1st post from Mullingar

Well, here I am writing my 1st post of the new year in Mullingar. Moved into a shared house, seems quite nice. Now we just have to see how things pan out over the next few weeeks.

Good mates of mine, Hazel and Barry have just got married over the weekend and are now in South Africa enjoying their honeymoon. They've asked me to be their 2nd photographer for the wedding. Here are some examples of the pictures taken from their wedding. All shot with the Sony Alpha 100, mainly with the KM 28-70mm (D) f2.8 lens. Post processed in photoshop CS2.

Hazel


Hazel and Barry Exchanging vows


The newly weds!

The rest are on my Flickr site.
www.flickr.com/photos/krispy_rabbit


How did you ring in the new year? I slept through it and woke up at 5 am! haha

Happy new year to you all just the same

Wired.com's top 10 new organism list

I spotted this top 10 list on Wired.com. It's 2007 top 10 'new' organism list.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/12/YE_10_organisms

It's quite amazing. The combination of new traits that can be implanted is massive.

Dog days

I spent the day testing the Sony Alpha 100 DSLR. I only got the camera last week and I wanted to get used to the control as I have a wedding to shoot tomorrow. Overall, it was an easy transition from my older camera which is the Konica Minolta 5D as the controls were similar. I must say though, I am a little disappointed with the camera. There was some nice new features but it's not drastically different from the 5D. For me, the part that really annoyed me was the amount of noise it produced beyond ISO 400. It may have 10MP but the image quality is about the same after post processing in photoshop.

As it was a wet and miserable day out, Odie became my test subject.

Here is a sample of the photos taken. Not true indicator of the camera's ability though as I've worked these pictures in photoshop. The rest of the pics are on flickr.

Merry Christmas

Just a quick post to wish you all a Merry Xmas. I've just completed my last day at work in the Limerick. Now to get things ready for the move to Mullingar. I am not looking forward to it at all. The girlfriend and I will be heading over to her parents today for the traditional Xmas dinner. No plans for the evening yet. Then it's a couple of quiet days before it's Hazel and Barry's wedding. Very important as I'll be doing some wedding shots then. Fingers, it will turn out fine, worst case scenario, I would have learnt something from it. Will let you know how it turns out.

Not much else to say. Have yourself a Merry merry Xmas time folks.

Quick update

Apologies for the lack of recent updates. I have been busy. Between sorting out details for the new job in Mullingar and work, there hasn't been much time left to update my blog.

I was invited to take some pictures at a Fashion show a couple of days ago. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance to do so. Click on the picture below to go to my Flickr site for more fashion shoot pictures.

Learned a couple of things from the shoot:

1. People don't look as good if you don't get them to pose for the camera. Most people just don't look naturally good in the camera.

2. If you are shooting without a flash, you need to know where the light sources are. It is unfortunate in my case when the models reached the end of the runway, the lamp was overhead. Consequently, a good bit of their faces were hidden in shadow. Most of my runway shots were crap. Had a few back of the scene , pre run way shots that turn out ok though.

3. Alternately, shoot with a flash. I am not a big fan of flash photography but then it's probably because I don't have sufficient skill in using them. Any how, should the pictures look flat in terms of light source, you can always alter the light source is photoshop later.

4. Shoot lots! You'll be surprised how many of your pics are out of focus, poorly litted, blur, compose poorly, crap.

5. As I've never shot an event like this, I didn't know what to expect and I started running out of juice half way through. Make sure you have enough batteries. If you can't afford battery packs, the alternative is to buy a few more batteries and have them charged up before you shoot your event. Batteries are pretty cheap these days.

6. A fast lens with fast auto focus helps. If all else fails, get to know your manual focus control.

7. Shoot in RAW format. It gives you a lot of room for correction later.

8. Alternate angles as well as position around the catwalk if possible. (wish I had done more of this)

Potrait

The girlfriend strikes a post. Getting her to post for a few potrait shot is no easy task. Click on photo for some other pix at my Flickr site.

