicate cells – e.g. to change the layout to 3 over 1. Once the layout is done, print it to file as before. If you think you will use these modified templates again, you can save them to the User folder in the Template Browser on the left hand side.
This is not going to be pleasant!
Friends doing it together!
Gravity assisted updo!
Was this actually a good idea??
Here's a quick interlude of non-composites - the first one being the obligatory "tough guy selfie-taking" shot!
With all that salt water splashing around - protective eyewear was a must!
There were also good looking photographers there!
Once, I had enough long shots, I went in closer to try wide angle views in the 10 to 13mm range using my Canon EFS 10-22mm lens. As before, the settings were around 1/1,000 of a second, f8 and ISO 800. After reviewing my initial bursts on the camera’s LCD, I realized that shooting at the camera’s low burst rate of three frames per second would allow me to composite the images in Photoshop. Using the high rate of 10 frames per second resulted in sequences where the images of the swimmers overlapped. While it is possible to use the high burst rate and then select every second or third image, this adds work. The other trick is to keep the camera as steady as possible so that the frames are approximately aligned – Photoshop then aligns them precisely later.
Of course I had to start with someone in a Santy Hat!
I managed to get the actual plunge here. No suggestion of him trying to impress the girls - of course!
Back in the office, I tweaked one of my images for exposure and contrast in Lightroom. I also did an auto transform to level the horizon and then I copied all these settings to the rest the images that would be composited. For individual sequences, I then used the Lightroom command Photo > Edit In > Open as Layers in Photoshop. For convenience, you need to have current versions of Lightroom and Photoshop to move images seamlessly between the programs. The first step in Photoshop was to select all the layers and chose Edit > Auto-align layers > Auto. This aligned the rock and the horizon but ignored the jumpers in the differing positions in the frames.
This guy got impressive lift on his jump!
Next chose which image you want as the base image – typically with a good background that is either not distracting or has a secondary point of interest. Move this to the bottom of the stack, then add a white layer mask to each of the remaining layers, and then hit the eye symbol to hide each masked layer. Next select and make the second layer visible, memorize the position of the swimmer, select the layer mask and change it to black with Ctrl I. A black mask hides the whole layer, so now chose a brush (B) with 0% hardness and with white in the foreground and black in the background. With the brush foreground selected, brush the person back in (you will see a white hole in the layer mask). Using 0% hardness gives a seamless blend of the components from the different layers. If you overdo it, press X to swop the brush to black and remove the bit you didn’t want. Repeat for each layer and then save back to Lightroom for final exposure tweaks and cropping.
Of course such a high jump into cold water is not for girls!
Karumba!!!
If the figures from the differing layers are very close to each other or even overlapping slightly, change the brush to 50-60% hardness and zoom in for final tweaking. If there are overlaps from different layers, I choose to bring elements from the later frames to the front. I did try Edit > Autoblend layers but this didn’t work well for me – the automatically generated masks were much more complicated and were applied to other parts of the image.
I kept shooting here until she resurfaced
The quickest updo in town!
Dive sequences were a bit more difficult due to overlap at the start - until gravity speeded things up!
This guy got off his marks a bit quicker!
It was much harder to get it right when there was more than one person - unless they synchronized well. I was unable to get any groups of three to work.
Finally, I was very happy with this duo - as well as catching the girl on the rock looking at me.
So that’s it – once you try these compositing techniques, they're much less complicated than they sound – although having a feel for layer masks in Photoshop is useful. And if I can do it, it can't be that hard!!
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Today, December 21st 2016, is the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, – and in Ireland, all eyes turn to Newgrange. This 5,200-year-old prehistoric monument is world famous because the interior chamber is illuminated for a few minutes around 9 AM as the rising sun clears hills to the southeast. As I write this, however, the radio is full of chatter because of new claims that the alignment actually dates from the reconstruction work in the 1960’s and 1970’s!! It will be interesting to see how this argument plays out*. Sadly, the radio is also reporting that cloud, yet again, spoiled this morning’s show.
(* See these pictures from the 1930's and 1950's and a statement from the Office of Public works stressing their view that the alignment of the roof box was in place before the reconstruction work. This post on the Shadows and Stone blog provides much more detail supporting the current alignment being the same as the ancient alignment.)
Anyway, I was oblivious to all this when I headed up there last Sunday, the 18th, to see the solstice celebrations for myself . . . hang on you say, wasn’t I three days too early? Well . . . no, because the sunbeam shines in for several days around the solstice when the position of sunrise "stands still". Newgrange's visitor centre at Brú na Bóinne runs an annual lottery for places in the chamber from the 18th to the 23rd. It’s also probable that the chamber is partly illuminated for a few more days on either side of these dates but the site is not open at sunrise then.
Anyway on the 18th with clear skies forecast, and even without one of the precious lottery tickets, I thought there would be opportunities for good landscape and people shots. And, I wasn’t disappointed! There was wonderful colour in the sky when I arrived contrasting with the controversial 1970’s reconstruction of the quartz south face of the monument. You can see here what Newgrange looked like before that - at least during the last 300 years or so - nobody knows for sure what it looked like when it was built!
Red Sky at Newgrange
Visitors arriving.
The sun comes out!
This is going to be a good one!
Clouds in just in the right place!
Of course, no modern celebration is complete without selfie shots! Some grumble at this but why shouldn’t people enjoy themselves and capture their memories on a special day?
The sun is now blinding and people turn to look into the passageway to the chamber.
And get their phones out!
Lots of phones!
Even from the outside, it’s awe-inspiring to see the beam illuminating the passageway – and I’m hoping that, despite the naysayers, it was built this way five thousand years ago – and not fifty!
As the show finished, I was able to capture the joy on the faces of the lottery winners as they emerged.
And the hugs!
Once the lottery winners are out, the rest of the visitors queue to get into the chamber. Even after the sunbeam has moved on, the chamber is still relatively bright because the passage is facing the sunlight. And you can get in for FREE for an hour or so on solstice mornings! An important TIP if you ever do visit Newgrange, is to wait until the end of the of the guide’s talk. After the rest of your group leaves, following the demonstration of the beam with electric lights, ask your guide nicely if you can lie down with your face on the floor and you will be able to see out through the roof-box. The access passage slopes upwards so that the floor of the chamber is level with the overhead roof-box at the exterior. It’s not as good as winning the solstice lottery, but it was still a magical experience to see my son’s face dimly illuminated on the floor during our family visit a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, photography is not normally allowed in the chamber*, so you just have to imagine this!
* Unlike the rest of the year, visitors to the site are allowed in for free on solstice mornings after the lottery winners leave and there is no restriction on photography - or at least there wasn't on 22 December 2016.
In the previous shot, I spotted lottery winners Micaela and Simeon from Alaska and I did a quick mini-shoot with them in the rapidly warming morning sun.
And some more visitors.
I was also fortunate to meet Anthony Murphy of Mythical Ireland shooting the passageway with his fisheye lens and then getting a shot of Michael Fox of the tour company Newgrange.com.
Here are the three of us having a chat . . . or if you want to be dramatic, posing as the shadows of our ancestors!
Once everyone had left, I got to walk around the monument totally on my own before the first of the regular tours arrived at 11 AM. This structure to the rear is believed to a folly built in the early 1800’s from stones that slipped off the original monument.
The sun was still blinding as I came back around the west side.
Working on my leading lines!
And my foreground interest.
The massive entrance stone in front of the passageway with the famous tri-spiral carvings.
Here the shadows of two of the megaliths and yours truly are juxtaposed (great word that!) with three jet trails. What would our Neolithic ancestors have made of these?
And finally, another one showing how brilliant the light was.
I took most of these shots with my Canon 10-22mm lens – its wide angle of view was ideal for capturing the shape of Newgrange. I used my Canon 70-200mm f4 lens to get most of the shots of the access passage and of the lottery winners leaving. They were all processed in Lightroom – in particular, I used the program’s graduated filter tool to enhance the detail in the skies.
A lot more reading about the Newgrange complex here and on Ireland’s Ancient East.
]]>Last Sunday morning, I got out for my first landscape shoot in a while and I decided to keep it local by heading to White Rock at the north end of Killiney Beach in Co. Dublin. Although it’s only 5km from home, this was my first time doing a proper shoot at this popular landmark! And of course, a big advantage of landscape shoots on December mornings is that sunrise is not until about 8.30am :-)
Here’s the first shot as the red sky peaked about fifteen minutes before sunrise. It’s a 30 second exposure at ISO 100 and f11 using my Canon 10-22mm lens at 10mm. I used a Lee Little Stopper to get the exposure long enough to smooth the water, as well as 0.9ND hard graduated filter to balance the light in the sky sky with the land.
The next shot was 10 minutes later and you can see how the red has changed to orange as the sun rises. It’s a three element stitched panorama with the same settings as the previous shot, except the shutter speed was 20 seconds.
Next, it was a quick change to the 100-400mm lens at 400mm to catch the sun bisecting the horizon – it's not often clear enough in Ireland to see this! (f5.6, ISO 100 & 1/1,250th of a second)
The action continued as this paddle boarder passed by (f5.6, ISO 800 & 1/4,000th of a second, 100-400mm lens at 400mm)
As I headed up from the beach, I stopped for a breather on the footbridge over the DART line and realized that the still golden light was illuminating Sorrento Terrace nicely. (f10, ISO 400 & 1/800th of a second, on the 100-400mm lens at 100mm)
It was such a fine day that I wasn’t the only shooter there that morning! (f7.1, ISO 400 & 1/640th of a second, on the 100-400mm lens at 190mm).
The DART footbridge gives a very different perspective of White Rock – and I used my filters again to get this shot – the exposure settings were 13 seconds at f16 and ISO 100 at 56mm on the 17-85mm lens. This time however, I pushed the 0.9HD down to cover the whole of the front of the lens to get a “9-stopper”, three stops from the grad and six from the Little Stopper. Without using the hard grad in this way, I would only have had a 1.5 second exposure with the Little Stopper - not enough to smooth water properly in the bright conditions.
Using the tripod on the footbridge didn't work well because it’s hard to get the camera out over the railing and because of the numbers of walkers passing – so I used my lightweight gorilla pod. This is only rated for lightweight cameras so it took time and care to get it steady and safe with my DSLR on it– don’t do this at home!!
Once I got it all set up though, I was able another version of the Sorrento Terrace shot (16, ISO 100 & 13 seconds, on the 17-85mm lens at 20mm).
As I shot, some of the passing walkers stopped to chat, and I persuaded a few of them to pose on the rock when they got down.
It’s a good landscape shoot when I get a single keeper – so I was well pleased with getting several from this morning’s work.
Before I go any further, I want to stress that I took this these shots SAFELY from the shelter of the Martello Tower – shooting close to stormy seas is inherently dangerous because every so often there is a bigger wave than normal – traditionally every seventh wave – but more likely at random. Every year people are washed off rocks to their deaths so coastline photographers should constantly assess sea conditions before and DURING their shoot.
I knew it would be pretty dark when I got there about 5pm and that my Canon 85mm f1.8 lens would be the tool for the job – although it’s normally more used to the civilised environment of indoor events! Even so, I had to push the ISO up to 16,000 to get exposures of 1/60th to 1/80th of a second. The first shot is only 1/20th of a second as can be seen from the movement blur – but I like it anyway!
The processing in Lightroom was simple enough – given the high ISO values there’s no point in obsessing about technical quality – just get the story out! I set the white balance to auto to remove the orange glow of the street lighting, added contrast in the light areas by dropping the highlights to -100 and boosting whites to +62, and similarly in the dark areas with -49 on the blacks and +53 on the shadows. Clarity was +35, vibrance +14. Noise reduction was about +65 with the same for masking. I also added a subtle vignette to focus attention on the centre of the shots. Once I got one shot the way I liked, I simply copied the settings to the rest (Ctrl Shift S). Finally I cropped my keepers according to whether I want just the trains and waves, or to include some of the background buildings. I experimented with B&W conversion but I though the loss of the colour of the railcars weakened the shots.
Roll on the next northeaster!
*Trains spotters will recognise that the last two shots are actually one of Irish Rail’s “Dublin Southern Commuter” service trains.
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As we headed to the upper levels, however, the stairs immediately caught my eye and, after some failed efforts, I got this two element composite by putting the centre arm of my tripod horizontal, like this, and then sticking the camera out over the banisters to look directly down. Of course, this meant the tripod was unbalanced – so I stabilised it by holding the other end of the centre arm. Even with the camera locked onto to the tripod head, I also kept a firm grip on the camera strap to eliminate any possibility of a three floor drop! The settings were 0.6 seconds as f8.0 at ISO 400 at 10mm using Canon’s EFS 10-22mm lens. Ideally, I would have used f11 for more depth of field and ISO 100 but this would have lengthened the exposure to about 4 seconds – and I was afraid I would cause camera shake holding the end of the centre arm for this long. Note to self:- if I’m doing interiors again - keep my camera bag with me for use as counterweight! The other problem was that one of my shoes and two of the tripod legs were unavoidably in the shot but quite a bit of fiddly cloning sorted that out. Finally stitching the shots, with so many items in the foreground and the background, proved a challenge for both Photoshop and Lightroom – the former was bit better but I had to do some tidying in one area – let me know in the comments if you can spot where I couldn't get it quite right!
The next three shots were all in the most impressive chamber - the Grand Lodge Room. The shot of the organ was another fiddly job to position the camera facing up from a kneeling position – it would be great if the 7D Mark II had an articulated LCD! Eventually, I got the organs pillars and the roof symmetrical – or near enough that I was able do final tweaks with Lightroom’s Auto Transform. I also made sure that the top centre pipe stayed below the gold border around the blue area. It’s a single shot and the settings are 4 seconds, f11, ISO 100 at 17mm – again with the 10-22mm lens. I white-balanced it off the ceiling. I was a bit dull out of the camera in the Adobe Standard Calibration but the following Lightroom settings brought it up nicely:-+34 contrast, -100 highlights, +100 shadows, +54 whites, -48 blacks, +35 clarity and +25 vibrance. I upped the saturation of orange, yellow, aqua and blue in the HSL panel by +15-20 and I added sharpening of 80 with masking of 71.
The final two shots are of the chamber itself with the organ to my back – again with the 10-22mm lens and at 10mm and ISO 100mm. The first is the far end of the room from the organ and it’s a four shot stitch – each for four seconds and f11. For such wide angle shots, the Lightroom cylindrical panorama option (Ctrl M), followed by an auto transform did a surprisingly good job of the stitching. The sides were quite curved but I cropped these out – although the side pillars at the crop edge are still a bit curved and the ceiling rectangle is not quite parallel to the edge of the shot.
Finally, I did another composite of the chamber from the organ end – this time there were five elements and the settings were 2.5 seconds and f11. The tone and saturation settings for both shots of the chamber were similar to those used for the organ. Again there is a little curvature of the nearest side columns but overall, I'm pretty pleased with my first serious effort at architectural interiors without specialised tilt and shift lenses.
Many thanks to Emily Gallagher for organizing the outing and to our guides Lionel & Keith. Tours of the hall are available during the summer for the princely sum of €2 - or by appointment at other times.
]]>But to misquote Allen Saunders
“birding is what happens when you make other plans”
(John Lennon was just one of many copiers when he included a version of the quote in his Beautiful Boy song!)
So there wasn’t a sign of it for the whole morning until I had to leave at lunchtime. At least, it didn’t dig the knife in like the St. John’s Point bird which, after I spent most a day looking for it to no avail, turned up again the following day grrrr!
Despite all this, there are a lot worse places to spend a morning dipping, as you can see from this seven shot stitched panorama of Barleycove Beach – taken from the garden where the Bluetail . . . wasn’t. Still, it was good to make new birding friends and catch up with old ones.
I also spent a lot of time practising my long lens technique on the common birds in the area – and this shot of a Dunnock or European Accentor was the best of them. I say European Accentor, because its cousin, the Siberian Accentor, has had an unprecedented European irruption this autumn with over a 100 records in Europe and 12 in Britain – hopefully one will struggle through to Ireland and answer to prayers of many Irish birders before the autumn migration closes in the next few weeks!
The settings for this shot were 1/1000th of a second, f5.6, and ISO 3200 at 400mm on my Canon 100-400mm MkI lens. I get so many blurry shot bird shots that I sometimes I start doubting my kit – but when I get one like this, it reminds me that the weakest point in my setup is always . . . me!
