On a wet Sunday afternoon, I spent an hour or so wandering about Gracehill. I’d driven through it many times, but never explored it on foot. The village is situated around two and a half miles from Ballymena, and was built in 1765 by Moravian Settlers.
A wee day off on Easter Tuesday and Janette and I took a wee trip down to Banbridge and a walk along the ‘Boulevard’ – the new name for the outlet centre. After all it was a wet day, with thunder storms and hailstones, and the Boulevard is covered, at least in part, and that meant there were quite a few people about to add human interest. Needless to say I brought the Fujifil X-T2 camera, and made a couple of exposures as we walked around.
A visit to Kellswater in Co Antrim.
Kellswater Reformed Presbyterian Church, near Ballymena, Co.Antrim. Built in traditional ‘barn’ shape in 1806. The congregation dates to 1760 making it the first RP Congregation in Ireland, and still singing only the Scottish Metrical Psalms in worship.
I’m still playing with the new Fufifilm X-T2, so today I took it on a walk around Kiltonga Nature Reserve in Newtownards, to test out the film simulation feature. One of the interesting features of this camera is the ability to set it to emulate various Fufi Films, like Fuji’s popular Velvia colour film for example.
The camera has a black and white option to record images on virtual ‘Acros’ monochrome film, which should give outstanding contrast, and a rich tonal range. Furthermore, Acros simulation will produce grain in the image exactly the same size as the film version, by ISO. The claim made by Fuji is that Arcos film simlation is even better than shooting in RAW and later converting to monochrome in Photoshop. Fufi even claim that Acros will outperform any other high end digital camera shooting in B&W mode. So, today I set the X-T2 to shoot in Acros Monochrome on card two, and in RAW on card one. (Shooting in RAW, of course means that should I want a colour image, I can use the RAW unprocessed files to produce it.)
On Saturday 1st October, I went for a walk up to Scrabo Tower, on the outskirts of Newtownards. This landmark has towered over much of my life, living and working around the Ards area. The tower was built in 1857, 540 ft above sea-level, as a memorial to the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, Viscount castlereagh, Charles Stewart. The tower is situated in a country park, close to Scrabo Golf Club, and is approached by car only as far as the golf club entrance, then by foot up a steep path to the summit. Thankfully, there are resting places on the ascent!
Being October, the road up to tower ran beside fields that had just been baled, – which provided my image of the day, and set the scene for my exploration of the towers surroundings.
Excitement! Just in time for the Christmas Gift Season, Bob has introduced a series of Black and White Giclee Prints, high quality, Black and White Images featuring iconic but lesser known Irish Scenes and Landscapes – available as Mounted Prints – ideal for shipping abroad – or as Framed Prints.
Limited Editions – there are only 120 of each of these prints available for sale, each one signed, numbered and dated by the photographer. Check out the order page here:
http://www.BobMcEvoy.co.uk/irish-art-limited-edition-prints/
Chloe, our 5 year old granddaughter, came in from the garage clutching a little box, filled with interesting little flat plate-like things, asking Janette if it was ok to play with them. It wasn’t! It was a box of Kodachrome slide ‘positives’ shot in 1990. In those days I was still making photographs with the Nikon FM2, no autofocus, no programmes, no auto-exposure, just a classy camera that gave the photographer complete control over the image.
So I took the slides, scanned them with the Epson Perfection V500 photo-scanner, imported them to Photoshop, and of course, unsaturated them to make some nice black and white images. This selection of them is a panel of shots I made in Co. Cork, when we were on holiday there in 1990.
Some ‘sepia’ type effects applied in three of them, to create a ‘vintage’ look.
Portraits2Go.co.uk 