One of the things on my to do list this year was to enroll in a photography class with a view to improving the images I take for the blog. I did attend a short set of classes earlier in the year but I was out of my depth and I struggled with trying to grasp concepts such as ISO and f-stops which the others in the classes seemed to understand instinctively, so the impact of the classes on bettering my photography was minimal.
Tag Archives: Musings
Photography Class
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Snapshots of my Weekend
I had set aside this weekend for a clean up of my place which looks like some mythical beast had ground down a ton of Saharan sand and huffed and puffed until it covered every surface. No, not sloth on my part – I had some minor work done, very minor, which has generated an inordinate amount of dust. However Friday came and went and the work wasn’t completed; Monday is now the new finishing date. It seemed pointless to do a massive round of cleaning only to have to do it all again forty-eight hours later, so this weekend was instead dedicated to doing as little as possible.
Favourite Things//Six
My magpie mind operates betimes in a strange fashion. An example: when I was thinking about writing this post about eggs, one of my favourite culinary ingredients, I recalled a line from an episode of a soap opera that I saw many years ago. It must have been around the time of a salmonella-in-eggs scare as one of the characters in the soap was bemoaning the temporary loss of what she described ‘as nature’s only convenience food’. How very right she was.
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An Instagrammed August
Meteorologically speaking August was a wicked month: wickedly good and wickedly bad. The Irish weather flip-flopped in a way that would have shamed your average politician. Some days dark clouds scudded like missiles across the sky discharging their watery cargo hither and thither and on others the sun shone a bright sunflower-yellow in a clear blue sky.
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This and That
My apéritif of choice this weekend past was a glass of Vin d’ Orange. Now, I realize, that saying that might suggest I lead a charmed gilded-glitz sort of life gliding swan-like about the place wondering what on earth I will have as an apéritif on different days. Continue reading
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An Instagrammed July
I wonder what twenty-second century social historians will make of us when they trawl through the zillions of words and images posted on a mass of nascent social media sites these past few years. Will they beleive it gives them an accurate picture of our lives in the opening decades of this century?
Filed under Musings, Photography
A Week. The Sea. A Poem.
It has been a busy week; there has been very little time to think and none for blogging. So yay for soul-restoring evening seaside strolls. Where ever or when ever I hear the sound of water breaking on rock, be it as a crashing crescendo or a miniscule murmur I always think of a poem I love; “Break, Break, Break” by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O, well for the fisherman’s boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
Happy Weekend – talk to you soon.
Packing. Panicking. Traveling
The weather today in these parts was a mix of sunshine, bouts of rain and the odd shower of hailstones. This, believe it or not, is a vast improvement on the rain-sodden mist-smudged days which have been the norm of late. However I am still very glad to be heading tomorrow, for a short break, to the warmer climes of the south-west of France.
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Paying it Forward
I cannot recall how where or even when I first heard of the notion of paying it forward. But I know it sounds like an eminently sensible and betwitchingly powerful idea. I am not even sure my hazy notion of the principle behind the concept is strictly accurate. I believe the theory is that when someone does something good for you that instead of seeking to repay them in someway you pay their kindness forward by doing something good or kind for someone else. The concept has been very much on my mind this week as I was recently on the receiving end of a random act of kindness.
Filed under Musings, The Universe
This Week
This week I went to my last digital photography class at the Gallery of Photography. I had enrolled for a set of four evening classes. The first two classes covered the taking of images and the last two Photoshop. I am not the brightest bunny on the block when it comes to matters technical so my mind is dizzy with concepts such as ISO, aperture size, shutter speed, metering, and stops. I think I have managed a shaky grasp of the basics of shooting images in manual mode; hopefully some practice and a little reading to revise will allow everything sink in. Photoshop is a different matter, what seemed somewhat easy to do in class has proved difficult to replicate at home even with the aid of Photoshop Elements 10 for Dummies. Aargh!
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Just Add Attitude
Just Add Attitude 