Neil Danton

You know how I like to keep you abreast of the news and don’t like to go on about a storm in a C-cup *I’ll stop now*

This was a fun shoot to fund-raise for breast cancer awareness month. I was pleased to be shooting model Brianna Dougher who is the current Miss Cork and also Cork Rose Kathryn Brennan:

This light-hearted take on a serious problem is for ladies to send their old bras to Sean Murray’s in Skibbereen together with a donation to the Irish Cancer Society

The largest lingerie department in West Cork wanted to raise awareness of the Action Breast Cancer Campaign and will be collecting the bras (and possibly hanging some up around the town!).

The store will also be holding a fashion show during October and at the end of the month there will be a tug-of-war with all the bras collected

TTFN

p.s. You can now subscribe to the blog by email and never miss an exciting post about great photography and interesting things you must know. You’ll also get my stuff:

No compass required. That’s way too clever at the time of day I’m writing this post…

This Sextant isn’t the device used to navigate, primarily at sea, but a bar in Cork City

I was there to create some editorial business portraits of the owner for the biz-section of a Sunday newspaper:

I’d never actually been in the bar before. Listen, have you any idea how many bars Cork has? What a revelation. So many little nooks and crannies:

Really liked the little serving hatch out the back:

Didn’t have the opportunity to sample the beer, but I can tell you the coffee they serve is excellent!

Sampling the beer will definitely be on the agenda next time I’m around and not working, or driving…

TTFN

..to create images for the launch of a website??

Well, occasionally it’s OK to create a Jump For Joy:

This was a PR shoot to launch a new website Online Club Members dot com which aims to be a Hub for Clubs. Sports, recreation, hobbies, anything really!

Sometimes it’s even OK to use a laptop in an image, as long as it’s not a man-in-suit-with-laptop for a business feature:

Usually though, I just like to try and create something in an image that looks like a bit of fun:

TTFN

When it’s a baby Tawny Owl called Fudge:

Fudge is the latest addition to the Birds of Prey Educational Centre at Trabolgan Holiday Village in Cork.

Fudge joins other birds of prey at an educational centre which was opened in order to raise awareness of indigenous species and the environmental issues involved in their protection and conservation.

Definitely has the cuteness factor doesn’t it?

Unless perhaps you are a mouse…

TTFN

…long dark hair and lovely legs.

Now I know you were immediately thinking of me, but no, I’m referring to Mairead:

A bit late with a blog, but I’m mad busy so it’s going to be short and sweet.

Shot recently on the streets of Cork for, erm, well there’s a small clue if you look hard enough.

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…Hollywood Icon, Legend. So many descriptive words, but that’s enough about me.

What I’m really leading up to, is that I was privileged to photograph Hollywood icon Miss Maureen O’Hara recently:

Star of over 60 movies she is now 90 years young and was launching the Maureen O’Hara Classic Film Festival in Glengarriff, Co Cork where she now lives for most of the time.

Unsurprisingly no direction needed to get the result I wanted. She has that “screen presence” even when meeting her face-to-face.

Still a classy, feisty lady. An absolute pleasure for me to meet her

TTFN

Sunday newspaper supplement: “Could you take a trip down to West Cork tomorrow?”

Me: “Sure, what do you need?”

Them: “A whale skeleton”

Me: (thinking): WTF?; (saying): “Oh,… OK. Um, no problem”

Very tricky lens selection as the whole thing is so long. Pic above is with a 15mm fish-eye. You know, fish, whale, fish-eye lens. Didn’t happen to have my whale-eye lens with me (and yes I do know a whale isn’t a fish!).

There’s also too much negative space in the image with a 24mm:

The feature the images (actually one in the end) were for was on community projects. Some time back the poor creature had been washed-up and stranded on the nearby beach and despite a lot of effort in trying to save it, had died there. The local community decided that rather than burying it, they would clean up the skeleton and create a marine artefact.

So I arrived at the location and very quickly started to hate the whale.

Poor creature hadn’t ever done me any harm, whales don’t tend to harm anyone really. OK so if you were a shark you might keep your distance, they’re not overly friendly to sharks, but that’s about all. Oh, and seals & penguins I suppose. They’re just unfortunate to be on the menu.

The reason for my dislike was purely the location. The skeleton had been placed into a concrete “bunker”, so shaded from above, and the way the sun was positioned, just creeping around a line of trees, the front third of the skeleton was in really strong sunlight and the middle and rear thirds in deep shadows. This is going to be a nightmare to light.