Anyway, I was pleased at the quality of the image, despite the high ISO. This was actually set automatically by my Canon 7D Mark II because I was using Auto ISO in Manual Mode – check out Steve Perry’s great video on this technique. This is brilliant for birding shots where you are constantly switching from dark to bright conditions as birds move in and out of bushes. I set my aperture to 5.6 because that’s the widest I can get at 400mm - and my speed to 1/1000th of a second because I find that, even when small birds appear to be stationary, they seem to have subtle tremors that you don’t see when you are shooting. The key point then, is that Auto ISO automatically changes to give you the correct exposure – unless it’s too dark even for the highest ISO (16000 on the 7DII) - and then your aperture or speed readings will start flashing in the viewfinder. You may end up with a noisy shot – but if it’s a good record shot of a rarity you want – noise can be dealt with later but lack of sharpness due to motion blur is fatal! I also use Spot Metering to get the correct exposure on a small bird in the frame – as well as the central focussing point set to Spot AF mode. The latter minimizes autofocus distractions from surrounding leaves and twigs – check out page 196 in Douglas J Klosterman’s excellent “Canon 7D II Experience” for more on Spot AF and why it’s better than Single Point AF for these kind of shots.
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A dusk shot taken on Offshoot's last summer meeting on 29 August - the topic was silhouettes at Bulloch Harbour. This guy went down to the water's edge to clean a few fish - you can see his bucket nearby. I asked him to stand very still for 25 seconds with his hands on his hips to make a strong shape. The other settings were f11 for good depth of field, ISO 100, and 17mm on the Canon EFS 17-55mm lens mounted on the Canon 7DII on a tripod. It was taken thirty two minutes after sunset at 8.51pm - so the light levels were low enough for a long exposure that smoothed the water without using neutral density filters.
There are lot's more shots from other Club members here.
]]>For the last week or so, crippling shots of recently fledged Cuckoos at the old Newcastle railway station on The Murrough in Co. Wicklow – notably from Eric Dempsey and Shay Connolly - have been annoy . . . ahem . . . inspiring me to find time to visit the area myself. I finally found time for a quick trip yesterday morning. As with any bird, there’s always the worry that it will be gone when you get there. So, when I arrived, it was good to see a report on Irish Birding that one had already been seen early on – whew! Irish Birding has more excellent shots of these birds from Brian Carruthers and Aidan Gilbert.
The next question was - were they north or south along the coastal path between the railway line and the beach? Fortunately a quick scan from the level crossing showed a birder south of the old station house and, as I headed that way, I saw it was recently returned Arctic explorer Mark Carmody – and there was a Cuckoo on the fence between him and me as well!
For the next while, it flew back and forth along the railway fence hunting actively - and unbothered by the presence of speeding trains, passing walkers and bird photographers! Unfortunately, I was unable to get a shot with both a Cuckoo and a train in it.
With a bit of care it allowed close approach – close enough to see that it was feasting on six-spot burnets that it caught easily by dropping into the grassy verges along the path. This was a bit surprising because these brightly coloured and slow day-flying moths, and their caterpillars, are poisonous due to accumulating cyanide from their food plants. Some quick googling did not lead me to any information about the diet of Cuckoos, other than a brief unreferenced statement in Wikipedia that they can eat hairy caterpillars that are distasteful to many birds – clearly this extends to poisonous species as well. If you know more about this, I’d be grateful to hear about it.
A moth is about to die!
Burnet a-la cyanide!
Finishing it off!
There's nothing like a bellyful of moths! It needs them for the amazing migration it will shortly begin to Africa, never having seen its parents!
The Day 2 programme was similar to Day 1 but there were a few additional displays, most notably the RAF's Red Arrows. Both they and the Frecce Tricolori flew closer and did dramatic runs of the town. Apart from the flying, the main drama was a wildfire on Bray that generated a pall of smoke during most of the event. Fortunately, it did not affect the display planes, but there were no parachute displays - perhaps because the helicopter landing field at the bottom of the Head was too close to the smoke.
On Day 2, I decided to shoot from the same spot on the beach in front of the VIP area, with the same lens, the Canon 100-400 MKI - to make it a fair comparison with Day 1. Additionally my spot on the outer edge of the breakwater a little hard to stand on - especially when leaning back to shoot directly overhead - so I didn't want to be encumbered by any additional gear. Of course this meant that that I couldn't try wide angle or people shots - and there are lots of these on the #brayairdisplay hashtag on Twitter. Next year . . .!
I'll also update my Tips on Shooting the Bray Air Display in the near future.
Finally, I also compiled my favourite shots from the two days here, where you can view a full screen slide show, buy downloads and order prints.
Finally thanks to all the display teams, the Bray Air Display crew, the the Irish Aviation Authority, the Irish Air Corp, and the sponsores for putting on a great show.
The Red Arrows Hawk aircraft. They put on a an extremely intensive display by splitting into two groups. No sooner had display finished than another was coming at us from a different direction. The stars of the event by a short head in front of the Breitling Wingwalkers and Frecce Tricolori. Despite their speed, I was very happy to get a few "crossing" shots.
Two fine strong Wicklow Civil Defence guys!
A few close ups of the Irish Coastguard Sikorsky - there was no lifeboat display on Day2. Followed by a few against Bray Head.
Caption 1: "Put that phone AWAY!"
Caption 2: "If you drop that phone, we're NOT lowering you down to pick it up!!!
Trig Aerobatic team flying Pitts Specials
Aer Lingus Airbus A321.
Breitling Wingwalkers - one of the displays of the event. Amazing to see what those women do out on the wings!
My favourite shot from the event - I'm really happy with the level of detail here. I was astonished to see the Wingwalkers perform some of their routines out of their harnesses, but if you look closely you can see she is attached by a safety cable - phew!
Seafire and Spitfire (carrier version) - both privately owned.
De Havilland DH84 Dragon "Iolar" - Aer Lingus's first airliner in 1936 - flown by the Irish Historic Flight Foundation. With a De Havilland Chipmunk from the 1940's.
Saab Draken - a Swedish military jet that was operational between the 1950's and the 1990's. It's now operated by Swedish Air Force Historic Flight, along with the SAAB Viggen that flew just beforehand. I'm not sure why, but my shots of the Draken were not as good as the rest of my shots. Yes, both it and the Viggen were further away and very fast but that doesn't explain why I failed to get a crisp focus. Of course, even good stills don't capture the one of the essentials of this military jets - the awesome noise!
Any finally, here is Frecce Tricolori - Italian Airforce aerobatic team. I was impressed by their extremely close formation flying - even closer to my eye than the Red Arrows! And they knew how to get attention with green white and gold smoke trails - followed by Italian tricolor smoke trails to Nessun Dorma by Pavarotti. A fitting finale!
And what did I learn?
- Start Time: -The show doesn’t start at Noon – it starts at 2pm! That’s when it’s licenced by the Irish Aviation Authority BUT if you want to be there on time GET THERE EARLY and USE PUBLIC TRANSPORT! Or cycle as I did! It’s likely to be a lot busier today.
- Breaks: Given the shorter schedule, the breaks between acts are quite short.
- Weather: The forecast is for sunnier weather today- after this morning’s cloud. Hopefully it’s right – it’s hard getting really crisp shots in dull conditions – I used lots of Lightroom’s Dehaze feature - 20 or even 30% to add a bit of drama.
- Location: The centre of the beach in front of the VIP area. I was just north of the blocked off area but if you want to get good shots of the parachutists coming in, it may be better to be just south of it to have the light behind you. Either way, this is the best place to get “peak stunts”. I had thought of going up on Bray Head but other photographers told me they had tried this in previous years and it too far away for the small planes. So, much and all as I would like to get an airliner low, over Bray Harbour, it’s not worth it for the rest of the show.
- Distance: Some of the planes stay a bit far out – for safety reasons I presume. These seem to be the faster, less manoeuvrable and older planes.
- Shutter Speeds: it’s very difficult to get two planes flying towards each other sharp, especially jets. Today, I will try 1/8000th of a second – and even this may not work 100%. Of course this will mean that propellers will be frozen. The other option is to slow down your shutter speed so that the plane you are following is sharp and the other one in blurred to convey the action. I’ll be experimenting with this today.
- Anticipation: To catch planes passing each other, you have to start shooting BEFORE you see them pass in the frame. If you shoot in RAW you need to judge this unless you have a top end camera that can shoot RAW continuously such as a Canon 1DX . On my Canon 7D Mark II, the buffer locks up after a second or so of 10 frames/second. Or switch to JPEGs, where you will get a much longer burst – I think my camera will shoot JPEGs until the card fills!
That’s it – time to get ready for today’s show! And if you have read this far, you will see I lied – it’s actually 101 shots. After culling out 1,309 shots I thought I was due a break!
27 July - I updated this post with the names of and links to the flying teams.
Defences Forces Black Knights parachute team.
Fougas of the Patrouille Tranchant team from Brittany
Air Corps Pilatus PC-9M trainers.
Air Corps Cessana surveillance planes.
Trig Aerobatic team flying Pitts Specials
Team Raven flying home built RV4 & RV8.
De Havilland DH84 Dragon "Iolar" - Aer Lingus's first airliner in 1936 - flown by the Irish Historic Flight Foundation.
Irish Coastguard Sikorsky S-92 Rescue helicopter with RNLI lifeboat.
Spitfire and Seafire (carrier version).
Frecce Tricolori - Italian Airforce aerobatic team.
With the Bray Air Display on this weekend, I blogged about the best of my shots from Dublin’s Flightfest yesterday. Today, I went back and re-edited my shots from the 2010 Bray Air Display. These are special for me because the last shot was part of my successful IPF Licentiate Panel. After yesterday’s post, someone also asked me if I had any tips. As with any photographic topic these days, a quick Google search give loads of guidance – mostly from American air shows where there is also access to the aircraft and crew on the ground. Bray is different in that the aircraft fly in from a different air field. Four of its strong features are that it’s FREE, the seafront location, the lack of restrictions you might have in a military base, and the presence of Bray Head. The latter gives a great background and alternative high viewpoint - so I plan to shoot from ground level one day and from the Head on the other day.
Anyway here are a few of my tips – as well as a few links to other articles. Digital Photography School (for beginners), Digital Camera Review, Photo Stack Exchange, School of Digital Photography, Picture Correct,
- Preparation – check the event’s website for timing and access as well as the weather forecast – happily it looks good for Bray on both days during show times.
- Preparation – the show runs for five hours and there are likely to be gaps so bring food, water, sunscreen etc. During the intervals, relax and review your images for mistakes so you can get it right on the next run. Photograph people or just chat to them! Perhaps move to a different location.
- Preparation: Travel light, especially if you are going to move around. Take only the gear you are likely to use in a small camera bag – this is not the day for a big backpack! Make sure your gear is ready, batteries are charged, cards are empty, and lenses are set to autofocus with image stabilisation on (easy to forget after a tripod shoot – and leave the tripod at home for this shoot!)
- Visualization – think in advance about what kind of shots you want and what settings you might need to get them – don’t just spray and pray! Look at airshow shots on the internet for ideas!
- Observation and practice – each group of aircraft usually makes a few runs, so get a feel for their routine on the first pass. Equally though, watch out for something special on the last run – but of course you won’t know which run is the last run! If there are announcements, listen to them!
- Perseverance – if you have not done this before – stick with it. There will be a high proportion of duds. Take lots of pictures and cull them ruthlessly afterwards.
- Camera(s) – a DSLR or high quality bridge or pocket camera with a zoom is best. Phone cameras will only work for the largest aircraft – and even then they will be small in the frame. They’re good for context shots though and instant posting to social media!
- Lenses - a long zoom for aircraft (and people!) close-ups. A standard or wide angle for context and background shots. I use my Canon 100-400mm lens as my primary lens for events like these.
- Positioning – shooting in the centre of the flypast may bring you closer to the peak display routines for VIPs on viewing stands. Shooting at the ends of the run can be good to capture aircraft turning in and out of display runs.
- Direction – the aircraft pass over the sea so you will normally be facing between NE & SE from the seafront. Perhaps go out onto one of the Harbour piers if you want to get directly under aircraft. However, some aircraft may not pass over the Pier.
- Lighting – the Bray Air Display runs from noon until 5pm so side lighting from the evening sun will a bit better in the afternoon but the sun will still be quite high in the sky.
- Metering – ideally, you want to correctly expose both the sky and the aircraft. If you are shooting against a light sky, you could overexpose by 1-2 stops in evaluative mode to correctly expose the aircraft, or use spot metering if you have it. However, this may blow out detail and colour in the sky. If you shoot in RAW, you can afford to under expose the aircraft by 1-2 stops and bring out the shadows later in Lightroom. During intervals, check your exposure using the blinkies - letting the brightest spots in the clouds over expose a little is about right in RAW.
- Shutter speeds - greater than 1/1,000th of a second for jets. About 1/100th of a second to 1/250th of a second is good to show propellers and helicopter rotors. For these experiment in this range to get the aircraft sharp and a good blur of the moving parts.
- Shooting Mode & Settings: For jet shots - use Aperture Priority with the aperture wide open for maximum shutter speed – crank up the ISO if necessary – 1600 or even 3200 can work well on modern DSLRs. To blur propellers and rotors use shutter priority. If you want to include backgrounds, use a small aperture to blur it or a high aperture to keep them sharp – in the latter case you may need to crank up the ISO. A high burst rate is good as well – but shoot in short bursts to avoid filling up your cards.
- Focusing: Use Servo mode to track moving aircraft. If you can, move your focussing spot to one side of the frame for better composition. It’s hard to focus and recompose on aircraft moving at high speed. Either way, practice the composition during initial runs. If your lens goes way out of focus, use Bray Head to get it approximately right before trying to pick up a small or distant aircraft.
- Photograph people as well. If you have a wide angle lens try and get people and aircraft in the same shot – although aircraft will be very small in these shots.
Oh . . . AND HAVE FUN!!
B52 bomber - terrifying!
Irish Air Corps CASA fisheries patrol aircraft.
Coastguard Rescue Helicopter
Ahhhh!
Black Knights parachute display.
Aerobatics.
Anyway back to the Flightfest. Like most other people, I started on the quays and like everyone else, I was getting shots mostly from directly below the aircraft. I did manage a few side on views as they turned away from the Liffey over the Southside. Here are the best of these starting off with an A320, I think, from Aer Lingus.
Next the Air Corp’s helicopters.
Most of the Irish Air Force!
CASA fisheries protection plane.
City Jet’s four-engined commuter aircraft the BAE-146 “Whisperjet”.
One of DHL’s delivery jets.
Hercules L100-30 Oil spill response plane.
Not sure who these lads are!
As I said earlier, I wasn’t so keen on looking up the planes bums, so I walked towards Ringsend and the Grand Canal Docks for some side on views. Here’s Ryanair over Ringsend Church – followed by the Coastguard rescue helicopter.
PBY-5A Catalina - Miss Pickup – built in 1943!
Sally B Flying Fortress from 1945 - check out the pilot's face!
Etihad Airbus A350.
And finally here’s Airbus’s giant A380 double decker. Despite its fame as the world’s biggest airliner, its commercial viability is on a knife edge. This is due to mechanical problems, the higher costs of four-engined versus increasingly reliable twin-engined aircraft, and the preference of customers for higher frequencies of flights on a route that are best served by smaller jets.
The pale dot in the rear cockpit window is a face!
Heading into the sunset?
As I pottered around, mentally sticking pins in Met Eireann, the curve of the seawall leading to the Poolbeg chimneys slowly penetrated my consciousness as the sunset broke through and the rain cleared. I realised there might be a good panorama shot to be had, especially with the wet flagstones, so I quickly set up the camera and the tripod on the wall as the red and gold colours ramped up. Next, I levelled the tripod head so that the individual elements of the stitch would not be offset. There was just time to get three shots off to capture the expanse between the sea front houses and the seawall – and then the colours began to fade.
For those interested, here’d a quick run through on how I pulled together the final panorama. The original exposure was for one second at ISO 100, f16, and 17mm using the EFS 17-55mm on the Canon 7DII – in landscape orientation. I used f16 to get front to back sharpness and to lengthen the exposure to smooth the water – I hadn’t time to get filters on the camera. My other goal was to ensure that I didn’t blow out the brightest part of the sky – using the highlight alerts or blinkies in live view. My rule of thumb is that when a few small bright areas are flashing it's OK because the LCD image is based on the camera’s JPEG - and these slightly blown areas can be recovered in the raw file. (However, when I am doing portraits, I make sure skin areas NEVER show blinkies because it’s virtually impossible to recover over exposed skin tones – a black and white conversion is the only rescue then!) As always, I checked focus by zooming to 10x in Live View. Next, I checked horizon with the camera’s built in level and with a spirit level in the hot shoe - the latter doesn't clutter the LCD and is always on! Finally, I used a cable release to avoid camera shake – especially as the whole set up on the wall was a bit precarious anyway! Here's one of the panorama elements as seen in the camera using the standard picture style.
