The Author – Bart Busschots
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Oct
9
Photo of the Week 32 & 33 – Irish Butterflies
Filed Under Photography on October 9, 2008 | 1 Comment
Since I’ve missed two weekends due to server troubles I thought I’d do a double post today. But rather than post two un-related photos I figured it would make more sense to pick two that are related. I’ve taken a lot of butterfly shots this year, and these two have come out as my favourites. It was a hard call to pick just two, but you can see the whole set in my Irish Butterflies Set on Flickr.
The first shot I chose is my best one of the most spectacular butterfly we have in Ireland, the Peacock Butterfly (Inachis io in Latin). We have no other butterflies with such striking colours or such impressive ‘eyes’ on their wings. I got this shot in my Grandmother’s garden near Cavan, Ireland.
The second shot is one of our most bland species, the Small White (Pieris rapae in Latin). Not as interesting as the Green-Veined White, and very small. But I still think this is a beautiful shot. I love the way the zoom lens has completely blackened the background. You’d never guess there was a hedge behind this guy! I took this shot in the Junior Gardens on the St. Patrick’s College Campus (AKA NUI Maynooth South Campus) in Maynooth, Ireland.
For those of you interested in such things, here are the technical details of the first shot:
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 55-200mm
- Exposure: 1/640 sec
- Focal Length: 200mm
- Focal Ratio: F11
- ISO: 400
- Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
- Exposure Compensation: -1.0
And of the second shot:
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 55-200mm
- Exposure: 1/1250 sec
- Focal Length: 200mm
- Focal Ratio: F8
- ISO: 200
- Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
- Exposure Compensation: -0.67
Sep
21
Photo of the Week 31 – The Approaching Storm
Filed Under Photography on September 21, 2008 | 1 Comment
I was very lucky not to get very wet while shooting this shot. I should probably have run straight for shelter but it was just too spectacular shot not to take the time capture it. This is a stitching together of five over-lapping shots at 18mm. As soon as I took the shot I bundled the camera into my bag and cycled home as quick as I could, I made it in the door with about ten seconds to spare before the heavens opened!
This shot was taken from Mullen Bridge (the bridge on the Straffan road at the entrance to the train station) looking East towards Dublin. The track you see is the Dublin to Sligo railway line and the canal is the Royal Canal which connects Dublin to the river Shannon.
[tags]panorama, photography, storm, clouds, Maynooth, Ireland, Kildare, Royal Canal[/tags]
Sep
14
Photo of the Week 30 – Vintage Power
Filed Under Photography on September 14, 2008 | 2 Comments
This is an old photo which I recently scanned. It was taken in early January 2000 in my home town of Duffel in Belgium with my trusty old Olympus OM/1. The reason the shot is to grainy is that I used to have a bit of a thing for fast films, in particular Kodak Gold 800 Zoom. As seems to be the norm for this series, I’m not really sure why I like this shot, I just do and have since the first time I saw it when I got my photos back from my local One Hour Photo (remember those?).
This is Belgian electric locomotive number 2334 which rather un-imaginatively belongs to NMBS/SNCB Class 23. These locomotives are still in service today despite now being over 50 years old (having been built between 1955 and 1957).
[tags]NMBS, SNCB, Belgium, Locomotive, Duffel, train, photography[/tags]
Sep
9
My Butterfly Collection
Filed Under Photography on September 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment
As the butterfly season comes to an end here in Ireland for another year I’ve taken some time over the past few days to sort and process my best Irish butterfly pictures and compile them into a Flickr Set. In the long term I’m planning on getting photographs of all 28 species of butterfly that exist in Ireland, but that will take quite some time and quite a bit of travelling. This collection represents my best shots from this year and last, though the vast majority are from this year. My aim is to have at least two shots of each species, a top view of the open wings, and a side view of the closed wings. The differences between these two views can be very dramatic.
[tags]photography, Ireland, butterfly[/tags]
Sep
8
Photo of the Week 29 – St. Mary’s By Night
Filed Under Photography on September 8, 2008 | 4 Comments
St. Mary’s Square is the second quadrangle on the St. Patrick’s College campus. It’s smaller and less well known than St. Joseph’s square. The square was rather controversially re-designed with a very modern water garden a decade or two ago. Personally I love it. I think it’s a great melding of the old with the new. This shot was taken on the central island within the water garden with the largest stone fountain in the left foreground.
In many ways this shot is one of the most extreme I’ve ever taken. The only source of light in the scene is the windows around the square. this lead to a gigantic dynamic range with the interior of the windows needing an exposure of a fraction of a second and the interior of the square requiring an exposure of a few minutes. Bridging this range required combining ten exposures over a range of 9 f stops (1 EV steps from -4 to +5) totalling about 8 minutes into a single HDR image.