Meeting the priest

I recently met the priest of the church in which I was to be married. I wasn't looking forward to it. Nevertheless, I made an effort and put on my best purple shirt and washed behind my ears in preparartion for the meeting. That way, if I sat next to him during the meeting, you could then say cleanliness was truly next to godliness. (ouch!)

Meeting this priest is compulsory otherwise he wouldn't let me get married in 'his' church. Secondly, one of us needed to be Catholic or else the church would not be available to us. In this case, it was the girlfriend that professed to be Catholic but in reality she belonged to a group of people that believed in The Giant Bunny in the sky, loosely known as the “Bunnymen”. Then he needed to discuss the need for a marriage course and last and not least, the various charges that needed to be paid for the use of the church.

So the priest asked what religion I belonged to, I said Protestant. He dully wrote 'prot' in brackets next to my name and ignored me for most of the meeting. So he went on to have a Catholic to Catholic chat with Carol, emphazing that it was only ok for Carol to marry me as long as she vows to do her best to bring the kids up as Catholics, within the unity of the marriage of course, bla bla bla. I kept my mouth shut because I knew there's not a chance that was going to happen. The kids are going to be Bunnymen, through and through and we were going to celebrate Christmas on Easter, and that would the end of it!

As mentioned before, one of the things we were encouraged to do was to attend a marriage course. It sounded like a good idea though I don't think I needed it. It felt like a money racking scheme as it would cost 150 euros per couple. Apparently there are couples out there who have decided to get married without considering certain basic questions like if they wanted to have kids, home finance and who would be wearing the pants at home, etc etc.

So the priest yapped on for a good hour without offering me or the girlfriend the chance to ask anything (no tea and biscuits either). I was bursting to interject but decided it was pointless to do so. I may as well comply somewhat because I wanted to use his building for my wedding. By the time it was over, I was just happy to leave because I was getting hungry. But I must say, I was then beginning to feel somewhat excited about the wedding, it was just a sense that it wouldn't be too long now! Hooray!

Liverpool 8 - Besiktas 0

Liverpool 8 - Besiktas 0

Nice. Now all we have to do is a few more of this in a consistent manner so we as Liverpool fans have less heartache.

http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/mediawatch/drilldown/MW12027071107-0854.htm

Odie on the kitchen floor

More tales from the hospital crypt

There's nothing healthcare workers enjoy more than hearing stories about how inept their fellow healthcare workers can be. Makes for gossip apparently.

Take for example the story of the student nurse that was told to clean all the dentures of the patients in the geriatric ward. As the story goes, she collected all the dentures in a single wash basin and gave them all a good brush. Never mind the unhygienic implication, there's the obvious problem of trying to match the dentures to their respective owners. Not easy as you'd probably guess.

This leads to another story where a care attendant discovered a missing set of dentures. Concerned that the patient might be mad because he/she was missing her dentures, she decided to take the initiative and find out who owned them. So she went and approached all the patient who didn't have dentures and see if the dentures fitted one of them. This went on for quite a while as the dentures departed one mouth and entered another until a nurse stopped her when she realised what the care assistant was doing.

Then finally, there's the 3rd year nursing student who was told to fit a conveen on an 80 year old male patient by a staff nurse. For those of you who don't know what a conveen is, it's a plastic sheath that fits like a condom with a tube attached to the end of it, allowing a patient to pass urine into a bag without getting out of bed. So this nursing student disappeared for 30 min and emerged from the ward. At this stage, the staff nursed had already forgotten about her.

“So where were you,” the staff nurse enquired?

“Oh, I was with the patient. I had a difficult time trying to get him hard!”, answered the student.

Apparently this old man had a big smile on his face for the rest of the day! Hope that put a smile on yours too.

Good night!

ps: If you have any funny hospital stories yourself, please send them my way. I would love to hear from you.