Once I got the shots on the computer, the first step was to use Lightroom’s relatively new panorama photo merge (Ctrl M). This left a few gaps along the bottom. I could have dealt with these using the auto crop option but that would have cut off the tip of the central diamond – so I waited until I was in Photoshop (below). As you can see, the stitched panorama is much more contrasty than the original shot. The beauty of Lightroom’s panorama feature is that it generates a DNG raw file that can be fully edited as a unit – rather than having to copy settings from one of the individual files to the other panorama elements.
Once the stitch was done, the next step, was to set the DNG’s white balance to daylight. I know this brings a slightly blue tinge to the flagstones but as David Noton asks when discussing white balance for landscapes, “Who Am I to interfere with Mother Nature?” Next I played with the exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks in the Basic Panel to develop the image, especially to bring out the contrast of the still wet flagstones. When I had pushed the shadows slider to 100%, I did a little more contrast work with the Tone Curve panel. I also added some clarity (11%) and vibrance (25%). I finished off the colour and tones adjustment with a graduated filter to bring out more of the drama in the sky.
Now that I was happy with the look of the shot, what to do with the street furniture that local authorities clutter so many public areas with? These may be necessary in high use areas, but they spoil the look of so many urban landscapes! Anyway, one choice was to take the easy option and crop the left hand side of the shot. However, I felt that the seafront houses balanced the rocks on the right hand side, so I decided it was worth doing a lot of content aware filling (tutorials here and here) and detailed cloning. I swapped into Photoshop - a simple Ctrl E from Lightroom – if you have Photoshop set as your default external editor in Lightroom’s preferences. However, there was a problem with the content aware fills on the smooth gradients of the skies. This is because they generated unnatural stepping and patchy effects in the middle of the fills where parts of the sky with different tones were brought together.
I solved this by doing low opacity cloning from other parts of the sky to smooth these effects. I also used this trick to deal with a bright patch of sky at the top of the image – I didn’t want it leading viewers’ eyes out of the image.
Next I used content aware filling to deal with the gaps along the bottom, along with a bit of touching up to tidy up flagstone boundaries in the fill areas. Once all the filling and cloning was complete, the final step was to flatten the image and save it back to Lightroom and add a subtle post-crop vignette in the effects panel.
I know all this manipulation is not to everyone’s taste but I thought it was worth it for this image. It just goes to show that, SOMETIMES – the old saying about the best shots coming from the worst weather is true! Check out more shots from the evening on the Offshoot gallery, here .
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For this post, my goals were two-fold. Firstly I want to show people enjoying themselves - usually using my standard zoom lens the 17-55mm. Secondly, at half-time and in between matches I scanned around for long distance portraits with the 100-400mm lens to get natural unposed looks against a highly blurred background. Of course this approach often catches people with odd expressions on their faces, so I only post those that look well!
Did I mention that Cuala is the "Best Sports Club in Ireland"?
Making sure everyone's energy levels are kept up!
Sponsor & organisation team.
Minister for Jobs, Enterprise & Innovation, Mary Mitchell O'Connor TD with Chairman of Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Co. Council, Cllr Cormac Devlin
The serious business of having fun!
Cuala people.
Group shots
There's no place like Mom & Dad!
More Cuala people.
Individual portraits
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Let's start off with a stitched panorama of Hyde Park with the Mini-All-Ireland in full swing.
Here's Fergal "Hooters" McGuinness getting the matches going.
The kids in the Cuala Academy range in age from about six to nine years old. Initially I used my standard 17-55mm zoom lens as I did a walk around of some of the matches. As the pitches are small it works well but when the players are really close, the high viewpoint is not ideal.
Once I pick out a match that I want to spend a bit more time with, I switch to my "big gun" the 100-400mm and, crucially, I break out my low folding chair. This means I can get really close to the action at HEAD HEIGHT. From an adult point view, they may be kids getting to grips with game but this angle captures the action and drama from the players' perspective.
Goaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal!! - but of course it sounds much better from Guomundur Benediktsson in Icelandic!
Talking tactics . . . and have fun!
Getting a bit more serious!
Things can get a bit quiet when you are the goalie on a team doing well! Even when I am mainly shooting with the long lens, I keep the standard zoom handy on the second camera body for moments like this.
The greatest field sport on Earth - and of course the Irish are totally unbiased in that view!
The "clash of the ash".
Team talk!
Girl power!
Back to the lads!
Determination!
And a bit of encouragement . . .
. . . reaps rewards!
The nine year olds taking it pretty seriously . . . in this attempted blockdown.
The joy of victory!
What goes on the field stays on the field.
Thanks to all the refs for running the matches.
It was great to have a fine day as everyone assembled in their teams and age groups at the start point.
Sponsors are vital for voluntary activities such as the GAA.
As are the Gardai to clear the traffic!
And a piper to lead the parade!
This why the streets have to be cleared!
Spectators old and young - but there's no escaping the political events of the week!
Moving pictures as well!
Parading on Castle Street
And here's the Castle!
Another of the Cuala Academy's sponsors.
Minister Mary Mitchell O'Connor TD.
Heading down Hyde Road.
Of course I had to get Cork in somewhere . . . our day will come again . . . won't it . . . surely . . . please??
Brothers in Arms
Lining up in Hyde Park
Hammering in the flag poles.
Raising the flags.
Trophies for everyone!
I'm sticking with Cuala!
Playing the National Anthem - Amhrán na bFhiann.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amhr%C3%A1n_na_bhFiann
Check back over the next few days for parts 2 and 3 of this blog post - the players and the people.
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When I arrived there were certainly no dancing curtains of green - and I wondered if there was any chance with all of Dublin's light pollution. But there were lots of shots being tweeted from Northern Ireland, so I stuck with it for a while.
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see a faint grey glow above Howth Head which translated into a hint of green on the camera - nothing to tweet home about though! Gradually it brightened to a clear grey arc stretching from Dun Laoghaire Harbour to the Baily Lighthouse. Some colour was barely visible to the naked eye along with a few pillars of light stretching up to Polaris. I quickly started snapping and the camera was clearly seeing bright green! I used the phone camera to do a quick post of a "back of the camera shot" on Twitter - leading to useful help from Ronán on settings - 4 seconds at ISO 800, f2.8 at 55mm on the Canon EFS 17-5mm lens. The arc brightened further but colour was always more imagined than real . . . but the camera was seeing it strongly and I started doing sets of four shots to capture the sweep of light over the Bay.
It quickly tailed off so I soon headed home to develop the results on the computer screen. In Lightroom, auto white balance dealt with the orange glow from the street lighting (this was good on the camera as well for checking in the field). Then I used Lightroom's panorama merge function (Ctrl-M) to stitch my my sets of four. Finally, on the resulting digital negative (DNG) file, I used graduated filters for some dodging and burning to bring out the green in the sky - and to tone back the street lights. I also used the radial filter to tone down a few especially bright lights including the ship in the Bay.
It may not be as dramatic as the results from further north but I'm well pleased with the results of only my second Aurora shoot - especially in a such a light polluted area. Is this the first time anyone has captured the Northern Lights sweeping over Dublin Bay?
Here's a different processing - more colours in the sky but at the expense of of brighter streets.
Here's two shots of this month's full Moon setting over Dublin's Docklands during an early morning visit last Tuesday 23 February. The shoot was planned with The Photographers Ephemeris and Google Maps. Given the location, of course, it would have been just rude to look at the map offerings from Bill or Steve :-) There is usually parking at both locations - at these hours anyway! There is a safe public footpath across the lock gates to Hanover Quay- safe in both an engineering sense and socially in that, despite the inner city location, there's lots of people living around the Grand Canal Dock nowadays -aka Silicon Docks. So there are walkers and joggers at all hours. There also appears to be someone living in the Waterways Ireland house at the lock gates.
For tripod shots of the Samuel Beckett Bridge, the north (lifting) side of the East Link Bridge is very shaky, especially when trucks are going over - but the southern side is much more solid. Take care also not to hinder pedestrians on the narrow footpath with your gear. There's no parking on the vehicular approaches to the East Link - park instead on Thorncastle Street.
Here's The Photographer's Ephemeris plot of the Samuel Beckett shot - the mid blue line show the Moon's direction from my position on the East Link Bridge (red pin) at shot time. The dark blue line show its position at moonset and the grey line show the distance to the grey pin - 923m.
The first shot over the Grand Canal Basin was taken at 6.58am for five seconds at f11, ISO 100 at 55 mm using a Canon EFS 17-55mm lens on a Canon 7D mark II mounted on a tripod.
The second shot of the Samuel Beckett Bridge was taken at 7.20am for 1/6th of a second at f11 and ISO 200 at 163 mm using a Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 lens on a Canon 7D mark II mounted on a tripod.
Both were developed from Raw files in Lightroom.
Because I’ve been blogging a lot recently about shots taken with my pocket camera (e.g. here and here), I wanted to use the big camera this time with my new specialist landscape kit, the Manfrotto 410 Junior Geared Head – that I got from Maher’s Photographic in Drogheda. It’s reviewed here by Landscape Photography Magazine and, as they say, it’s slow to set up. When I arrived on the quay, I could see it would soon cloud over, so instead I grabbed the Panasonic LF1 and the Gorillapod SLR and ran across to the railings to get these two shots before the Moon disappeared. The second one, with St. Mary’s Church on Pope’s Quay, is a panoramic stitch. With the sunrise still as late as 8.26am, it was too early for proper blue hour shots but given the brief appearance of the Moon, I was glad to get them at all.
After picking up Mark, we headed for Ballycotton in east Cork where a good selection of semi-rare birds had been reported on Cork Bird News and Irish Birding – including a new one for me – hopefully! As we approached Shanagarry, we could see it was going to be a colourful dawn so we rushed to the Pier to catch it over Ballycotton Island. When we got there the colour in the sky was peaking, so it was the pocket camera kit to the rescue again to get this stitched panorama within a minute or two of our arrival at 8.07am - from the top of the pier wall.
Having brought heavy the duty kit though, I want to give it a try and I got this panorama twenty minutes later as the rising sun was heavily screened by the approaching frontal cloud. See how all the reds have disappeared for a more subtle sky. I used my new Lee Little Stopper (also from Maher’s) to get an eight second exposure at f11 and ISO 100. This long exposure smooths the sea, compared to the previous shot that was exposed for 1/3 of a second at ISO 80 and f8 - the smallest aperture that the LF1 has.
Parking properly on the pier is important as well!!
With the good light for landscapes over, we turned to birding – starting off with this fine first year Glaucous Gull –a regular visitor to Ireland in small numbers from the Arctic according to Birdwatch Ireland. Light levels for flight shots were still very low, so I used ISO 3200 to get 1/640th of a second at f5.6 on the Canon 100-400 mk1 lens, at 400mm on the Canon 7DII. Pixel peeping at 100% magnification reveals a slight softness at this ISO level – but its fine for record shots. Of course, high ISO shots without motion blur are much better than the reverse!
Next we headed for nearby Garryvoe hoping to see a flock of Glossy Ibises reported from a pond close to the beach. This former rarity from southern Europe is being seen in Ireland with increasing frequency and there has been a recent influx of several tens at least along the south coast. As we birded one of the flooded fields, I heard a shout from Mark alerting me to the flock flying my way and I was lucky enough to get a few flight shots as they passed overhead.
However, my real target for the day was a Siberian Chiffchaff that had also been reported from this spot. We saw several Common Chiffchaffs as we worked the hedges and I was hoping that I wasn’t going to “dip” again as I had done in Wexford recently. Happily, our bird popped out just as the rain was threatening, clearly showing it’s washed out appearance compared to it common cousin - it's got a stronger eyestripe along with a prominent green panel on the wing as well. It paused for a few quick shots and then it was gone!
It topped off an excellent morning with two fine landscapes and three good birds all wrapped by 10.30am – just in time for us to head back to Cork to the joys of domestic responsibilities!
A promised drink in the Shelbourne was briefly put on hold while I got this shot with my pocket camera, the Panasonic LFI – the settings were 1/10 second (braced on a safety barrier with image stabilisation on), f2, and ISO 400 at 28mm. As usual with this camera, I shot in manual mode and in RAW. I converted to black and white to eliminate the orange colour of the digger that was distracting from the jagged structures. I also played with the exposure, contrast and clarity sliders in Lightroom until I got the look I wanted.
Once I had the camera out, of course I also had to try a few quick shots of the Mansion House just up the street – all lit up in blue. It’s the official residence of the Lord Mayor of Dublin. The First Dáil (parliament) met there on the 21 January 1919 to adopt the Irish Declaration of Independence. Unlike the 1916 Proclamation which, initially at least, only had the support of the small number of extremists involved in the Easter Rising, the Declaration of Independence was backed by the overwhelming democratic mandate of the 1918 election, except in most of Ulster where there was, and still is, a Unionist majority. Of course, before country was properly established, there was still to be the War of Independence with the British Government, the split with Northern Ireland, a Civil War . . . but enough of the history that we will all be drowned in for the next seven or eight years!
The settings were the same as for the previous shot and there was a convenient road sign for support. I could not get back far enough back to get everything in at 28mm so this image is two-shot vertical stitch panorama. This can be done automatically using Photo Merge with the latest version of Lightroom (Ctrl M) but, due the restrictive shooting conditions, I had left myself with too little border for that to work well. Instead I exported to Photoshop (Ctrl E) and then used File > Automate > Photomerge to make the panorama (there’s no keyboard shortcut for this in Photoshop). I was left with quite a bit of blank space on both sides of the stitch, so I had to do several Content Aware Fills to deal with this (Edit > Fill > Content Aware – Shift F5). I did them separately for the cobles, the railings and the walls as one big fill did not work well. Even then, I had to do a bit of cloning to tidy up the edges.
As luck would have it, two people walked up the steps and in the door as I took the shots. To highlight the figures, I used a radial filter in Lightroom (Shift M) to increase exposure and contrast around them. I’m not sure if prefer the colour version as it was lit up, or the black and white, so I’m showing both!
Oh, and yes we got have that drink as well!
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Discussion was still going on in the Irish Birdnet as to whether the Glaucous-winged Gull was the real deal or possibly has some features indicating hybridization with another large gull species. Killian Mullarney, one of the authors of the Collins Bird Guide, pitched in to say that he wasn’t actually that well up on the identification of large gulls from the North Pacific. Then, during one of his regular visits to check the gull flock at Duncannon last Sunday, he found the first European record* of a Vega Gull – it breeds in north east Siberia and winters in Japan!! Given how similar this species looks to our native Herring Gull, as well American Herring Gull that has been recently split , I’m really looking forward to what he will pull out for us when he gets his act together on gulls!
I couldn’t travel until Tuesday and by then, connecting with the bird was looking a little dodgy because, after giving itself up for Victor Caschera and others on Monday morning, it disappeared about 11.30am. Nonetheless, I headed off early with Dave on Tuesday to be on the main pier at first light. I was hoping it’s routine involved breakfasting on the sprats being landed by the local fishing boats – particularly as Victor said it was the only gull doing so the previous morning. Surprisingly, the rest of the gulls were showing no interest in the fish boxes on the pier. I’m not sure if this was because they were catching enough of their own on the water’s edge as the tide went out.
Sadly for me and 15-20 other birders, mainly from the UK, the Vega Gull did not show during the morning. A nice shot of an first winter Iceland gull caught in the early morning light over Duncannon fort was a small consolation.
As well as the flock of gulls around the pier, there were thousands more on Duncannon’s fine beach - so I decided to spend a few hours walking the shoreline and checking them out in the hope of finding a slightly darker backed “herring gull” with a strong brown shawl of streaks, and a dark eye. The Vega Gull is also still moulting its outer primaries - unlike the Herring Gulls that have completed their feather replacement. Unfortunately, the combination bright sunlight, strong winds, the receding tide and rather jumpy gulls meant it was impossible to get steady views at close enough ranges to pick out eye colours and judge mantle tones. I did see one adult Yellow-legged Gull but eventually the conditions became too difficult and I just walked the beach and took a few landscape shots. That's another birder, not me in the shot below.
Here’s a aerial view the Duncannon area from Bing Maps** It may be useful for birders looking for the Vega Gull over the weekend or just wishing to study the wide range of gull species on show there at the moment – both subspecies of Herring Gulls, Yellow Legged Gull, Caspian Gull, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Great-blacked Backed Gull, Iceland Gull, Glaucous Gull, Common Gull, Black-Headed Gull, Mediterranean Gull & Kittiwake. As Killian Mullarney has previously pointed out, it can often be difficult to get close to the gulls on the beach. However, use of your car as a hide on the upper beach may allow closer views of gulls – particularly on an incoming tide – high tides in Waterford this Saturday & Sunday are at 10.29am and 11.22 am. There were several local cars on the beach when we were there but it’s obviously AT YOUR OWN RISK! Driving onto the lower beach when the tide is out would carry a much greater risk of being bogged down. Unfortunately, on sunny days you may often be looking towards the light. The light can also cause problems on the main pier. In the mornings, the rocks between the pier and the Fort are heavily shaded. In the afternoon, you will be looking directly into the light in this area. Overall, bright overcast conditions with light winds are likely to provide the best observations conditions.
