Taking only photographs – leaving only footprints
I took this photograph back in August 2006. I was stood on the shore with my back to the beautiful Ashford Castle. It was evening when I took this image so the light gave nice warm colours. Lough Corrib was teaming with Salmon which were jumping out of the water, it must have been pretty easy for these two fishermen to catch a few of them.
Whilst browsing through my now extensive collection of photographs of Scotland. I found this interesting picture of a Seagull watching over the beautiful harbour at Dunbar (about 40 miles east of Edinburgh along the coast). The image above is definitely not as good photographically as the one I published on the same day I took this (Tuesday 18th July 2006). But I did want to show the boat on its side, which didn’t feature in the previous photo. Taken into this sun the original file straight out of the camera looks very different, using Photoshop I was able to mask out the foreground rocks and colour correct the background separately to the foreground. This took maybe 15 minutes to do something that would have taken a good 3 – 5 hours in a traditional darkroom. It seems the more technology advances we can do more with our time but that only puts more demands on our time.
Going back through my archives of last years trip to New York I realised that I have many photographs of that part of the world that have not been put online, in fact over the short time I was in New York I took over 900 photographs. Now I’m not planning on publishing even half of them but I did come across a few interesting images that I thought I would like to share. The photo above was taken on the 28th March 2005, just after getting off the ferry having been to Liberty Island. The sun in the wrong place and this was a quick grab shot of the U.S. Coast Guard boat. What caught my eye was the two machine guns on the boat, personally I have never seen a coast guard boat with guns on it in the UK, is this common I wonder?
I set off early this morning, north to the Lake District. I am spending the weekend with 12 friends and my parents. I hope to go on lots of interesting walks and take many photographs. I haven’t visited this part of the world for a couple of years and I have never seen such nice weather as I did today. The photograph above shows Coniston Water with the beautiful autumn colours on the trees.