There’s only one way this was going to work and that’s kill-off all the ambient light and light the whole thing myself. Piece of cake when it’s just the skeleton, not so easy when there are people to light as well. Got away with it though:

Stayed with a 24mm lens for that image. Using a 15mm with 3 people, especially if they are anywhere near the edge of the frame would produce horrendous distortion. It’s not too bad to use though when it’s a younger person, and you can keep them near the centre of the frame:

In two of the images it’s possible (I now realise!) to spot one of my lights. Can you see them?

TTFN

I wandered down to beautiful West Cork recently to do a shoot for the home supplement of a Sunday newspaper. The story was centred around what B&Bs are doing to add value to the B&B experience. In this case it was providing different courses while enjoying a stay, and in particular this one was song-writing in the company of a musician. A guitar playing, piano playing, drummer in fact. The list of who he’s worked with is a bit like a who’s-who of the music world, but includes being tour drummer with Ronnie Wood.

I started off with a few general views of the interior & exterior of the property:

Then it was down to the more interesting but slightly difficult concept of how to convey music, peace & tranquility and anything else I could throw into the mix. A bit awkward when’s there’s no sound in a still image!

The location of the property was right on a cliff edge, and I mean right on the edge, so that was a natural place for an image:

The main room where the course will be run was another:

I was still missing something though, even if I wasn’t too sure what it was. I wanted something extra to add to an image. Then I remembered a “prop” I’d met earlier.

My musician’s daughter is Summer by name and summer by nature and after a quick check that it was OK to include her in an image, I asked her if she liked to dance and let her off to do her own thing while her father played:

It took about 3 frames to get the right shot with enough movement in the dress to show it’s not posed:

I just love that image.

TTFN

That’s wind as in Mistral, storm, air movement due to weather. Nothing to do with the chocolate. *just saying*

So how to promote a food forum?

Simple. Go to beach, get a chef, get a chocolatier, get kids.

In my case the problem was getting down to, and back up from the beach, with what seriously felt like a dislocated knee-cap! Besides, I was working with a great PR consultant who does all that organising stuff, so I don’t have to

Always nice to get a bit of animation into an image when possible:

This is Isabel from Issie’s Handmade Chocolate (yes, yummy. Take my word for it. No don’t. Buy some and try it yourself) with twins Paul & Grace:

Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, PAUL. Just saying that over a few times, as I originally captioned and released some images with the wrong name, like John or something. I was obviously confused with the names of the Saints, or the Beatles. Very rare I get a caption wrong. I blame it the fact I was biting on a piece of wood at the time because of the pain in the knee. *Sorry Paul*

This is Henry from Wokabout (delicious sauces. Love shoots involving food – sometimes I get samples!). This is a one-shot take. With the wind that was blowing that’s all I was going to get, after that the stir-fry contents were all over the beach:

Then there were a couple of images with just the twins & chocolate. It was a Take 2. It was so cold the melted chocolate had solidified. Good job I had a runner (er PR) with me to go back up the cliff to the hotel and reheat it. Would have been pointless me going, it took me about 10 minutes to get back up from the beach when we’d finished the shoot. The chocolate would have solidified again if I’d gone!

This one was used quite a bit:

Actually though, I really like this one as well. Something about the look on Grace’s face. I think it says Mischief :

I hope the hotel waiter got that table off the beach before the tide came in. It was moving fairly rapidly!

TTFN

Not that I’m religious in the slightest, but this particular church was no longer operating as such and had instead been converted into a magnificent home, which I was shooting for a sunday newspaper supplement.

The thing with property shoots is always the issue of that old converging verticals problem. This (if you don’t know) is what happens when you point a camera upwards to include all of a building or structure in the frame. Works the other way too if you point a camera downward, but then it’s diverging verticals of course.

The human eye corrects this automatically. Actually the human eye doesn’t do much I suppose, it’s the brain that corrects it . Cameras aren’t that smart though. Strike one for man versus the machine.

This is a typical, but not extreme version of what happens:

and this is more like we see it:

The two main ways of correcting the problem are either to use a specialist tilt/shift lens (which I did have with me), or to correct it afterwards with some special software in post-production. That’s the route I chose on this occasion for speed. Tilt/shift lenses are great, but they are a bit fiddly and time consuming and I needed a LOT of images from this particular shoot, and not as much time available as I would have liked.

Here’s a couple more bits of detail of the exterior:

and some of the interior:

It’s also quite nice to include some detail when possible:

Oh, and the view from the belfry:

I didn’t dare ask the price the place was on the market for..

TTFN