By mid-afternoon, most birders had left and we decided to head home via the South Slob where a Siberian Chiffchaff was seen in early January. Sadly, we didn’t even connect with this, just this Common Chiffchaff as dusk fell. However, there’s still hope because the Vega Gull was seen again on Wednesday – so I’m still hoping I’ll have a positive update to this post at some stage!
NOTES
* Technically, it’s actually the first record for an even bigger area, the "Western Palearctic". Ecologists divide the world into eight ecozones, based on the presence of broadly similar species of plants and animals, and the Palearctic occupies Europe, North Africa, much of the Middle East and the rest of Asia north of the Himalayas. For convenience, the Palearctic is split into western and eastern sections along the Ural Mountains, the Caspian Sea and onto the Persian Gulf. I believe the name is a combination of paleo (Greek for old) and arctic (Greek for northern) but I haven’t seen this confirmed online. As North America is in the Nearctic ecozone, however, this seems likely. Amongst European birders finding a “first for the Western Palearctic” is quite a feather in your cap . . . although you don't actually need one from the bird in question! Birders with such an achievement are perhaps worthy of the post-nominal title “1WP”?
** By now most people are very familiar with Google Maps – but did you know there are other sources of internet maps? These include Micrsosoft’s offering, Bing Maps, and Ordnance Survey Ireland’s (OSI) extensive collection that now uses the “Geohive” brand – good luck with that name! Anyway, the key point is that these sources can often provide a better quality aerial views of an area than Google. OSI doesn’t give driving directions but they do have three sets of aerial shots over recent decades as well as six inch maps from the mid 19th century and 25 inch maps from the late 19th and early 20th century. These series of maps and images provide a fascinating view of how areas change over time. Planners, developers and county councillors could also usefully consider the meaning of “liable to floods” on the old maps!!
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There was also the tantalising promise of shots to follow – vital for this sometimes difficult to identify mega-rarity from the Pacific coasts of North America and East Asia. While waiting, I made initial preparations for another 500 mile trip to the southwest - and when the pictures came through it was clear that this near adult bird was very promising with its grey tipped primaries, shawl of brown and dark eyes. However, as with many of the large gulls, this species is known to hybridise with its close relatives and these hybrids can be very difficult to identify.
So it was another early start – this time at 3.30am with Peter and Victor to be there at first light. Peter and I still have nightmares about narrowly missing another mega rare gull from the North Pacific in Killybegs in Co. Donegal last January – a Slaty-backed Gull. Then we decided to make a later start and to take it easy on icy roads only to miss the bird by minutes as it disappeared before 10am on the second day. This time we were there shortly after 8am in near darkness – this far west, sunrise is not until 8.45pm at this time of year. Then there was an anxious search around the various piers of the fishing port for about an hour and a half until the bird was eventually attracted to bread at the main pier and about 30 happy birders eventually connected with this first Irish record*. It quickly moved to rocks close to the main road into the town where Fionn had found it the evening before.
Here's Ciaran Cronin in the foreground looking doubly happy!
Here's the rocks where the Glaucous-winged spent most of it's time, along with the Yellow-legged Gull.
Here’s a series of pictures on the water, mostly with immature Herring Gulls.
Next are some flight shots showing the grey tones of the mantle and the wingtips as well as the presence of a few dark immature feathers on the back. Most are from the initial observations from the pier but the the last one is in somewhat brighter light later in the morning.
Here’s a shot of a group of birders on the main road – Fionn is on the left with light grey hat.
Finally to add to the mix, here’s a shot of another, albeit less rare, cousin of our native Herring Gull – a Yellow-legged Gull from southern Europe.
So is it a certain Glaucous-winged Gull? I’m no gull expert so I’m not going to call it but I understand a lot of birders are positively disposed to it. However, I’m a little concerned about the darkness and pattern of the wing tips. It will be interesting to see the discussions of this bird over the next while.
QUICK UPDATE - I just had a chance to read comments on the Rare Birds of Britain & Ireland Facebook group from various birders who have seen lots of them and they are happy this bird is well within the range of normal variation.
*There has possibly been a previous record in Sligo in 2009 but it has not been established if that first winter bird was a pure Glaucous-winged Gull or a hybrid.
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I used my Panasonic LF1 pocket camera mounted on railings with the Gorillapod. They were all taken at about 28mm, f8 and ISO 80. Shutter speed varied from 4 seconds in the dawn light for the first shot about ten past eight to 1/6 of second for the last one an hour later. As this camera doesn’t have a cable release option, I used the 10 second delay feature to make sure the camera was stationary after I released the shutter.
The first shot is of the City Hall on the south bank with the Elysian Tower behind - the tallest building in the Republic of Ireland. It is followed by a shot of office blocks on the north bank on Lapps Quay next to the Clarion Hotel. Both were taken from Parnell Bridge. The third shot is of Connolly Hall, the local SIPTU HQ, also on Lapps Quay.
The next two are from the Eamon De Valera bridge looking upstream to the formerly openable Clontarf Bridge - with the Moon setting over it. The second shot is a stitched panorama of five shots using Lightroom’s new photo merge feature – this does the job entirely within Lightroom without the need to export the individual shots to Photoshop.
This is the view upstream from the Parnell Bridge towards Morrison’s Quay on the right.
Along the way is the now closed Moore’s Hotel – visitors using this fine establishment had to be sure not to transpose the two first letters!!
Finally, here are two shots of the Cork College of Commerce – the second one includes the Trinity Pedestrian Bridge. There's very little colour in this building and the sky was already greying over as the breeze strengthened - so I converted them to black & white in Lightroom.
I arrived at the car park overlooking Port Oriel Harbour at Clogher Head about 10pm but I couldn’t see much, partly because of the very bright harbour lights - and the three quarter Moon wasn’t helping either. So I decided to explore northwards and I found a much darker spot at Port Beach car park around 11.15pm. By now the skies above the northern horizon seemed to be getting brighter and my anticipation grew as my eyes acclimatised to the dark – and the stream of aurora tweets continued. Should I set up here? But I couldn’t work the lifeguard hut or the toilet building into a decent foreground. As I dithered – shimmering green curtains suddenly flickered and then burst into prominence all along the northern horizon – sh****t - my first Aurora and the big camera is snug in its bag!!! I grabbed the pocket camera, my Panasonic LF1, and braced it against the car for 5 seconds at f2 and ISO 1600 – but not braced well enough as you can see from the movement trails of the stars. Nonetheless, I was ecstatic to do so well on my first try – and hopefully nature’s greatest lightshow would continue through the night – wouldn’t it??
However, within a few minutes they disappeared, so I drove further north to the southern shore of Dundalk Bay around Annagassen – but I still couldn’t find foreground interest that I liked and the light pollution from Castlebelligham, Black Rock and Dundalk itself was much worse. Right! - back to Port Beach for shortly after 1 am. The tide was well out and I could see shallow channels in the moonlight so I decided to try those for the foreground. There wasn’t a lot going on the sky – just a faint grey glow to the north – so I was amazed when I got shots like the next one from a 20 second exposure at ISO 800, f4 & 20mm. This one at 2am was the best - with a strong green glow reaching up a fainter purple glow - along with reflections on the beach and topped off with the Mourne Mountains in the distance. The nearer Dunany Point worked well to shield the light pollution from Dundalk Bay. I stuck around until after moonset at 3.20am hoping the strong green curtains of earlier would return but it got no better – even after the moon disappeared. In any case by then, the Mournes were hidden by cloud.
To pass the time and keep active in the chilly breeze, I set up the pocket camera on the gorillapod for this shot. You can see a street light in this one that’s not in the main shot – I cloned it out because I thought it was too prominent – but it was very handy for focussing!
It may have been my first Aurora shoot but it won’t be my last!!
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"The boat is one of the National Yacht Club's motor launches which was stolen during the night. The prop shaft got snagged in a lobster pot and the culprits had to be rescued by the lifeboat! They were arrested on their return to shore. The club tried to board the boat the next day but gales prevented boarding and it was subsequently driven on to the pier and wrecked"
I had an hour or so to spare in Dun Laoghaire last Tuesday so I took a wet walk out the East Pier. Despite the weather, I got a few interesting shots – starting with this wrecked rowboat that was washed up on the outside slope near the bandstand. I don’t think it will become the new Sunbeam or Irish Trader though! I took these with the Canon EFS 17-55mm at 20mm – it was so dull I had to use ISO800 to get 1/80th of a second at f8 to keep Howth Head and Killiney Hill in the backgrounds reasonably sharp. A little bit of Lightroom magic using exposure adjustments and graduated filters brought out the boat colours and the cloud detail - and I finished them off with a light vignette. By the way if you do go to shoot this, remember that the outside slope of Pier can be SERIOUSLY DANGEROUS for getting washed into the sea if there are waves coming from the east!
Later on my way back, I heard the ILV Granuaile sounding its horn as it prepared to leave port – but by this time is was really lashing down so I sheltered under one of the steps between the two pier levels and broke out the Canon 100-400mm lens for the shots firstly against the Dun Laoghaire skyline – and then as she left the harbour. For the birders that’s a Great Northern Diver in the foreground of the first shot.
Fortunately the rain eased off briefly as I scooted up to the top of the pier wall to get the last shot as she headed out in a choppy Dublin Bay.
I had no sooner finished with Granuaile when I saw a flying songbird with prominent white wing bars – surely a Snow Bunting – a regular winter visitor from the Arctic to the Dun Laoghaire Harbour in very small numbers. Fortunately it landed briefly to allow me get a few heavily cropped record shots – this is the best of them.
As I was leaving, I checked the path outside the base of the Pier for Black Redstart – another scarce winter visitor, this time from Europe, that shows up in this spot in most years. Fortunately it popped out of sheltering bushes to perch on a rock for a few quick shots in the rain. The family name comes from the Middle English word for tail - stert.
Finally, I got close to one of the resident Rock Pipits for this last shot – this spot is a great area to get close to birds because they are so used to walkers. All three bird shots were taken at about 400mm at f5.6 and ISO1600. The shutter speeds were 1/1250th of a second for the bunting, 1/160th of second for the redstart and 1/400th of second for the pipit. As well as Lightroom’s sharpening, I find Photoshop’s Shake Reduction is very useful to add the impression of sharpness to borderline images - here a text tutorial and here’s a video. I find that the full effect is often too much, so I apply the shake reduction to a copy of the background layer and then adjust the opacity of this layer to taste. Of course, the image has to be moderately sharp to begin with – it’s not going to rescue a total blur!
Much as I love my “proper cameras”, Canon 7D's I & II, there are times I don’t want to shoot with them because they are bulky and obtrusive. I’ve had a variety of pocket cameras over the years but none of them lasted long because I either broke or lost them. After I lost the last one, I started looking around again for a genuine pocketable camera to keep with me at all times. If you say, “isn’t that what your phone is for?” Well, I’d say “No!” – because phone cameras don’t shoot raw*, don’t have manual controls, and don’t have a zoom lens. Additionally in my case, my old iPhone 4S is old has a relatively poor camera.
The currently lusted after pocket camera is the Sony RX100 – “Some of the best image quality in any compact camera, ever” according to DPReview. The only problem is that the latest version IV sells for about a grand in Ireland after cashbacks – although the original version I is now under €400. I was wondering if I could stretch to this when I spotted a second hand Panasonic LFI from Conns Cameras at a little over half that - and this camera also been well reviewed by Cameralabs. OK it doesn’t have a big (for a compact camera) one inch sensor but it does have bright f2 lens at the short end and it’s even smaller than the RX100. And is has a much longer 28-200mm zoom . . . so I splashed out :-)
I’ve been getting used to it over the last few months and I hope to be blogging more of my shots with it over the next while. I decided it would be ideal for wandering around the English Market as a tourist – even if that’s an odd feeling in your home town! Because of the low light levels, I decided to shoot at 28mm to keep the aperture wide open at f2.0. Ironically, this is where the small sensor is an advantage because the depth of field with small sensors, even wide open, is much greater and I wanted to keep the backgrounds sharp to show the context of the shots.
Mostly, I wandered around looking for good spots to get people going past me and shot from waist level hoping to get the shots without people noticing at all, or at least until after I took the shot. Even at f2 I needed ISO 400 or 800 to get speeds of 1/125th of a second – and small sensors start showing noise after 200. Anyway for the first shot in the post, I had to start with one to show the natural modesty of Cork people!
Once I got the shots on the computer, I could see that even doing the best I could with the available technology, the images were noisy and flat – and I didn’t use flash to keep a low profile. So, as well as noise reduction, I added lots of contrast, clarity and vibrance in Lightroom as well as pushing the tonal sliders pretty much to the limits to get a grungy appearance. A vignette and some grain completed the look. Where necessary, I used the Radial Filter to put a little more light on faces.
This was meant to be a fun shoot but when I saw this sign, I realized that I was going to have to take things a lot more seriously!
Next I wandered around for a while trying different locations and getting a feel for the area – and of course getting in one with the wonderful roof.
Eventually I came to Moynihans Poultry and as their signs provided good framing I stuck with the location for a while first from one end . . .
. . .and then the other.
Then it was time a quick wander a few other locations around before my time was up.
And to finish up, did I mention to humble nature of Cork people??
*Actually camera phones do shoot Raw because that’s what all digital cameras do – but only some cameras allow saving in Raw format – something very few phone cameras had until 2015.
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I was at my desk at lunchtime on Wednesday, when a tweet came through from Cork Bird News about a bittern at Castlefreke near Rosscarbery in west Cork. The Eurasian Bittern, a secretive heron of reed beds, is a sporadic visitor to Ireland and a former breeder - but I wondered if the Castlefreke bird could be the far rarer American Bittern following the recent westerly winds. However, I had a job to finish so I switched back to that until 3pm when another tweet announced that it was an American Bittern and it was giving stunning views! WTF OMG MEGA!!!
Irish birders have never connected with this species because most of the 22 previous records were shot or found dead in the 19th century. There have been only four records from the birding era of last 60 years or so - the most recent was one killed by a dog in Co. Wexford in 1990 - and you can't tick dead birds! So now the pressure was on to get the job finished and to prepare for an unscheduled day off. Firstly a quick check of the weather forecast for Thursday – mild, with gentle breezes and partly cloudy – an excellent late November day. In contrast, the forecast for the following days was cold, wet and windy. So the weather was reinforcing the first law of twitching - go ASAP! You never know how long - or short! - a rarity will stay!! Next Google maps – and it was pretty much as I expected - a round trip of 650km and seven hours driving without stops (the 4.5 hours one way shown on the map includes going into towns so that the map shows their names). At least dawn wasn’t until about 8am. so, compared to summer twitches, it would be a relatively late 4.45am start! A quick round of calls and texts made it clear that all the usual Dublin suspects were going, including Victor, Sniper, and two of my regular crew, Rooster & Dipper. The urgency was heightened by the knowledge that the Cork lads were already ogling it as I was getting my act together!
Brrr, brrr brrr – jaysus, what effin time is it? . . . yaaaaaawn! Oh yes, it's a twitch day. Up, dressed, don’t forget the sambos, keep the dog from waking the whole house as the lads knock on the door, get three of us and gear into the car and out onto the M50 for the long run down the Naas dual carriageway and then on through the darkness and drizzle along the M7 and the M8. At least we didn't have to drive through all the towns and villages of twenty five years ago:- Naas, Newbridge, Kildare, Monasterevin, Ballybrittas, Portlaoise, Abbeyleix, Durrow, Cullahill, Johnstown, Urlingford, Littleton, Horse & Jockey, Cashel, New Inn, Cahir, Skeenarinkey, Kilbeheny, Mitchelstown, Fermoy, Rathcormac, Watergrasshill , and finally Glanmire before we arrive in de reel capital! Nowadays it’s a steady 120kph to burn up the quiet early morning motorway in two and half hours until we hit the rush hour tail back at the Jack Lynch tunnel.
A quick call to Vic as we wait at the first traffic lights of the day – he’s already in Castlefreke but the bird hasn’t shown yet. For us, it's another 50 minutes around the South Ring and out the N71 to West Cork via Inishannon, Bandon and Clonakilty before we arrive just after half eight as the morning brightens up and the bird has just been found. Cue, a huge sigh of relief as we’re now pretty certain of not dipping, i.e. missing the bird.
Shortly after we got the car parked, we got our first moderately good views as it hunted around a small lake – newly developed as part of the reconstruction of Castlefreke Castle – a project with it's own story! It looks like it will be West Cork’s answer to Downton Abbey when it’s finished. Anyway, we watched the Bittern intermittently as it regularly came out of the reeds and flew occasionally – happily the American version is much less skulking than the Eurasian Bittern. While it was hidden we had time to catch up with other happy twitchers at the scene - and chat to the locals who were wondering what on earth was going on!
