Raïa on Coke Lane

I hit Smithfield on my way in to town earlier to see if I could find the RAIA/Raïa pieces I’d missed on Coke Lane last weekend. I found the two I was there to see, plus some extras down by Frank Ryan’s Bar that I hadn’t known would be there. I’m intrigued by these three, will need to see if I can place them all, the last one is almost certainly Phil Lynott, wondering about the others.

So objective one was complete.

Heading on into town, on the way past Fegans and the peerless Saudade I think someone has been adding some colour: I’m quite taken by the sentiment I have to say..

Then it was more or less straight up the quays, generally looking for any pieces by Zlashing that I haven’t seen yet. Found one that had been painted over but couldn’t make it out.

Finally got a chance to snap the shutter of The Barbers Room on College St. I pass this every day but the light is almost always terrible. Having a good camera and a lens capable of stopping down to F/1.8 helps enormously.

Every time I see that I get a terrible urge to have my head completely shaved.

Some Helvick Wildlife

Back down in Helvick with a new lens, what to do, what to do….

OK some of the local fauna came out to play in the sunshine so I tried to see what I could get. These aren’t going to win any nature photography prizes but considering that they were the product of about 5 minutes snapping away at one of the flowers in the garden I think they turned out OK. 

Two important lessons learned – F/1.8 allows you to really crank up the shutter speed so it’s possible to capture bees as they flit from flower to flower but F/1.8 also delivers awesomely shallow depth of field so your bee’s wings may be in focus while its head isn’t. Bummer.

Some sort of bee. Very spiky fur, quite the striking orange hair do to be honest. I think it’s a Bombus Muscorum assuming I’m reading my guide to bees correctly. Kinda cute, wouldn’t have said it was a Bumble Bee but apparently it is.

 

Bombus Lucorum I think, maybe Bombus Hortorum. Very big bee. And this one is carrying a 50-100 bee mites that you can see clustered around the front of its thorax. 

Almost certainly a Bombus Lapidarius Queen.  Quite a big Bumble Bee whatever it is and they wouldn’t keep still, lots of photos of a leg or a blurred wing but this one is quite a nice effect.

I went out earlier to take a look at the new windmills up on the hill overlooking the bay. I think these are about 50m to the turbine, 50m diameter. possibly a bit less. Not the biggest by quite some margin but a lot bigger than I expected when I got up close. Hardly the most exciting target but they did hammer home a major drawback of a fixed lens, you need to move yourself around a lot to get big things into a usable frame.

Quick Test of the D40x with its new 35mm F1.8 DX lens

So I inherited Audrey’s 5 year old D40x as she upgraded to a new and better camera but I decided to invest in a nice prime lens to see if being forced to stick with a classic frame while gaining quite a bit of speed would help me take better pictures. I can but dream I suppose but it is a nice toy I think. The D40x has a decent enough sensor and although it’s only 10Mpixel it has all the manual options I want for this exercise. If I find I can actually take decent pictures in the end I might decide to invest in something with more oomph but this is more than enough for what I want to do at the moment.

Now this is an awesomely boring subject but I wanted to cobble together a few things to play around with difficult lighting targets ( metal, glare on wood will do nicely ) and depth of field.

The foreground was a coaster that the camera was resting on, the iPhone 5 charging cable is aligned exactly with the far edge of the second 20 cent count. and the keys on the right are angled towards me but the tip is parallel with the vertical coin.  The coiled cable all bokehed into the mist in the background is about 10 cm behind the coin.

ambient lighting is very bright fluorescent, some fill provided by LEDs. White balance set to Auto, whatever that actually means. Exposure was 1/80th sec @ F1.8. ISO 100 that was slightly underexposed. This is a 4Mpixel crop, with a 10% brightness bump to counter the underexposure but no other enhancements.

Not bad overall I have to say, some odd fringing on the key, noise is pretty obvious when you zoom in but the source image was JPEG not RAW so I’m hoping this will get much better once I get a decent image handling tool chain in place.

Quite happy to be honest.

As a comparison I tried to replicate the conditions with the kit lens ( 18-55mm F/3.5-F5.6 ) set at 35mm. Didn’t quite get the framing right so the crop here is smaller and the comparison isn’t totally fair as a result but you can see that there is a dramatic difference in any case. The best the stock lens could do in this light was 1/8th sec @ F4.5 so just on that alone the new lens really does shine in low light situations (Ha!).

Another Panorama of the Liffey at Dawn

This one is pretty good, not quite as spectacular as the one a few weeks back but very nice I think.Fog was just lifting unfortunately but still worked quite well. Click to hugeinate. And once more gotta love that 1.5m wide building in the middle there. Must investigate that more closely sometime.

