Baby Giraffe
Originally uploaded by jbwan

Just received confirmation that one of my Flickr available photos was included in the recent Schmap guide to Dublin. Sometimes I spend so much time fussing over lighting, exposure, and other things with my SLR that it’s quite humbling and satisfying to have a no-thought shot with my compact Olympus c-750uz (4MP) receive more recognition than most of my other photos. Maybe it was the models that I used in the selected photo – eye-catching Giraffes!

Colour in the Grey Sky
Originally uploaded by jbwan

Snapped at one of the launches during the visit to Waterford of the Irish National Hot Air Ballooning Championships. Great to see the balloons back in Waterford and hopefully they’ll be back again next time. A wonderful spectacle for all to see; floating high over the city and county.

This weekend I decided to settle down to a task that I have been putting off for a long time now. That task was the organisation of my digital photo library, spread across 3 different computers and a network storage drive. Over the years I have used so many different digital cameras, software packages for organising photos, etc that my digital library was in somewhat of a mess. Using exif data to sort files based on chronological data is obviously the way to go and there are several utilities out there for a small fee that will do this for you. However, I was feeling a little frugal and initially had a crack at parsing the exif data myself using some c# knowledge. It was reasonably successful but too many variables involved in doing it properly. So, I then decided that I didn’t have the time to write a full utility and went looking for freebies. What I found was truly wonderful. A short Perl script that uses jhead to extract exif data from jpg files and then sorts the files into year/month directories and renames all the files to yearmonthdate_time.jpg format. Better again is that the clever script performs a MD5 hash on any file with exactly the same date and time to see if indeed it is the same file, if so it skips the duplicate, if not it copies it as a filename[2].jpg to indicate the legal duplicate. Granted it still took a while to parse through everything but my task was made infinitely simpler by using this little script. Now I have a digital library to almost be proud of. Almost because I have a quantity of files that are not exif timestamped and need to be sorted manually at a later date.

Note: While this utility is great for parsing jpg files, I couldn’t get jhead to parse the exif information from RAW format files. That added a little bit of time to my task but not too much.

Focal Bench

Originally uploaded by jbwan

For a long time I always wondered about whether or not I should learn about Photoshop. I could see myself becoming somewhat addicted to it and the myriad of effects that people can create using it. This weekend I finally bit the bullet and downloaded a trial of CS3 and looked up some tutorials on basic techniques. This is my first effort and I’m rather proud of it even if it’s only a very simple effect. I have a taste for more elaborate effects though so I envisage plenty of study ahead.

Red Admiral

Originally uploaded by jbwan.

Sitting down eating dinner in the garden last Saturday, this guy came fluttering by through my shrubs. Hadn’t seen one in a long time up to this.

The Vee

Originally uploaded by jbwan.

I like The Vee, the distinctive meeting place of two hills in West Waterford (well technically it’s in Co. Tipperary but what’s 100m between friendly counties? ) Siân and myself took a trip up there recently to see the scenic beauty and swung by Melleray Abbey on the way back where I saw a nice tree stump in the abbey grounds.

Melleray Abbey

Originally uploaded by jbwan.

Stumped

Originally uploaded by jbwan.

Feeding Tortoise Shell

Originally uploaded by jbwan.

Daisy, Daisy

Originally uploaded by jbwan.

The more I say the angrier I get so here’s a couple of nice calming photos from my garden yesterday evening.

Paradise

Originally uploaded by jbwan.

Paradise indeed but it’s also only 45 mins drive and about 30 mins walk to get there from Waterford City. I love capturing sights like this in my home county – you don’t need to go far to see the wonderful world around you!

Bee Safe, Bee Seen

Originally uploaded by jbwan.

Constant rain, a garden full of flowers and insects, I’m as busy as the guy in the picture buzzing in and out of the house, trying to grab a few shots.

Recreating last Summer

Originally uploaded by jbwan.

Shot a photo almost identical to this one last year but the poor lily flower was covered in small flies. This year however, Rose Nymphe is shown in true splendour having opened for the first time on Sunday morning.