Sometimes, it just poked its head out – pretending to be a reed??
Eventually, however, it came really close giving superb views during a sunny spell - so it was very definitely ticked! This shot clearly shows the distinguishing features – the dark culmen (top) on the bill, the brownish black crown (black on a Bittern), the long dark moustachial stripe (much shorter on a Bittern). The strength of this stripe also indicates it's an adult * - see the Update Below
After views like that, it was time to break out the sambos in the mild afternoon sunshine and get ready to re-run all those kilometres back home to Shankill in time for dinner.
Many thanks to Lynne and Ted de Beer and Peter Wolstenholme for finding this bird and getting the news out; and to Joe Hobbs for details of previous records. Check out excellent video footage from Michael O'Keefe here and here - you have to watch the first one for a while to realize its actually a video!
* UPDATE
On 11 December on IBN, I asked Killian to explain why the American Bittern was a juvenile and he responded as follows:-
Hi John,
The excellent quality of the several of the flight photographs of the Castlefreke American Bittern reveal that it has rather prominently pale-tipped primary coverts, indicative of juvenile plumage. Perhaps more importantly, the primaries and secondaries all appear to be of the same generation (again indicative of juvenile) with no suggestion of any subtle moult contrast between different generations of flight feathers that would be expected in an older bird, particularly at the juncture of the primaries and secondaries. The most in-depth reference to the subject on my shelves is Peter Pyle's Identification Guide to North American Birds (part 2) which discusses these and some additional ageing features in more detail.
Killian
I replied as follows:-
Killian,
Thanks for that. These features you mention are clearly visible on e.g. Aidan Kelly's shot on Surfbirds [my own previously unpublished and not very good flight shot is below]. The darkness of the moustachial is more prominent than I would expect on a juvenile from looking at the Collins Bird Guide. Would this be due to moult or variability do you think?
John C
. . . and he replied as follows:-
"Hi John,
The opportunity I had to examine the fresh corpse of the 1990 American Bittern at Killag, Wexford helped me understand how much the prominence of the dark neck-stripe (I think this is a better term than 'moustachial', though perhaps 'malar stripe' is technically more correct) in this species depends on how the feathering of the adjacent tracts is laying. A lot of the time, it seems, the dark stripe is largely concealed by overlaying side-of-neck and foreneck feathering, but it may become more prominent in an instant if the bird's activity changes, as happens when display commences, or a bird takes flight. For this reason, the strength and colour of the neck-stripe is perhaps not such a straightforward means of ageing American Bittern as is commonly suggested. The other thing to bear in mind is that juvenile American Bitterns apparently undergo an extensive moult of head, neck and body feathers between July and November of their first year, after which these parts of the birds' plumage are said to be very similar to or identical to adult plumage. I say 'apparently' because I have not studied this matter in any great detail and I have occasionally struggled to figure out what is going on when looking at online photos. This is why I consider the condition of the larger wing feathers and the presence/absence of moult contrast to be a more reliable means of ageing autumn birds than some of the other features available.
For anyone who has an interest in following up on this subject there is a great series of shots of a very young juvenile American Bittern from Ron Clifford here and and an even more instructive series from Dan Streiffert here, the first of which demonstrate just how prominent the dark neck-stripe can be on a displaying bird
Killian
Finally for lots more excellent shots of this birds, check out Irish Birding and search for American Bittern; see David Monticelli's excellent series here, and perhaps for the the best shot of all, check out this one by Richard Mills.
** You can also subscribe to IBN to see these discussions in their original context - it’s free.
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Update 12 Sep 2017
Check out this account of another found by Bruce Taylor found on Barra in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland on 7 September 2017. He was dreaming of an American Redstart as well!
Introduction
At the time and 30 years on, 1985 stands as the best year for American passerines in Ireland and Britain. For me, it peaked on the weekend of the 12th and 13th of October when I found an American Redstart and also saw a Scarlet Tanager and a Philadelphia Vireo. Although the Redstart was only a second Irish, amazingly, it’s the last twitchable European occurrence outside of the Azores!
Scenic view of Dirk Bay, near Galley Head - Richard T. Mills.
Scarlet Saturday on the Beara Peninsula
After unsettled westerly weather for the first ten days of October 1985, conditions settled for the weekend of the 12th and 13th. On the Saturday morning, in the company of my then girlfriend*, I headed off from Cork to the Beara peninsula. The plan was to do some birding as well as showing her the scenery of Dursey Island via Ireland’s only cable car. We had time for a brief stop at Firkeel where she, despite being a non-birder, found me a Red-breasted Flycatcher– an excellent tick at the time. She might be kept on! Then we had to go catch the cable car. I felt slightly uneasy leaving the area without checking it fully . . . but I could do that on the way home and I wasn’t aware of any other birders visiting the peninsula that day . . .
Map of West Cork. Routes taken and locations mentioned during the 12th &13th of October 1985.
Firkeel and Garinish (neither indicated on the map) are close to the Dursey Cable Car at the tip of the Beara Peninsula. From: Google Maps.
Scarlet Tanager. Not the 1985 individual, but a 1st winter male that was at Garinish, also on the Beara Peninsula, Co. Cork in 2008. Photo: Tom Shevlin.
As it turned out, Dursey was pretty birdless so, as we returned over the Sound on the afternoon cable-car, I was looking forward to getting back to Firkeel. As soon as we arrived, we met the late and much missed Willie McDowell accompanied by Denis Weir – both from Belfast. At the time, however, Willie was more of a birding rival than a friend and I was stunned when he gleefully told me Scarlet Tanager they had found – the second Irish record. It was great to see such a rarity, but sickening to know that I left it after me earlier in the day!
Button A and Button B
Back in Cork that evening, the day’s news was being spread on button A button B phone boxes – younger readers should be aware that you had to get into these contraptions to make phone calls! They were pretty dodgy at the best of times, and a brief call to Dennis O’Sullivan on Cape Clear was mainly occupied with details of the Tanager. However, he did squeeze in a mention that Jim Dowdall might have seen a Philadelphia Vireo in Dirk Bay near Galley Head – part of the headland then unfamiliar to me. Dennis was unsure of how certain the identification was but I said even if Jim only thought he had a first for the Western Palaearctic, I was going! Dennis said he might see me on Galley Head at some stage on the Sunday if they succeeded in chartering the island ferry for an early morning departure to Firkeel – another first! Unknown to us, Jim Dowdall confirmed the identification later that night, However, when I phoned fellow Cork birder, Mark Shorten, to plan our trip to Galley Head, we decided that we would make sure of it in the event of any uncertainty. So it was fairly late when I got to bed after checking the identification information I had to hand . . . and of course there was no internet!
Dirk Bay, near Galley Head. A view of Dirk Bay from seaward indicating the locations where the American Redstart (to the right) and the Philadelphia Vireo (to the left) were found in October 1985.
Dirk Bay Locations. Relative positions of main locations in Dirk Bay. From: Bing Maps.
A First for the Western Palearctic!
It was another fine morning when Mark and I arrived on Galley Head about breakfast time the following day. We found Dirk Bay easily enough – left at the last cross roads about a mile back from the lighthouse and down the hill - despite the not very accurate half inch maps of the era. . . how did we ever manage without clickable directions??
When we arrived at the bottom of the hill, we found what appeared to the correct large tree . . . and quickly got views of what looked just right for a Philadelphia Vireo flitting through the leaves . . . Wow - our first 1WP !!We stuck with it until late morning and got detailed notes to make sure there would be no doubt as to its identification. Stunning Yank no. 2 of the weekend for me!
Philadelphia Vireo, Dirk Bay. October 1985. 1st Irish and 1st Western Palearctic record. Richard T. Mills.
I’m Going to Check this Garden for an American Redstart . . .
Eventually, we felt we could do no more with the Vireo and we looked around to see where else we should check. Although there was a lot of cover in the woods nearby, there were no migrants of note and eventually I said to Mark that we should go and “check the garden at the top of the hill for an American Redstart” – a bird I had been rabbiting on about for a few autumns. I’m sure Mark groaned at the reappearance of this pipe dream! Nonetheless, we hopped back on my trusty Honda 250cc and headed back up the hill. Once we were parked, Mark walked in along a track on the lower side of the garden and I hopped over a gate on the upper side. Just inside was a short thin hedge and the movement of a bird close to me immediately caught my eye – a small passerine facing me with a dark head, a conspicuous white eye ring, and yellowy orange patches at the sides of the breast. Janey Mac** - it’s a another yank – but which one?? Before I could even start getting my head together, it immediately turned and spread its tail to reveal large yellow patches at the sides!! I couldn’t believe it – an AMERICAN REDSTART! OH FLIP!!** But how was I to get Mark on to it? It was so close to me that I was afraid to call him - he was on the other side of the garden and out of my sight. The best I could do was strangulated shout-whisper:-
“Mark, ahhh … .American Redstart”.
His response was predictable . . . “Fudge Off** Coveney!”
Technology has evolved greatly in the last thirty years – language less so! So what to do now? I was terrified of leaving the bird even for a moment, still worried about shouting, and all the time trying to make as many mental notes about it as I could.
All this translated into a minute or two of paralysed silence as the bird worked its way around the garden. It was eventually broken by “Coveney, you haven’t really got an American Redstart??”
Another shout-whisper - “Mark, you’d better get over here”.
There was a mixture of scrambling noises and detailed threats as to what would happen to me if I was spoofing. As he hopped over the gate, I frantically combined pointing and “shhhh” gestures. By now Mark realised I wasn’t joking and once he actually saw it, he fell to the ground and rolled around with joy . . . narrowly avoiding the abundant cow droppings**. Meanwhile the bird flitted around the garden – apparently oblivious to us. Eventually we calmed down enough to watch the bird in detail and get notes on it even though it was utterly unmistakable. Perhaps an hour passed as we watched it and intermittently expressed our disbelief at the morning’s birding! Finally, however, hunger reminded us that it was lunchtime and we broke out the sambos on the ditch – while keeping an eye on the bird.
American Redstart. Dirk Bay, Galley Head, Co. Cork. October 1985. Richard T. Mills.
Dennis’s Saucer’s Eyes and Anthony’s Black Socks
It was about 2pm when the nosebags were emptied and we began to wonder what had happened to the Cape crew. If they had chartered the ferry at 8am and gone to Firkeel, they should be here by now! Perhaps they had found something else . . . we had had a first for the Western Palearctic and perhaps the most desired second Irish on the books . . . and WE were worried we were missing something!! Should we wait for them or leave the birds and try to get the news out? The phone box in Ardfield, five minutes away, was usually out of order and getting to and from Clonakilty would take three quarters of an hour! As we considered what to do, we heard the distant sound an engine revving and gravel crunching – a birder’s car for sure!
“Right Mark, let play this cool if we can," - as Dennis O’Sullivan’s car came round the bend and skidded down the hill to a halt next to me.
“Did ye get the Tanager?” I said.
“Yeah, yeah” said he.
“What took ye so long – did ye have something else”. I asked.
“No, no, the ferry was a bit late and the roads were dead slow and twisty all the way! But what’s happening here? Is the Vireo still here? Is it a Philadelphia?
“Yeah and yeah!!
“So what are ye doing here – we heard it was in a tree at the bottom of the hill.”
“It is, . . . but there’s an American Redstart in this garden.”
I can still remember Dennis' saucer eyes - “What??? You so and so!!!!** I can’t swear these were his exact words but this gives the gist of them! Cue panic egress from car by four birders!!
No sooner had they gotten into the garden and onto the Redstart when we could hear more gravel crunching and two or three more cars pulled up – a megatwitch for Ireland in the 1980’s! Included were Jim Dowdall, Tony Marr, and Anthony McGeehan. By now the excitement overflowed and I just shouted “American Redstart in the garden”. Tony almost managed to get out of his Volkswagen Sirroco while still driving and I can still see Anthony hurdling the gate in his black socks. Given that I am now into photography in a big way, my only regret is that I didn’t have a camera that day to record the dozen or so thrilled birders on the best ever Irish twitch!
American Redstart. Dirk Bay, Galley Head, Co. Cork. October 1985. Richard T. Mills.
Anti-climactic End to the Weekend
Eventually everyone had their fill of the Redstart and were far nicer to me than ever before . . . or since! As the new arrivals went for the Vireo, I headed out towards the lighthouse – I wasn’t really aware of the gardens on “shite lane” back then but there were a lot of bushes around the last bungalow before the light house. I was working that garden as the light faded when I had a brief glimpse of a bird with some prominent yellow underneath. For a while, all I could see was a shape moving through the leaves but no details. My heart was racing again – could I get a fourth yank for the weekend?? Eventually, it started to show . . . glossy black head, white cheeks and bright yellow breast split by a black band . . . a bloomin’** Great Tit! And that was it – as is often the case with American passerines, the area was otherwise very quiet. I’ve seen and found a few good birds since then but nothing to compare with that magical weekend of 30 years ago. I do a lot less birding nowadays . . . but I still dream that I might have one more day in the southwest when yankee flits are almost common!
Notes
This post is a slightly edited version of a note that was first published by the South Dublin branch of BirdWatch Ireland early in 2015. Thanks to Richard T. Mills and Tom Shevlin for permission to use their excellent photographs here and to Joe Hobbs of the South Dublin Branch for his help in preparing that article.
*As for the “then girlfriend” . . . Marian I think her name was . . . oops . . . oh yeah we’ve been married quite a while now! I suppose two fine sons make up for her lack of further additions to my Irish list!
** It’s just possible that the expressions used in this article are not an EXACT reflection of those uttered at the on the day – naturally the mists of time have drawn a veil over my memory of any vulgarities that may have occurred! I was also informed that such words are entirely unknown to the South Dublin readership!
Further Reading.
Brazier H, JF Dowdall, JE Fitzharris & K Grace (1986). Thirty-third Irish Bird Report, 1985. Irish Birds 3(2): 287-336.
Coveney, John (1985). American Redstart Setophaga ruticilla on Galley Head Co. Cork. Cork Bird Report 1985.
Dawson T & K Allsop (1986). Recent Reports. British Birds 79(1) 1-17.
Dowdall, JF (1995) Philadelphia Vireo: new to the Western Palearctic. British Birds 88(10) 474-477.
Dowdall, JF (1993) Philadelphia Vireo in Co. Cork - new to the Western Palearctic. Irish Birds 5:76-78.
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UPDATE Nov 2016: I just came across this anonymous article from 2000 in the Irish Times describing the author's odyssey on the trail of Van's lyrical tour. Back then, apparently some cars didn't have CD players and he had to use a . . . .cassette player! Anyone???
On a sunny last Saturday in September, I headed to Ballycotton hoping to see an American Golden Plover found there yesterday - AGP in birder parlance. It was a perfect day for a shirtsleeves and sandals stroll from the Ballynamona car park to the old lake under the ever watchful eye of Ballycotton lighthouse.
Although the tide was nearly in, there were very few waders on the beach but Wheatears, stopping over on their migration from the Arctic to Africa, were giving good views.
I spent a lazy hour watching very little on the lake edge as the tide came in, thinking there are worse ways to miss out . . . until I was startled by a loud disyllabic plover call right over my head! WTF?? - that's unfamiliar!! Could it be the AGP?? As it spiralled down and landed at the edge of the incoming tide, I reached for the new Canon 100-400mm mkII, and went into to 10 frames per second burst mode . . . shoot first ask questions later. Sadly the lens is not mine but a loaner from an Offshoot friend - thanks Mike. As the bird made a few short hops on the shore, I was thrilled to catch the diagnostic light brown underwings - very different from the gleaming white of the European Golden Plover.
It then settled down to wait out the high tide and was gradually pushed further away from us. Not to worry, the craic was good as old birding friends arrived and new acquaintances were made.
Then I decided to head back to Cork to try for an Azorean or Atlantic Gull at Blackrock Castle. However, the walk back to the car was slow as we checked the flocks of gulls and waders on the beach - they had been pushed out of the now flooded lake. There were no more rarities but I got a few nice shots of Oystercatchers in flight and, amongst the Black-headed Gulls, a Mediterranean Gull with its heavier red bill. This former rarity is now increasing on the south and east coasts.
I arrived at Blackrock Castle about 7pm, just as the tide started to go out and gulls were arriving to roost. I was looking for a large gull with the strongly streaked head characteristic of this form - officially called "Yellow-legged Gull showing characteristics of the Azorean or Atlantic subspecies" by larophiles! Just in case you are worried, these folk are not beset by some dodgy fixation - instead they are fascinated by gulls - the term is from Larus, the scientific name of the group. OK, OK, perhaps being fascinated by these urban killers, as they are portrayed in the dafter extremes of the British Tory press, is a dodgy fixation! Check out this article for all you're ever likely to want to know about the origins and identification of the gulls from the Atlantic islands.