Some More Dublin Street Art

Audrey had told me that there was some interesting stuff in the Liberties that I’d missed on my last trip up Thomas St so I headed back in search this morning.

Found this on a ruined facade called Conway, quite nice.

And nearby was this rather dramatic uplift of some business window shutters.

Then I wandered around searching until I hit Francis St and found a bunch of stuff, including the specific piece Audrey has mentioned on the way down to the Tivoli.

Which led up to the Tivoli Car Park and these two pieces. The additional commentary about Bono that you can make out if you zoom into this one is quite funny.

 

And this one is an amazing play with pattern and texture. Seriously impressive.

There’s also a ton of stuff on the walls inside the Tivoli Car Park – this just gives a flavour of it. I’ll have to go back again when I can get in there.

Most of the rest that I found hasn’t changed from my first trip ( here ) so I headed off towards Georges St Arcade and Drury St to see if I could get a better shot of a gateway there that I want to capture but have never managed to take an acceptable picture of. On the way I noticed this sign for the Mercantile that I’d never noticed before. Very cool.

And then I got to that gateway on Drury St. I think this is an OK shot assuming you don’t mind the distortion from the panorama shot but unless I nuke all the cars that are forever parked in front of it I don’t know how I can improve on it.

And then I took a quick run over to the North side to see if the alleyway connecting Bachelors Walk and Abbey St had anything to contribute since the loss of everyone’s favourite Tardis. The art work wasn’t particularly awesome but the wit was out in spades. Those North siders sure know how to hand out both criticism and praise.

But they know how to lay on the awesome when they feel like it too.

Heading back I passed through Temple Bar again and while I was walking along Essex St East I noticed a couple of guys staring into a really dark, dingy alleyway on the south side winding up towards Dame Street. I passed them by but something jumped out as I did, so I backpedalled and found they were looking at this. I think the two guys thought I was some sort of nut but who cares – I’ve wanted to find this one for quite a while.

Good day again. Nowhere near as epic as yesterday’s half marathon wander around the city but a pretty good walk and the weather was perfect for it.

Circumnavigating the Liffey

Well almost, but not quite. Today I took a trip eastwards from Phoenix Park through the north side of the city sticking relatively near to the river and then returned via a similar route on the south side having crossed over the East Link bridge. I mostly just wanted a nice walk in the city but as usual I was on the look out for anything interesting.

My first waypoint was Smithfield, I’d skirted the Southern edge on Benburb St on my last trip along the Luas line a few weeks back but had missed out on the square and I knew there was some stuff there worth checking out.

The first thing that caught my eye was a little bit of street humour.

Smithfield itself was looking good but the place was pretty quiet.

On the North end of Smithfield there are two great examples of Dublin Street art.

Moving eastwards down King St North and Bolton Street. I came across this little gem leading away from Mount Carmel’s secondary school. This is Henrietta St. – a  very odd set of marginally preserved protected buildings leading up to King’s Inns. I presume these were tenements at one stage too. The street looks amazing with that combination and contrast of Regency architecture and the early version of classic Georgian red brick Dublin street design.

Some restoration seems to be happening so maybe things are looking up but the second shot gives an idea of just how run down it is.

Nipping through Kings Inns at the top of the street I came out the gate on the right hand side of the main doorway in the picture below, turned around and had this fantastic front view appear. Really nice.

After this I was dodging though the masses around Dominick St and Parnell St until I came across an interesting piece of “classical” tagging on Rutland Place as I was making my way up to the Hugh Lane Gallery.

I was heading there to pay a visit to my favourite piece of classic Irish art, Harry Clarke’s “The Eve of St Agnes” . I took a picture, probably wasn’t supposed to but it’s a hard thing to capture so I don’t think they need worry. I like the contrast between these two in any case.

Both of these contrast quite starkly with the preserved facade of something that appears to have been part of one of the Magdalene Laundries on Sean MacDermott St. that I came across next. I know the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity ran one that appears to have taken up most of the block that this portico is part of. This thing is just a preserved facade, there’s a modern building right behind it and looking on Google Maps you can see that it’s only about 5m deep. The Greek inscription reads “ΜΟΝΟ ΣΟΦΩ ΘΕΩ ΣΩΤΗΡΙ ΗΜΩΝ ΔΟΞΗ” which is, apparently, a biblical verse, Romans 16:27 making some comment about God being wise. Seems he failed to pass that wisdom on to quite a few people in the vicinity if you ask me. I’m also not sure why a verse from Romans should be quoted in Greek but what the heck, I’m not the target audience I suppose.

