Day 16: Sheer mundanity. Taken on December 10, 2009.

I may as well admit here that keeping three separate sites – newworldphotos.net, bhalash.com and flickr.com – in sync regarding photos is a total pain in the ass. Doing it on a daily basis for my ”365 days of photos” just compounds the problem. Grr, etc.

Day 10: Juxtapositions. Taken on January 10, 2010.

On a photowalk to the area this morning, I decided to capture this vista again in order to compare the changes as to how the scene appeared back in October 2006, when I last visited.

I love this scene. The juxtaposition between the warm interior and the exterior that stretches off to infinity has always been a compelling inspiration for me.

Day #3: Forthill Cemetery. Taken at Forthill Cemetery, Galway City, on January 3, 2010.

Immediately before I left for the United States of America in mid-2007, I paid a visit to Merlin Park Castle/Doughiska Castle, which is currently located on the forested grounds of Merlin Park hospital on the outskirts of Galway City, and with the weather behind me today, I again paid another visit to the magnificent tower house:

Here they are, old and new:

Old Card:

New Card:

Kinda.

Disclaimer: Traipsing around any kind of ruined structure can be incredibly dangerous and should never be attempted.

Anyways.

Some young vagabond(s) had forced open the door of Doughiska Castle in Merlin Park forest, which for me turned it into a veritable wonderland. The keep is wonderfully intact, to the point that I was able to make it up onto the roof of the castle, explore most of the rooms and cells and even go down into the cellar. A manifest lack of torch and flashgun, combined with a very short time limit put me off getting more photos, although I really want to get back into the castle before I leave on Wednesday.

Mayhap I can bug out of work early on Sunday and make a beeline for this magnificent building.

All I really got from the castle were some excellent infrared photos:

Doughiska Castle

The Keep

Looking down

Untitled

I braved the inclement horribly shitty weather to take some photos of the Abbey church on Eglinton Street.

As I have a terminal lack of anything to do tonight, I’m going to fill in some of my workflow on the photo. The first step is to actually get the photos from my memory card, for which I use a shell script. It does nothing exciting and I don’t accept any responsibility if it accidently dumps ten thousand photos into one folder (which happened to me). There’s not much to say for the script, it takes all the .cr2 files from the memory card and places them under ~/Pictures/Imports in a subfolder, going by today’s date – 2006-12-31.

After that, I import the photos to Lightroom:

Workflow 1

Normally I’d use the raw editor to screw with whatever aspect of the photo needed screwing with, but in this case I wanted to compose a HDR shot in Photoshop, so I just exported the three photos I wanted to tiff format and used the HDR function in Photoshop to create the final photo. I used Photomatix before, but in 90% of shots people go utterly overboard with tone mapping, which leads to a horribly fake and cartoony image, which was never to my tastes when it came to HDR. Going through the HDR group on Flickr I find this and this.

Workflow 2

Creating a HDR photo in Photoshop is insanely easy if you have good shots taken, so I’ll skip on the detailed instructions. Suffice to say, to pick File-> Automate-> Merge to HDR, click a few buttons and go get a coffee if that’s your thing. At this point I’ve composed the HDR, converted it to 16-bit for ease of work and straightened it:

Workflow 3

I’ve started working in layers where I can, I did a lot of tweaking of colours and lighting, with a little clone work for a few annoying cables and wires that were in the church:

Workflow 4

Squinting at the above picture, I had layers for the shadow/highlight tool, levels, hue/saturation, curves, colours and the channel mixer. And behold, the final shot:

Workflow 5

The Abbey