Meanwhile as I waited, there was a steady stream of arriving gulls but as the light declined after half-seven, I still hadn't found what I was looking for . . . OK, OK enough of the song titles, and not even the right city! And then, suddenly . . . it was just there on the mudflat, preening actively and then running Lesser Black-backed Gulls out of its way! I was back into burst mode at ISO 3200 as moonlight took over from sunlight. Fifteen minutes later, I could barely see it anymore, never mind judge if the tones of its mantle were between light grey of Herring Gull and darker grey of Lesser Black-backed Gull. Fortunately, the camera could see it far better than I. No worries, it was in a bag. It may not be an official tick . . . yet!. . . but it's an excellent new bird!
Wouldn't it be great if it was like this all the time?
]]>Anyway, the first stop was one of my regular locations at Coliemore Harbour in Dalkey where this couple obligingly stayed still for a four second exposure. The other settings were f16 for depth of field, ISO 400 to keep the exposure short enough to minimize subject movement, and 38mm on the Canon EFS 17-55mm lens. As always, the The Photographer's Ephemeris told me in advance that the Moon would be just right of the Martello Tower on Dalkey Island.
The second image was was in new moonshot location for me - the promenade at Clontarf where I got the Moon rising over the green lighthouse at the end of the North Bull Wall. The settings were 1.3 seconds at f7.1, ISO200 and 400mm on the Canon 100-400mm lens. The overriding consideration here was to use the 500/600 rule to make sure that the movement of the moon did not cause it to blur. In fact, I would have been better keeping the exposure at under 1 second given that I was using a crop sensor camera but I'm still happy enough with this!
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The full gallery of QM2 shots is here - and some of the highlights are below along with a few words of the story of the morning. The main aim of the trip was to get views of the liner from the sea with coastal landmarks, such as Dun Laoghaire, Killiney Hill, the Poolbeg Chimneys and Howth in the background - as well as dramatic closeups of the ship itself. For the coastal landmark shots, we had to get 1-2km out beyond the ship so that we were far enough away to both frame it in my 70-200mm telephoto lens AND get the landmarks reasonably large in the background (telephoto compression). As it wasn't always possible to change lenses as required in the conditions, I also did panning shots for later merging with Lightroom's new panorama feature - these shots are in the composites gallery. The trick here is to leave plenty of room in the frame to allow for boat movement as you pan.
Happily it was a fine morning with bright sunlight. However, the previous day's winds had left a bit of chop on the Bay, as you will see from the white horses! So, it was only possible to shoot when we were stopped or travelling slowly - salty spray and DSLRs do not mix!! There are also some shots from land from the Forty Foot, Bulloch Harbour and Coliemore Harbour after we docked.
Leaving the Harbour shortly after 6am with the QM2 on the horizon.
With Killiney Hill, Dalkey Island, Bray & the Sugar Loafs in the background.
White horses off Dun Laoaghaire!
Non-composite panorama.
Dwarfing the Poolbeg Chimneys!
Dramatic view of the bow - with a tender being lowered.
The first tender heading in to Dun Laoghaire
Our skipper Kenneth and crew Glynn from the Irish National Sailing and Powerboat School - on their brand new 12 seater rib the "RASH" with twin 200 horse power Suzuki engines! Many thanks to them for their skill in dealing with the sea conditions and the numerous positioning requests from the photographers.
On our way back in - with the tender and the safety boat.
Off the Forty Foot
Off Bulloch Harbour with The Baily Lighthouse on Howth Head in the Background
Dalkey Photographer John Fahy striking a pose for me - thanks John!
The telescope at Coliemore Harbour erected in memory of John De Courcey Ireland. I'm showing two versions because even when I stopped right down, I couldn't get both the telescope and the ship in focus at the same time. So I took separate shots with one or the other sharp and then layered one with the 'scope in focus underneath one with where the ship was sharp. Then I did a crude but easy focus stack where I just erased out the blurred 'scope from the top version - simple enough even for me!
Composite with Killiney Hill
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The clouds over Shankill were just thick enough to allow me see the eclipse comfortably without eye protection - probably a bit bold but I can still see! Shot at with the Canon 100-400mm lens at 400mm, f5.6, ISO 100 and 1/2,500th of a second. It's brightening up now as I write this 20 minutes later.
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Unfortunately, when I arrived at the base of the pier, the break in the clouds was shrinking rapidly but I was hopeful the gap would last just a little longer. As you can see below, though, all I got was a thin streak of moonlight over the entrance. I used the Canon 100-400 lens on the 7D at 115mm, f11, ISO200 and 30 seconds. As I was standing on top of the pier to increase the separation of the foreground wall from the lighthouses, and there was a bit of a breeze, I stabilised the tripod by hanging my camera bag from it. As always, I used a cable release and I composed using liveview so when shot time came, the mirror was already locked up. With an exposure this long, it was easy to capture the red and green flashes of the East and West Pier lights – seven second intervals but not synchronised. The Kish Light in the distance gives a double flash every 20 seconds. Checking, the Commissioners of Irish Lights website, I believe the small light near the Kish is the South Burford Buoy.
At the time, I thought this would just be a practise shot but when I looked at it on the computer, I rather liked the arrangement of the lights and the streak of moonlight – but what was that lump on the end of the West Pier?? On a 100% zoom, I saw I wasn’t the only lunatic at large – someone else had to urgently text or check their status! If you don't believe, check out a bigger version of the shot on Flickr!
I also came across several astrological links when I was googling for this post. Apparently, the next few weeks are looking promising for Arians - no not aliens! - such as me. One horoscope says:-
“love is spontaneous and direct. The chase is very exciting to us under this fiery influence”
Sadly though, there was no mention of the lotto numbers!
Anyway, Here is the techie bit for these two versions, one using a tree in my estate for some foreground interest. I used the 100-400mm f4-5.6 lens on the tripod for 2 to 2.5 seconds at 180mm, f5 and ISO800. To keep everything reasonably sharp, I applied the 500 rule as described by US landscape photographer David Kingham on photography blogging site PetaPixel. The idea is to divide this number by the focal length, in this case , 180mm to get 2.7 seconds. When using a crop sensor camera such as my Canon 7D, you are also supposed to divide by the crop factor of 1.6 which gives 1.7 seconds - so I was at the limits! Given the restriction on the length of the exposure, I had to open the aperture to the widest available setting of f5 at 180mm and push the ISO up 800 to get enough light. In Lightroom, I cropped quite a bit and changed to a square format. I adjusted the brightness with the exposure, shadows, highlights and whites sliders. I pushed the white balance strongly towards the blue end to pick up the last of the twilight even though this makes the Moon look at little blue – but I much prefer this to a black sky. Finally, I applied noise reductions.
Check back in a few weeks and I might update on the lurve predictions!
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Just a quick post for the day that's in it - crocuses on the green in my estate. I took this one day last February with my now lost pocket camera, a Canon S90 - I always lose or break my pocket cameras :-( I got down low to get a different angle and gave it a bit of fill flash. The settings were 1/320th of a second, f8, 28mm (35mm equivalent) and ISO 100. I chose a relatively fast shutter speed because there was some movement due to the breeze, a small aperture to get everything in focus although that's not too difficult anyway with such a small sensor, and the lowest ISO available to maximize image quality.
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Photographing seabirds often involves trips to offshore islands such as Great Saltee in Co. Wexford or heading into the deep as I did on the Blemullet Pelagic last summer. However, it’s possible to get close to one species, Black Guillemot, around Dublin Bay. I’ve previously photographed them at close range on the Great South Wall in Poolbeg. As with all the Irish auks, they dive for fish but unlike the other species, they usually stay very close to the coast all year. Happily for photographers they often nest in holes in piers and harbour walls – including at Coliemore Harbour in Dalkey where these shots were taken. If you visit early in the morning when there are few people around, they will often bicker, display, or even mate at frame-filling range – as you can see in this shot of fellow Offshooter Frank Kenny in action! I should add that the full length position is not to “hide” from the birds – they are just as blasé if you are standing up – it’s to get down to the birds’ level which give a much better angle.
In this series, I’ve experimented with shooting against the light or, as we say in Cork - contre-jour :-), because Coliemore Harbour faces that way on early summer mornings. In the first shot, I’ve set the bird against the out of focus reflections of the sun from the ripples. I used fill flash to bring out some details on the plumage and get a catch light in the bird’s eye. The amount of flash exposure is not recorded in the exif data but I usually need to add two to three stops of flash compensation to see its effect in these bright conditions.
I used my Canon 100-400mm Mk I lens at 285mm on a Canon 7D MkI, 1/6400th of second at f8.0 and ISO 400. I’m not quite sure why I used such a high ISO in such bright conditions – 1/1600th of second at ISO 100 would have been quite fast enough. However, a high ISO would have increased the range of the flash. When you are this close to the subject at the longer end of the 100-400 lens, the depth of field is very narrow. So I normally stop down to at f8 or even f11 to get the whole bird sharp but the background is still strongly blurred because I am so close. Despite the advice about getting out early, I actually took this shot at 8.36am on a Saturday morning in May 2014 – everyone else was obviously having a sleep in!
The next shot is a love-hate one. Obviously, I love it because I’ve posted it - but some people don’t like it at all. They go on about – shock! - movement blur - or worse, blown highlights – go straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect €200! I’d like to say I carefully planned it, but it was just a grab shot at about 5.20am in May 2013 - the last stop after an all night session of Moon shots that I’ll post about some other time! Anyway, I saw this pair attempting to mate against the rising sun and I swung the camera on to them – forgetting that I’d just finished doing tripod shots at 1/25th of a second, f11 and ISO 100! As I already said, it works for me –if it doesn’t for you, just look away now!
The final shot is of the same pair – taken a few minutes later as they recovered from their (s)exertions. I spotted the rim lighting against the sun and I got flash mounted and working but I still hadn’t the camera settings quite right - probably because I making slow progress on getting the right angle while slithering around full length! Anyway, at 1/50th of a second, ISO 200 and f5.6, there is a hint of movement blur on the birds head.
That’s it for now; I hope you like the look of the shots and won’t worry too much about the technical issues!
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My Profile in the current Newsletter of the Irish Photographic Federation
"In the Spotlight: John Coveney LIPF
Q: Which club are you a member of?
A: Offshoot Photography Society.
Q: Do you have any IPF / FIAP / RPS etc. distinctions?
A: I have a Licentiate from the IPF - my successful L panel in 2011 was a huge boost to my confidence in my photographic abilities. I've tried and failed once for an A with my moonscapes – I plan to try again on this or another topic in 2015.
Q: When did you take up photography & why?
A: The first time was in the 1980's for birds but I didn't stick at it, except for family & holiday snaps, due to the cost of long lenses on a student budget. I eventually sold my camera gear to help fund binoculars and telescopes for birding but I guess the photography bug stuck with me. When I was working as an environmental consultant from the late 90's I wanted a camera to record observations and I eventually bought a super zoom in 2001. My first exposure to serious photography was in my early teenage years was when Richard T. Mills used to visit our family farm in Cork for wildlife shots. He was also a staff photographer with the Irish Examiner – then the Cork Examiner – aka "De Paper". I was seriously impressed with his array of Nikon cameras, huge telephoto lenses, and lighting gear e.g. for shooting Barn Owls at night. He also used to give talks on his bird photography to the Cork Branch of BirdWatch Ireland (then the Irish Wildlbird Conservancy).
Once I got my first digital camera, an Olympus C2100 superzoom in 2001, I was seriously bitten by the bug again and I spent far too much time on the internet learning how to use it and to improve my shots!
Q: What genre of photography best describes your photography or are you a general interest photographer?
A: People, places, wildlife.
Q: What was the background to your most successful image?
A: My most successful image was the winner of the 2013/14 IPF's National Nature Competition "Crabs Might Fly". I had gone out early to get a shot of the crescent moon over Dalkey Island – an image that appeared in my L panel – and then onto Great South Wall in Poolbeg to get some shots of Black Guillemots. I was on my way home to Shankill and I stopped for a quick spot of birding at Bulloch Harbour. The winning image was a single grab shot shortly after I got out of the car – I was lucky because I still had the 100-400mm lens on the camera!
Q: Your own favourite image?
A: A breaching humpback whale – not in some distant ocean – but off Co. Wexford on 1st February 2010! Perhaps I could also mention "Mane in Motion" – this won Sony Ireland's "Life in Motion" competition in 2009 – and the prize was a trip for two to the Sony World Photography presentations which were then held in Cannes. As well as the opportunity for me to be inspired by the work of top class photographers – a booking mix up by the organizers resulted in our room being upgraded to a film star type suite on the seafront! This went down well with herself!
Q: Would you recommend joining a camera club? Why? What have you got out of it?
A: Absolutely – photographing wildlife and birds is necessarily gear obsessed but this can get in the way of developing your vision. Offshoot have a practical and friendly approach to showing a broad range of techniques to members. This was, and is, hugely important to broadening my photographic perspectives and developing my confidence. Without it, I doubt if I would be taking on large groups of children for my kids' school 2015 calendar, social events, or a vintage fashion shoot for the Irish Independent.
Q: What does photography mean to you?
A: Am I allowed say everything??
Q: What is your photographic dream?
A: To earn my living from photography.
To see more of John's work, please have a look here:
Website: John Coveney Photography
A humpback whale breaching off the coast of Co.Wexford - taken by John Coveney in 2010 and still one of his favourite images. |
"Crabs Might Fly" - John Coveney |
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In the run-up to a pelagic, there is knowledgeable -sounding?? :-) - discussions of upwellings, the shelf edge, bathymetry and submarine canyons that might lead to undiscovered seabird concentrations and perhaps the prize of a Cahow, or even an albatross! - mega-rarities that have been recorded on Irish research cruises in recent years. Except for these isolated sightings, however, Irish pelagics over the last 35 years or so have shown that our waters do not compare with pelagic birding hotspots off California, Australia or even as near, relatively speaking, as the southeast coast of the USA at Cape Hatteras. The only significant discovery is the regular presence of Wilson’s Petrels in late summer and early autumn. Amazingly, small numbers of these 40g birds (1.5 ounces) reach us from Antarctic waters where more than 50 million pairs breed.
Despite a long history of often dull trips, every year a few boatloads of lunat . . . ahem, intrepid Irish birders battle pessimism, seasickness, as well as diesel and chum fumes (see below). Perhaps the most regular is “Ed’s pelagic” that goes 10-15km off Co. Kerry. Ed has a good track record of scoring Wilson’s Petrels on most trips. Even if it’s quiet, there are always spectacular views of the outer Blasket Islands or, if we go a little further south the Skelligs, and I have always enjoyed these trips.
However, when Dungarvan based birder, John Power, contacted me a while back about a possible trip to the edge of the continental shelf from Blacksod at the southern tip of The Mullet in Co. Mayo, I quickly gave in to my eternal inner optimist! So why Blacksod? Well northwest Mayo is relatively close to the steep edge of the continental shelf as shown in the Real Map of Ireland and the 2-3,000m deep waters of the Rockall Trough. At its nearest, it’s about 55km northwest of Eagle Island on the Mullet – and about 80km from Blacksod. In contrast, the shallower slopes down to the Porcupine Seabight off the southwest coast are almost 70km off the Tearaght – the westernmost of the Blaskets in Co. Kerry – and over 100km from the nearest harbour at Dingle. The theory is that, as deep water currents hit the steep continental shelf, there would be upwellings of nutrient rich water that would lead to concentrations of shrimp, fish, cetaceans and, most importantly, seabirds.
All of this led eleven birders to a 5.30am departure on Saturday 19th July from Blacksod Pier. We had a 4-5 hour steam north westwards, around the Blacksod Lighthouse, north of the Duvillauns, inside the Inishkea Islands, and then past Inishglora, Eagle Island and Benwee Head and out into the blue – well out of sight of land.
By mid morning we were in deep waters of 1,100 to 1,200m and about 60km offshore. Once there, we started chumming – that is throwing out a mixture of cooking oil and rotting fish to attract seabirds that – unlike land birds – have a good sense of smell. Breakfast cereal is added to keep the mix floating a bit longer. Then we drifted until lunchtime and scanned the slick for birds. This is when the combination of smelly chum and the extra rocking of a drifting boat is sure to push any queasy passengers over the brink of sickness – fortunately we had only one victim – seasick prone twitchers who have previously learned this the hard way no longer do pelagics!
Within an hour or so a shout went up, a Wilson’s Petrel! It stayed just long enough to get a distant record shot that shows the distinctive pale bar on the upper wings – unlike the native Storm Petrel that has a prominent white bar on its under wings and only a faint one on the upperwing. This was a good start but it was new for only one of our experienced group.