[tags]Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland, SPCM, HDR, night, photography[/tags]
Aug
31
Photo of the Week 28 – Hawthorn Blossoms
Filed Under Photography on August 31, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Each year in May Irish hedgerows get painted white by Hawthorn blossoms. Each flower is tiny, but a few million of them soon add up! This is a close-up shot of a small bunch of blossoms near the start of the season.
For those of you interested in such things here are some of the technical details of this shot:
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 55-200mm
- Exposure: 1/1250 sec
- Focal Length: 200mm
- Focal Ratio: F8
- ISO: 400
- Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
- Exposure Compensation: -0.33
[tags]Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland, Hawthorn, flower, blossom, white, photography[/tags]
Aug
30
My Perl Image Processing Scripts
Filed Under My Projects, Computers & Tech, Software Development, Photography on August 30, 2008 | 6 Comments
Update (18 June 2012) – A more up-to-date version of these scripts can now be found here.
My Myers Briggs personality profile insists that I “prefer economy of effort”, you can probably translate that to “is a lazy sod”. Because of this I like automating repetitive tasks. It all started when I wanted a quick and easy way to prepare my images for posting to my website. I wanted them resized with my URL and the Creative Commons icon added in, and I wanted to be able to process a whole directory of images in one go. I started by playing around with the GD libs in PHP, but soon realised it would be quicker and easier to use Perl to shell out to the command line tools from Image Magick. At the time I wrote a post on my choice to do this which also contained the initial code. That code has been expanded and evolved since, and now includes functions for rendering nice (in my opinion) borders and titles on my better images. If you want to see examples checkout the Photo of the Week category on this blog..
[tags]Perl, Image Magick, script, programming, image processing[/tags]
Aug
24
Photo of the Week 27 – St. Mary’s Church
Filed Under Photography on August 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment
This shot shows the tower at the back of St. Mary’s protestant church in Maynooth as seen from the St. Patrick’s College/NUI Maynooth South Campus. In some ways this almost a cliché in Maynooth. Very few photographers pass through the arch outside Callan Hall without thinking “wow, this arch frames that church tower perfectly”. For that reason I can take no credit what-so-ever for the concept of this shot, just for the implementation. It’s amazing how many different shots you can get from the identical spot by changing your height above the ground and your focal length. I must have taken about 50 shots before choosing this one as my favourite.
For those of you interested in such things here are some of the technical details of this shot:
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 18-55mm (D40 kit lens)
- Exposure: 1/160 sec
- Focal Length: 55mm
- Focal Ratio: F11
- ISO: 200
- Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
- Exposure Compensation: 0.0
[tags]Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland, NUIM, SPCM, church, tower, arch, photography[/tags]
Aug
17
Photo of the Week 26 – Small Tortoiseshell Butterfly
Filed Under Photography on August 17, 2008 | 1 Comment
Just because something is common, doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful. After the Cabbage White the Small Tortoiseshell (Aglais urticae) is probably our most common butterfly, but I also think it’s one of our most beautiful. You can’t miss the lovely reds, but look closer and you’ll also see wonderful bright blue spots along the edges of the wings. These guys are strongly attracted to a lot of garden flowers so keep an eye out for them in your back yards! I snapped this one while it was feeding on some Thyme that was flowering.
For those of you interested in such things here are some of the technical details of this shot:
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 18-55mm (D40 kit lens)
- Exposure: 1/160 sec
- Focal Length: 55mm
- Focal Ratio: F8
- ISO: 200
- Camera Mode: Auto
- Exposure Compensation: 0.0
[tags]butterfly, Small Tortoiseshell, Aglais urticae, Cavan, Ireland, photography[/tags]
Aug
12
Photo of the Week 25 – Commuter Reflection
Filed Under Photography on August 12, 2008 | 3 Comments
I really don’t know why this is one of my very favourite images but it is. Maybe it’s the colours, maybe it’s the reflection. I do have a thing for reflections in photographs. This is just an ordinary Irish commuter train making it’s way from Maynooth in to Dublin along the Royal Canal on a summer evening at rush hour. For my fellow train spotters this is an Iarnród Éireann Class 29001 Diesel Multiple Unit.
For those of you interested in such things here are some of the technical details of the original shot:
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 18-55mm (D40 kit lens)
- Exposure: 1/1000 sec
- Focal Length: 18mm
- Focal Ratio: F10
- ISO: 800
- Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
- Exposure Compensation: -0.67
[tags]train, canal, Royal Canal, Maynooth, Kidlare, Ireland, photography[/tags]