It occurred to me the other day that I hadn't really done any street photography lately, so I decided to take advantage f the nice light today (and lack of rain) and headed into the city for a wander. Actually I had two goals. (If you're not interested in the tech side of photography you might wiant to skip the next few paragraphs!) I am still trying to solve a little difficulty I've been having with my Nex-7. The little Sony camera takes great pictures when it comes to resolution, depth and clarity, but I've found the colours less tan appealing. In fact, every time I've shot with it I've been really disappointed with how the colours turned out. The camera''s built in white balance settings always appeared tro me to be two skewed towards purple and the auto white balance just seems to have a mind of its own (well, ok, it's supposed to but you know what I mean). I had tried using grey cards, picking grey areas in the image and sampling but I could never seem to get it quite right. So I decided to go back to basics as I was over-complicating the issue. So I set it on daylight and then in Lightroom, I tired to figure out just what what offset was needed and take it from there. I think I have it licked now, but I'll need to do a few more shoots with it to be sure. Basically, I entered a negative amount into the tint slider in the white balance section. IT was at plus two, but a figure of -10 seems to get rid of most of the hue problem. You can then adjust the temperature slider to make the image warmer or cooler without having to worry about the tint. I know you can dial this in directly to the camera so that will be my next experiment.
Anyway, enough tech talk, on with the pictures!
Ok, I know this isn't technically a street shot, but I thought it was cool, so I'm including it anyway. I just looked up and saw this as I got off the tram and I like the mirroring of the two planes and the two birds.
Speaking of mirroring, here's another cheeky little metaphor. On the one hand you have the sign saying "look both ways" and then in the background you have two people facing opposite directions. Ok, so it's subtle, but still !
The christmas decorations are starting to come out in force now, but they are quite pretty. At least these ones in the Stephen's Green shopping centre are.
Looking straight up form underneath this decoration looks like something out of superman or something. If future generations found this photo they'd probably try to discern some hidden meaning in the positioning of the golden balls. "It's a sign, It's a sign !!!"
Obligatory Irish christmas sign !
A Bassoon player gets funky! You don't get a lot of Bassoon playing buskers.
"Ok, I've put the key in and I've pressed the button but it's still not working, now what do I do?.. turn to page 38 in the manual..."
"Hey, I just cleaned that side of the street.."
The daily drudgery of the pedestrian
I'm a sucker for pattern's and textures
Building a bridge. And that's not a metaphor, they're actually building a bridge. Or a heli-pad. Or an on river disco. Or a river cleaning station...or... nah, it's probably just a bridge.
That woman's got no hands!
There was nice light today, it has to be said.
Obligatory Ha'penny Bridge shot
Like I said, really nice light.
These two just looked cool! How could I not take their picture?
Anyway, that's it for now. I've a whole virtual pile of nice Autumn shots to get through captioning, and I've some really nice ones so I'll post them soon. In the mean time don't forget to check out my new and improved tumblr companion blog.