Most of the time it was pretty dull with an informal rota of watchers and dozers. The photographers checked their camera settings, discussed file formats and autofocusing, and practiced their long lens technique on the ever present Fulmars and Lesser Black-backed Gulls. There were occasional Great Shearwaters – or perhaps the same one returning – and some Leach’s Petrels to stir the sleepers. By early afternoon I’m sure many of us were wondering if it was going to be the Blacksod-all- pelagic!
Perhaps the most exciting event was a Bonxie attacking a Lesser Black-backed Gull in an effort to steal its chum titbit. Despite the lethal looking attack, the gull eventually escaped, apparently unscathed!
In the afternoon, we cruised north-eastwards along the shelf edge – clearly all the seabird action was just a little further on!! If it was, though, it was little further than we could go – the birds of the afternoon were very similar to the morning – such as Great Black-back Gull, Kittiwake and a solitary Puffin that circled the boat for a while.
Just as we were about to head home there was a shout of dolphins! - but they looked a bit strange to those of us used to Common and Bottle-nosed Dolphins. As they came closer, their very black backs combined with white and yellow flank stripes identified them as Atlantic White-sided Dolphins to our skipper. We had 25-30 of them around us for half an hour or more – many of them appearing to wag their tails as they leapt out of the water.
We were getting to grips with this new species for most of us until some the more distant ones looked a bit different - particularly their blunt fins?? As they came closer, again our skipper recognised them as Long-finned Pilot Whales – 40-50 of them including some very young animals with their birth rings still visible. They didn’t stay as long as the dolphins but it was great to be among these deep sea mammals.
As they left, we saw a few paler dolphins leaping right out of the water – 3-4 Bottle-nosed dolphins.
So after a quiet day for birds, our time in the deep finished off with a memorable concentration of cetaceans and cheered us up for the long uneventful cruise back through the sunset to Blacksod.
Thanks to John Power and Dave Suddaby for organizing, Dave for relentless chumming, and our skipper for getting us there and back safely and comfortably. Observers: Victor Caschera, Dick Coombes, John Coveney, Jim Dowdall, Aidan G. Kelly, John Lovatt, Killian Mullarney, Dermot O’Mahony, Brian Porter, John Power & Dave Subbaby. Some of Aidan & Victor’s shots can be seen here on Birdwatch Ireland’s seabird blog “A View from the Headland” with more of Victor’s shots on his Facebook page.
Photographic Notes - Gear
The usual photographic kit for Irish birders is a Canon 7D teamed with a f5.6 400mm lens. This setup is light enough for walk around use and to handhold - tripods are unusable on small boats. It’s also relatively cheap at around €2,500 – or less for second hand gear. Five years after its introduction, the 18 megapixel Canon 7D is still highly regarded amongst birders for its fast autofocus, burst rate of 8 frames per second, and its 1.6x crop sensor that gives a 400mm lens an effective reach of 640mm – especially as lenses for bird photography come in only two varieties – too short . . . and far too short! Canon “400mm lenses” for birding actually come in three versions - the image stabilised 300mm f4 plus a 1.4 converter that makes a 420mm f5.6 – this is the common choice amongst birders. Next is the 100-400mm f4-5.6 zoom lens that I use because I want a wider range of focal lengths for other photography – it’s also image stabilised. Finally, there is the 400mm f5.6 which is the lightest and probably the sharpest of the three - people have tended to avoid this one because of its lack of image stabilisation but that’s a mistake in my opinion given the high ISO capabilities of modern DSLRs.
Why not Nikon or another brand? Well, when many birders were choosing DSLRs in the last five years or so, Nikon’s only walk around long lens was an 80-400mm that was reputed to be relatively slow to autofocus. When trying to capture a flying bird, a tenth of a second of autofocus hunting is an eternity! Since 2013, there’s a new improved version but it’s quite expensive at around €2,500. Sony also has a 70-400m lens that is well reviewed but I’ve not come across their lenses or cameras in the field. In recent years, smaller lighter mirrorless cameras have improved dramatically but, with the possible exception of Sigma and Tamron lenses (below) they don’t yet have the high quality affordable and lightweight long lenses that birders require.
Two other alternatives to the Canon lenses are the Sigma 150-500mm lens and the newly released Tamron 150-600mm lens. They have greater reach and are cheaper than the Canon options but they are a little larger and heavier, and lack a little sharpness at the long end. Even the well-reviewed Tamron, here, here, and here does not does not appear to me to be enough of an improvement to switch from Canon. Those buying their first DSLR lens for birding should certainly consider it, however. These lenses may be available for mirrorless cameras but their bulk would negate the size advantage of mirrorless cameras.
A budget option, if the size or cost of a DSLR system is not for you, is the Panasonic FZ200 super zoom. For less than about €500 you will get an all-in-one camera with a 25-600mm lens that has a constant f2.8 aperture. The image quality of its small point-and-shoot sized sensor won’t be as good as DSLR, but it’s a great way to get record shots on a budget and it has been very well reviewed by DPReview. Panasonic also have an interesting new version in this series, the FZ1000. This will be available soon in the €900-1,000 range. It has a much bigger one inch sensor – about the third of the size of the Canon 7D - with a 25-400mm f2.8 – f4 maximum aperture. So why would a birder looking for maximum reach go for a shorter zoom? Because the image quality from the one inch sensor, especially after cropping is likely to more than offset the shorter reach. The f4 lens would also let in twice as much light at f5.6 DSLR kits. Two early reviews of this lens, here and here, are very good.
Photographic Notes – Settings
Photographing seabirds and cetaceans from a moving boat is not easy. Indeed, getting good shots of the smallest species - the storm-petrels - as they jink around is amongst the hardest of photographic challenges. So it’s best to start with larger relatively slow moving species such as the gulls and practice – a lot!! –at your local pier or pond. In fact, practice and a thorough understanding of the fundamentals of exposure and of your camera’s settings are vital to get good shots of seabirds at sea. For a detailed guide to the Canon 7D’s settings, I would highly recommend “The Canon 7 Experience” by Douglas J Klosterman.
Also remember that as sea and weather conditions deteriorate in wind conditions above force 4-5, bird photography from small boats becomes almost impossible due to movement, splashes and perhaps the dreaded seasickness! However, it’s likely that your boat will not stay out very long in such weather anyway! If you are trying to shoot in such conditions, it’s essential that you have some kind of a rain cover. A splash of a saltwater is likely to kill the electrics of your camera and lens!
Assuming, however, that you have a reasonably bright calm day, the main goal is to get shutter speeds in excess of 1/1,000th of a second to freeze the motion of the birds and their wings – in this post, I’m not going to deal with the creative use of slower shutter speeds to convey the impression of movement because this results in loss of feather detail.
There are two ways of achieving these high shutter speeds. The more common is to use aperture priority – AV on a Canon - and open up your shutter to the maximum, typically f5.6 with the above Canon kits. This will give you the highest shutter speed achievable for whatever ISO the camera is set at. In bright sunlight, you will get speeds of 1/1,000th to 1/2000th of a second at ISO 200. In bright overcast conditions, you will need ISO 400-800 to achieve this, while dull conditions demand ISOs of 1600 or perhaps even higher. Such high ISO’s will result in digital noise but this can be dealt with in camera or in post-processing. In contrast, motion blur from insufficiently high shutter speeds will ruin your shot. When using aperture priority, you will need to monitor the shutter speed indicator in your view finder, especially if the light changes. Too little and your speed will be too slow and too much means you are using an unnecessarily high ISO and therefore losing some image quality. The constant monitoring of camera settings does not come naturally, to me at least. It needs practice to avoid a long run of shots at the wrong settings.
The other alternative is to use shutter priority – TV on a Canon - and set your speed to your desired value. If there is insufficient light to achieve this, the aperture indicator in your viewfinder will blink and you will need to increase the ISO setting until this stops. Again you will need to monitor this indicator and your aperture values as light levels change. If they become very small, your ISO setting is too high.
Once you have achieved the correct speed and ISO for the conditions, you will also need to constantly monitor your exposure compensation. If your subject is a bright bird against a dark sea you will need to under expose by 1-2 stops. If it is a dark bird, you will need to over expose by a similar amount – and similarly overexpose for all birds against the bright sky. On the Canon 7D, I use the thumbwheel on the back to control exposure in aperture priority. Remember that if you over expose you will lose shutter speed so, if you think you will do this a lot, you should start off with a shutter speed of 1/2000th of a second or more. This gives you the flexibility to maintain a speed of at least 1/800th of a second.
If you use shutter priority, you will need to achieve your desired shutter speed at apertures of f8 to f11 to allow for over exposure compensation by stopping down to f5.6. Under exposure compensation does not cause as many issues. In aperture priority it will result in higher shutter speeds which are not a problem as the maximum available shutter speed is usually 1/8000th of a second. In shutter priority, it will result in quite small apertures of perhaps f16 or f22 – these may lessen the “pop” of you subject if the background sea is also in sharp focus. Of course if you have a pale bird that is flying between a dark sea and a pale sky you may have to choose either over exposure or under exposure compensation . . . or else be extremely quick on the controls!
When shutter speed and exposure are dealt with, you should set your camera to the high burst speed setting to give yourself a better chance of getting a good image each time you shoot. Don’t, however, just hold down the shutter button for maximum bursts! You will fill you card (s) far too quickly and the downloading and processing all those duds will slow your computer right down! Instead try to get a feel for your subject’s movements and shoot off a short burst of 3-5 images at the right moment. With observation, you will get a feel for each species’ behaviour to help you pick the right moment to shoot. Too soon and the bird will be too far away but too late and it may suddenly jink as it approaches the boat . . or just jink anyway!
Most people recommend a focus tracking method such AI-Servo in Canon – once the camera locks on to larger birds it will keep them in focus if they don’t move or turn too rapidly. Initially you should use the centre focusing point as this is the most sensitive. Birds that are small or distant, such as storm petrels - or a record shot of a distant rarity - are much more difficult for the autofocus to lock onto. If they are against a sea other than flat calm – very rare in Irish waters! – the autofocus loves to lock on to the wave pattern some distance behind the bird resulting in blurred bird images. The trick here is firstly to set up you camera so that you can move around the focus point. On the 7D you can program the rocker button to do this – it’s on the back between the “start/stop” button and the big thumbwheel. Then, use this to move the autofocus from the centre to the bottom point so that it will focus on the water underneath the bird and hopefully get the bird sharp as well. If you are trying to focus on a small bird against the sky, the autofocus often searches unsuccessfully on the largely featureless background so pre-focus on water at a similar distance and then try to locking onto the bird.
Additionally, if your lens has a focus limiter switch you should chose the option that stops the lens focussing at close range. This results in much quicker auto focusing because the autofocus has to move the lens’s internal elements much more to lock on to close objects. On my Canon 100-400m there are two settings for minimum focus distances of 6.5m and 1.8m. I normally use the former. Of course if the bird does come very close, you may then not be able to focus on it at all – so which setting you use is a judgment call depending on the birds’ usual behaviour. Additionally, if larger birds do come very close, e.g. to chum, you may need to stop down the aperture to f8 to get enough depth of field to keep the whole bird sharp – if you do this you may also need to increase your ISO to maintain your shutter speed.
Finally you need to decide whether to shoot in JPEG or RAW. Most people start with JPEG and if you know your exposure and camera settings well, you will get very good results. With JPEGs you also have the advantage of longer bursts and smaller images so you can get more images on your cards. Your computer will also process these images more quickly. If you want to minimise computer processing, you should use the camera’s onboard noise reduction controls – low for ISOs up to 200 on older DSLRs – or 400 for modern ones such as the 7D or newer. Similarly use moderate noise reduction for intermediate ISO settings and high for high ISO’s. Unless you are experienced with white balance settings, use auto-white balance. Finally, it’s probably best to use moderate sharpening settings. The main downside with JPEGs is that you get it wrong, it’s harder to recover the shot in post-processing.
The use of RAW files is only for those who are comfortable with processing them afterwards with a program such as Lightroom or the Adobe Camera Raw module in Photoshop. The key advantage of RAW shooting is that if you get your exposure wrong - by up to about 2 stops - you will be able to recover much more detail. Again, if you are experienced with post-processing, will be able to correct white balance errors and, especially for high ISO shots, do a better job than your camera with noise reduction and sharpening. The downsides are much bigger files sizes, shorter bursts, and heavier demands on your computer and time.
Well . . . these photographic notes are half as long again as the story of the trip! If you are new to this type of photography, don’t expect to understand them all at once. Play with one setting at a time and practice on easier subjects in advance. It’s worth the effort though to get good quality images and . . . if you can shoot seabirds at sea, you will be able to figure out how to shoot almost anything! Finally though, remember that if you do concentrate totally on photography on your pelagic trip you may not actually “experience it yourself” – so put the camera down occasionally – it’s something special to be up close to oceanic seabirds and mammals.
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Although it’s only 46m (151 feet) above the surrounding land, it provides spectacular views of the Central Plain of Ireland – I’ll show the best of these images in a future post. As the sun set, however, I realised that the rising Moon would be just behind the castle – as seen from the Ballycarroll road back to Junction 10 on the M7 motorway – even if staying on for these shots would expend quite a few brownie points J.
The first shot is from the road itself and I took it with my Canon 70-200 f4 lens at 200mm for 1/25th of second at f11 and ISO 200 – and mounted on tripod. The f11 aperture gave enough depth of field to get both the castle and the moon – some 363,000km (225,600 miles from Earth at its nearest point – in focus. It was taken about six minutes after sunset. This is the processed version that was shot in RAW. I was able to bring out the detail of the Moon and landscape using the almost HDR capabilities of Lightroom’s tonal controls. I also used the radial filter to further adjust the exposure of the Moon and enhance its face. Compare it with the out-of-camera version!
The second view was taken about 35 minutes later from the adjacent newly harvested cereal field. As the twilight progressed, the light dropped dramatically by about nine stops and the exposure was 15 seconds at f11 and ISO 200 at 38mm using the Canon 17-55mm f2.8 EFS lens. By this stage, retaining detail in the Moon would result in the landscape being totally blacked out – so I don’t worry about blowing out the Moon and expose for the landscape. In fact, I like the starburst effect generated by the small aperture.
It was certainly worth the stop at this spectacular setting. If Lord of the Rings had been shot in Ireland, if would have made a great location for Weathertop!
]]>My entry for Met Eireann's spring weather photo contest got to the final and will be the backdrop for the presenters on Monday 28 April. It was taken on a sunny but cold morning on the slopes of the Silvermines Mountains in Co. Tipperary in April 2012. The sunlight coming from almost against me and across a valley, highlighted the contrast between slight frost on the fields and the dark trees and hedges. I used the Canon 100-400mm lens on a 40D at 220mm, f5, 1/1250th of a second and ISO 400.
It was taken in the rain with the 7D and the Canon 100-400mm. The settings were 400mm, 1/400th of a second at f5.6 and ISO 1600 and I was quite pleased at how it came out despite the dull conditions - Lightroom cleans up the noise really well.
While I have been very happy with the performance of this lens since I bought it second hand about five years ago, I've been following with interest the buzz around Tamron's new 150-600mm f5-6.3 which, currently is €300 cheaper than the Canon at Conns in Dublin. In a recent review by Bryan Carnathan of the Digital Picture, says that at f5.6 the:-
“Tamron [is] holding a slight edge in the center of the frame in some comparisons. At 400mm, the Tamron is noticeably sharper [my underlining]. At f/8, the comparisons are even closer with the Tamron retaining a corner advantage at 400mm. The Tamron also has less CA at 400mm”
He also notes says it's "sweet spot" is in the 300-400mm range and that 600mm is the "least sharp focal length" and needs stopping down to f8 or even f11.
Clearly Tamron have brought out a serious and excellent value competitor to the Canon that would make it very hard to choose if I had neither – the question for me is - is it good enough to switch??
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Twenty of us arrived at dawn at the eastern end of the Upper Lake with lenses fixed and tripods drawn! Peter demonstrated the use of graduated, polarizing and neutral density filters to keep detail in the sky, reduce reflections, and to smooth out the water. The next shot is my favourite from here and naturally Glendalough’s “special stick” made an appearance – it’s even been known to magically move according to the rule of thirds or the golden mean as compositionally required :-)
I exposed this shot for 15 seconds at f11 and ISO 100 at 20mm using my Canon 17-55 EFS lens - an exposure this long was possible in the low light levels before sunrise. I had my circular polarising filter on the camera when I took it but I rotated it so that it did not remove the reflection from the lake surface - this made the stick more prominent.
As the light increased after sunrise, a “big stopper” is required to lengthen the exposure enough to smooth the water – some of our group had the Lee 10 Stop Neutral Density filter, while Peter prefers B&W’s 6 stop filter. I don’t have one of these yet – so head on over to the Offshoot Flickr group to see the results of these shots, especially Olive’s example here, taken about 15 minutes after sunrise.