 

Anyway it was then on in the direction of the IFSC and the (old) new docklands of the North Side. There are some pretty nice apartment setups in there that I hadn’t realised existed. Interesting location. Once again I was struck but how dead it was, where are all the peoples!!. This was 1:30PM on a Saturday. What is this? 28 Days Later???

Anyways on to the next stop – just after Custom House Square / Mayor’s Square (where there were loads of people I’m glad to say and my worries about the Zombie Apocalypse were proven groundless) – I came across the North Quay’s monument to modern Irish stupidity and hubris – it’s The New Anglo HQ again! The SOS button in the first picture is about 6 years too late I’m afraid but I’m glad to see someone’s thought to put a Paddy Wagon permanently on call outside the front as you can see in the second shot, just in case.

From here up to the O2 and the East Link Bridge things thin out a bit but the view across to Grand Canal Dock was nice, you could even see down the Dodder to Lansdowne Rd where the screen was on warming the crows up for the Ireland Italy matches. The light wasn’t great so I didn’t get a good enough picture to post unfortunately. A bit further on I began to notice that there are a lot of lights embedded in the cobbles along the whole quayside and they all have odd shapes in the glass, odd shapes that are actually fish – how cool is that. There are hundreds of them but here’s a small sample: a fish, a starfish and look two fishes..

   

This was hitting the easterly limit of my jaunt and I had to either cross here or turn back so I headed over the East Link bridge. The view was pretty good but the light wasn’t really playing nicely for me.

You can see how dark it was getting in the shot I took of Lansdowne Rd from the bridge over the Dodder in Ringsend. You can just make out the flames and the screen is showing 0:0 as the teams were just lining out as I took this.

The light stayed pretty grim for most of the trek back to the city center but it picked up just enough as I hit Temple Bar so I had to check out the progress on Blooms Hotel.

It’s looking amazing now, although frankly the Paddy’s day flag is a bit of a let down.

Onwards into the side streets of Temple bar and I found a piece by Dahleo on Crowe St, beside FX Buckley’s, that I hadn’t noticed before – very nice work.

And then on Temple St South a more challenging piece by Emil (?) that has a lot going for it once you look closely.

And finally I took a snap of the Beatles decorated traffic light signal box on Parliament St. , I’ve been meaning to take a picture of this for a while and I think I’m going to have to go back and try again because this one isn’t all that great. Fantastic work though, shame my picture doesn’t do it justice.

Glad to be back in Dublin.

I had an epic walk around the city centre today, found a bunch of places I’d never seen before ( like Henrietta Place and Kings Inns? Wow. ) and made a major dent in my need to get a Dublin City fix after being stuck in the country for over a month.

I’m going to post some pictures shortly but the list of streets and points of interest I passed along the way is worth posting I think:

1. Conyngham Road
2. Parkgate St.
3. Temple St. West
4. Benburb St.
5. Smithfield
6. King St. North
7. Bolton St.
8. Henrietta St. and into King’s Inns and King’s Inns Park ( Awesome )
9. Dominick St.
10. Parnell St.
11. Cavendish Row
12. Rutland Place
13. Gardiner Square North
14. Parnell Square North and Hugh Lane Gallery
15. Parnell Square East
16. Cavendish Row
17. Parnell St.
18. Gardiner St.
19. Sean MacDermot St. Lower
20. Buckingham St. Lower
21. Amiens St.
22. Harbourmaster Place
23. George’s Dock
24. JP Morgan House
25. Mayor St. Lower
26. Custom House Square
27. Spencer Dock - Anglo Building
28. New Wapping St.
29. North Wall Quays
30. O2  ( with all the Beyonce groupies queuing for tonight’s concert)
31. East Link Bridge
32. York Road
33. Thorncastle St. – Irishtown
34. Bridge St. – Ringsend
35. Ringsend Road
36. Pearse St
37. College St.
38. Westmoreland St
39. College Green
40. Central Bank to Cope St.
41. Fownes St. Lower
42. Temple Bar
43. Temple Lane South
44. Dame St.
45. Eustace St.
46. Temple Bar
47. Sycamore St
48. Dame St.
49. Parliament St
50. Wellington Quay

Now that was a good walk, just shy of 14km. I passed over the bridge in Ringsend just as Ireland and Italy were lining out on the pitch in Lansdowne Road, got to see the fire jets and fireworks going off. Hadn’t realised how load those things are, I was at least 2km away and they were _loud_.

Great day to be in the city.

Tomorrow I’m going to start at the same point more or less be head south of the river first, got some street art to find.