In my shot, I used daylight white balance to keep the colours as they were at the time – about 20 minutes before sunrise. As landscape photographer David Noton says:-
“If the light is cool and blue I'll not interfere. If the rays are warm and golden I want them to look as such. Who am I to interfere with Mother Nature?”
I also set the “picture style” on my Canon 7D to the “landscape” option and both of these settings usually produce an image fairly close to how I saw it. Of course, when shooting in RAW, you may say it doesn’t matter what white balance or picture style I choose because these only affect JPEGs and I can change RAWs anyway I want in Lightroom. That's true, BUT setting them on the spot gives me two advantages. Firstly, the JPEGs on the camera’s LCD will be washed out if I use auto white balance, making it harder to judge if I have captured the scene properly*. Secondly, in my Lightroom import preset for landscapes, I have already chosen (i) the “As Shot” option in the White Balance panel, AND (ii) the “Camera Landscape” setting in the Camera Calibration panel – both of these are in Lightroom's right hand develop menu. As Lightroom generates the previews of my imported images using these settings, it produces a close approximation of the camera’s LCD images. Furthermore, when I match these settings on the camera and in Lightroom, there is no disconcerting change in the appearance of the image when it is imported. Remember that, even when you shoot in RAW, you can’t see RAW images, only JPEGs as rendered by your camera or computer based on the inputs you set. So, if you don’t specify in advance how you want your JPEGs to look, they may differ considerably between the camera and the computer. Of course with a RAW image to start with, you can deal with these mismatches and change the image radically from the original Canon appearance according to your taste. I just prefer a consistent starting point on both the camera and the computer that is close to the scene as I saw it – an approach that also speeds up my workflow.
*[I mentioned above that use of auto white balance may cause washed out colours on the LCD, particularly at dawn and dusk. Even with daylight white balance, however, you would still get washed out LCD images if you use the “expose to the right” technique to reduce digital noise in the shadow areas of your shot – so the trick is to get everything looking right on the LCD with a normally exposed image - then push up the exposure until the histogram moves to touch the right hand edge – or even slightly climbs the right hand wall. This takes advantage of the of the extra stop or so of dynamic range in RAW images. My rule of thumb is that small areas of blown highlights as shown by the blinkies will be OK in landscapes - however I would always avoid blinkies in skin areas of portraits. Finally, if you are using your LCD in this manner particularly in low light conditions, you may to turn down its brightness.]
After we finished at the lake edge, our next stop was the nearby stream below the Poulanass Waterfall where the now overcast conditions were ideal to do some silky water photography as shown in the above four shots. For these, I chose my Canon 70-200mm f4 lens because I thought getting in close on the rocks would be good – but also because there were lots of us around the stream, so wide angle shots wouldn’t work. The settings were ISO 100 & f11, with exposures - again on the tripod - of between half & one second. The focal lengths of between 113 and 200mm. For these shots, I did use the circular polariser to reduce reflections from the rocks and to increase the exposure time. In Lightroom, I worked the tone sliders to avoid blowing out the whites in the water and bring out the detail and colours of the rocks. I also bumped up the vibrance and clarity. I also modified the daylight white balance towards the blue end to bring out the blue tones in the water.
After, finishing with the rocks I worked my way up the stream and saw this stick stuck at the bottom of the waterfall - a different one from the lake! I tried a number of compositions and zooms and I liked this tight framing best. Then I decided to do a horizontal flip to see if would look better with the stream flowing left to right – and when I was looking at the two versions side by side I suddenly saw that they would look really interesting if I combined them in Photoshop. In the the end I made two versions, one with the left hand edge in the middle and one with the right hand edge in the middle. I can’t decide which I prefer – so I’d be interested in your opinion in the comments.
That's it for now, I hope to do another post on this trip when I've tried out Peter's processing strategies that he demonstrated to us later in the day.
It wasn’t particularly stormy on the way down but that all changed where our route met the sea at Churchtown – about 500m short of the Lighthouse – there was a deep blanket of foam on the road and it was like driving through a whiteout! The first few shots were taken with my pocket camera, a Canon S90, before we braved the foamy blizzard. Shooting in these conditions is slow work given the need, firstly, to stay safe and secondly to keep yourself and your gear at least moderately dry and steady. Even before we got out, we had to face the car into the wind to avoid the risk of damage to the door hinges if the wind caught the car doors – but then it was really hard to open them to get out! We worked the low cliffs in this area – well back from the edges! – trying to get the best composition and avoiding foam splatters on the lenses – it was a good day for my protective UV filter! The next two shots from this location were my favourites - the sea was almost entirely white and slightly eerie looking as the thick coating of foam had a slight calming effect on the breakers – but they still crashed furiously onto the rocks!
Eventually it was time to warm up and, after a very welcome cup of tea and currenty cake from a friend of Tom’s, we headed out the lighthouse. The next six shots were taken from viewing platform at the top where there would have been a real risk of being blown off I it wasn’t for the railing! Even though we were about 30m up – the crashing seas were spectacular! Then as I watched the rocks below, I saw “high vis. iPad seascape shooter” who, of course, had to get close in to the waves breaking at the base of the lighthouse. A few seconds after he left his rock, it was completely swept by sea!!!
Despite the storm outside, it was completely calm inside the lighthouse’s four metre thick walls and I took some time on the floor to get the best angle on the spiral staircase. Back out in the storm again and I got a shot of the red doors on the – relatively – sheltered western side of the tower. As we had been on the go since about 5am, the next stop was lunch in the Heritage Centre, followed by Ireland’s very welcome clobbering of “three a row” Wales J.
Then as dusk fell we headed home with a last stop at the still foamy inlet – and by now the beam of the lighthouse had come on. I particularly like the last shot. Yes it’s a bit blurry and noisy – 1/30th of a second at ISO 1600 with some popup fill flash – this was the best I could do handheld given that a tripod would have blown over or even away – but for me it captures the spirit of the day. I’m also impressed that John Stanmeyer won the 2013 World Press Photo competition with my idea J - just for the record, I took my shot before the award was announced!
Gear: Apart from the first two shots with the Canon S90, the rest were taken with the 7D using three Canon lenses, the EFS 10-22mm, the EFS 17-55mm and the Canon 70-200mm f4 lens with focal lengths in the range 10 to 70mm. In good light, ISO’s were in the 200-640 range and apertures of f8 to f11 were used. Interior and dusk shots were done at ISO 1600 at apertures of f4 to f5.6. Typically I used aperture priority to get a much speed as I could at these settings.
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I was out and about north of the Liffey today but with limited time for photography except for a quick visit to Howth Harbour during a sunny spell when I got this view of the fishing fleet tied up during the storm – and with the lighthouse in the background. You can check out a very different view of the lighthouse with the full Moon behind it that I got in Nov 2011 here on my Flickr site.
I took today’s shot with the Canon 70-200mm f4 lens at 78mm for 1/320th of a second, f11 and ISO200. It’s essentially straight out of camera, which was set on daylight white balance which nicely captured the cold wintry sunlight and the dark clouds – with lighthouse as the only warm looking feature. The shot would have been better without the car in front of the lighthouse – and I did try again after it moved but the light wasn’t as good – I guess I’ll have to clone it out if I ever want to do more with this shot!
]]>The first is a compressed telephoto view taken from the car near the Falls Hotel – I used the Canon 70-200mm f4 lens at 104mm - the settings were 1/320th of a second at f4 and ISO 400. The main edits were adjusting the tones to bring out the cold dark ambience as a hail shower started – as shown by walker’s “head down” stance. I added blue to the shadows using the split toning panel in Lightroom and added some vibrance to further highlight the red building. I also cloned out a few blurred twigs in the foreground.
The second shot is a very different wide angle perspective and it was taken from just behind where the walker is in the first shot. I used the EFS 17-55mm lens at 28mm, for 1/80th of a second, f11 and ISO 100. In theory, this may have been a candidate for a long exposure with a neutral density filter (which I don’t have yet) but the stormy gusts and short gaps between the hail showers would have made it impractical to set up a tripod. Instead, I used the minimum ISO and a narrow aperture to get a relatively low shutter speed compatible with hand holding. This smoothed the flow a little while retaining the motion and power of the torrent. The main edits were a black and white conversion, followed by working the contrast and tone sliders to silhouette the surroundings and bring out a brief shaft of light on the river. Again I used the split toning panel to add blue to the shadows.
The third shot is a stitched panorama, using Photoshop, taken from the riverside path near the Main Street. It originates from three shots that were taken handheld with the EFS 17-55mm lens at 20mm, for 1/125th of a second, f8 and ISO 400. I could have done it in one shot at about 11mm with the EFS 10-22mm lens but this would have meant using a wider angle which would have made the bridge and the building much smaller relative to the waterfall – as well as causing some wide angle distortion of the buildings near the edges of the frame. In my opinion, this composition is more balanced. When stitching, it is essential to shoot in manual mode so that the camera settings don’t change as you move towards the sun. I actually forgot to switch from aperture priority here! – but I was lucky to get away with it :-). When handholding, you also need to plan your sweep so that all the important elements of the view are well within the shot while keeping the camera as level as you can. Zooming out a little helps by leaving some flexibility to crop the stitched panorama. Before stitching, I did some basic tone edits on one image in Lightroom and then synchronized these across the three images. After stitching, the main edit was some cropping and adding a little blue to the shadows.
This final shot of the series shows the biggest drop at the top of the cascades. It was taken the EFS 10-22mm lens at 12mm. I chose this angle to include both the main drop and rest of the cascades running down to the Falls Hotel where we started. The spray at this location meant that only a quick grab shot was possible during a very brief sunny spell. The settings were 1/640th of a second, f8, and ISO400. Editing was limited to minor cropping and tone changes.
The title is taken from the 1994 film based on a 1979 book of the same name by Jim Harrison.
UPDATE 3 Feb: Shot published in the Cork Examiner on 1 Feb 2013
Followers of my Facebook ramblings will know that I went in the west for a bit of storm chasing last Sunday. The swell page on the surfers’ weather site, Magic Seaweed, was showing swells of up 15m while Met Eireann’s sea area forecast was predicting violent storm force 11 – “exceptionally high waves. Very large patches of foam, driven before the wind, cover much of the sea surface” – or one step below a hurricane. Originally the plan was to head for Mullghamore in north Co. Sligo or Rossnowlagh in south Co. Donegal. Apart from good landscapes and big waves, at only about three hours from south Co. Dublin, this is one of the closest stretches of the west coast to Dublin. However, the BBC weather forecast charts showed that the deep depression off the north coast would generate virtually continuous cloud cover and intense and prolonged showers over this area. Therefore, Murphs Yer Man and I decided to head for the equally close & scenic west Clare coast. Some breaks in the cloud were forecast there that would, hopefully give better light.
We worked our way along the coast from Lehinch to Black Head and I got plenty of competent shots between the hailstorms and the gusts. However, this one of the spray breaking over the cliff tops near Doolin during a short sunny spell was easily my best effort of the day. The great black-backed gull soaring effortlessly above the surf was the clincher – although I didn’t even see it when I took the shot!
I used my Canon 70-200mm f4 lens with my old but serviceable 40D – I had the 17-55mm on the 7D at the time and there was no way I was swapping lenses in those conditions! The settings were 1/1600th of second, f5.0, 122mm and ISO800 – basically whatever it took to get the shutter speed up to avoid storm shake!
In Lightroom, I applied a 2:1 crop to remove the uninteresting horizon as well as houses from further up the slope – followed by a little more cropping to get the gull near the thirds line. As the shot is all about movement and shape and there was almost no colour in it anyway, a black & white conversion was the next step. Then I pushed up the highlight and white sliders to accentuate the surf and spray, followed by more contrast and blacks to darken the cliffs and foreground. Finally, I added a split tone – quite a bit of blue to shadows and a of hint yellowy-orange to the highlights to warm them up.
If you get this far, I hope you've enjoyed the shot as much as I did - taking and developing it. The title is from Jonathon Livingstone Seagull by Richard Bach.
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The first slide show is from Saturday when the tide was slightly higher but there was little wind. This still produced waves breaking over the pier itself as well as flooding the parking area at the base of the pier – so a bit of jogging or a good balance was required to avoid a wetting when getting to or back from the sheltered steps on the blockhouse! Once there, I got shots of guy and his bike getting very wet coming back along the Wall as the tide dropped. I also got few shots of the other shooters that didn’t want to get their feet - or their tablets! - wet. The last image is a wide shot of the waves sweeping along the Wall as I headed home.
With a south easterly gale on Sunday, things were a bit more dramatic when I arrived at high tide as the sun came out – even the outer higher section of the Wall between the Half Moon Bathing area and the lighthouse was being swept by the waves. Venturing onto the low lying section would have been an instant qualification for a Darwin Award! Nonetheless, as the tide dropped, one guy thought he could outdo Canute – briefly! I don’t think he was connected, except in spirit perhaps, with the guys in the Porsche who think seawater makes excellent car wash :-). Fortunately, it doesn’t rust children! In the era of the selfie though, it’s not enough to shoot the scene – shots of the other shooters getting their takes are also required before closing with a few sunset skies.
Finally, if you’ve read this far, you may want a few techie bits – the main one was using two cameras - my old 40D as well as my 7D – one with the EFS 17-55mm and the other with the 100-400mm. With all the sea spray around, I didn’t want to be changing lenses! The other tech tip is that despite the humour above – real care is need when shooting near breaking waves. Sooner or later there will always be a rogue wave and not necessarily every seventh one. Risks range from a wetting, to saltwater ruining camera gear ruined, as well as injury and worse. When I’m shooting near breaking waves, I always wait and watch for a while to get a feel for the conditions before going nearer. Also remember that a few inches of water flowing around your feet is enough to knock you over. In conclusion, make sure that getting a killer shot doesn’t kill you!!
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OK, there's four or five days to go to the winter solstice but at 130 degrees from Dublin according to the Photographer's Ephemeris, this morning's sunrise was within 0.2 of a degree - or a near as makes no difference! - of its southernmost point. From 16 to 27 December, the southwards progression of the dawn along the horizon that has been underway since late June comes to a stand still or "solstitium" as the Romans put it. After that, it will be only a few weeks to "a grand stretch in the evening"!
I went out early to Dalkey Hill to get a shot of the full moon setting over Dublin but cloud rolling in from the west kyboshed Plan A - but Plan B wasn't too bad :-). The exposure was 1/640th of a second at f5.6 and and ISO 200 using a Canon 100-400mm lens at 400mm, handheld. The main edit in Lightroom was an approximately 30% crop to make the sun even bigger in the frame.
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Shankill was in the news this week when the New York Times illustrated it's story on Ireland's exit from the bailout with a local resident's experience of the crash. There was lots of coverage on whether they got it right and doubtless many people will have their own opinions. Anyway, I thought I'd add my own views - literally - of my adopted home of twenty years.
At the southern edge of Co. Dublin, between the mountains and the Irish Sea - I don't think it's such a bad place at all :-). Have a look at this 30 image slideshow and see what you think! To see a captioned version of the slide show, click on Slideshow in this link.
Once we were out at sea, Colin was constantly keeping a sharp lookout for cetacean activity and associated flocks of feeding seabirds – aided by information from land based whale watchers on Toe and Galley Heads. Early on we had a sighting of a Minke Whale but as with a few other brief sightings of this species during the day, I didn’t get any shots.
For much of the trip, we had Common Dolphins, including a mother and calf, swimming around the boat almost at arm’s length and riding our bow wave when we picked up speed. It’s marvellous to see them using just muscle power to effortlessly keep up with our engine powered top speed – although the scars on the back of a few of them suggest they don’t always get it right with their boat play! The IWDG’s Celtic Mist was also whale watching in the area and came within shouting distance at one stage for a quick chat.
A few Fin Whales were blowing and feeding several miles out – accompanied by diving gannets and dolphins. However, these giant “greyhounds of the sea” never hung around one spot for long and there was only a few opportunities to get reasonable shots – including the pectoral fin of one that was lunge-feeding – “badly” according to Colin!
Other than one juvenile gannet, there weren't many opportunities for bird photography. As things went quiet further out, we had a report of Fin Whales in closer to Toe Head but we saw no sign of them as we headed back in mid-afternoon. However the low afternoon sunlight brilliantly lit up the lichen covered tops of The Stags Rocks – as well as the memorial to a diver drowned there in 1998. As we returned to Castle Haven, we passed a group of sea kayakers before docking back at Reen Pier opposite sunlit Castletownshend.
It was my first trip out with Colin in late autumn and while I wasn’t as lucky as on some of my trips off Wexford, it was still an excellent day out – and only slightly marred by having my late lunch in Union Hall ruined by the last gasp efforts of a certain group of men in black!
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