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The Gallery can be found at this link; http://.../christymoore

This has be Sligo’s worst lit venue, Happily terrible lighting can sometimes lead to good results!

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http://dickonwhitehead.zenfolio.com/

I will be uploading many new galleries over the next few weeks so check it out if you have time for some beautiful photographs.

All feedback is most welcome.

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At last!

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They were excellently supported by The JPT Trio, my first time hearing them but won’t be the last. Only a photo of the main act cos my camera was in the van, silly me!

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Cathal Hayden, Martín O'Connor and Seamie O'Dowd playing in Barry's Public House, Grange, County Sligo

I will be back for more on Friday the 25th for what promises to be another wonderful night of music and craic at Trad for Trocaire being organised I believe by Steve Wickham check it out here on facebook

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Streedagh beach is a perfect place for this activity but unfortunately it is normally not legal on this beach. Allowed in plenty of other places though including Rosses Point.

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more info on all aspects of  power kiting and sand yachting can be found here http://www.ipksa.info/

I will return tomorrow for a few more photos hopefully with stronger winds for a bit more drama.

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On another note the erection by the landowner of offensively large keep out notices adjacent to the right of way is an unfortunate degradation of this beautiful area, I will post a few photos of these in a later post so you can see what I mean. I am sure he is within his rights and all that but why?

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This photo and many more available to purchase at www.dickonwhitehead.com.

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I love this one, a quite moment while the choir ( from Ballyhaunis Community School) is waiting behind the stage backdrop for their turn to perform. The only illumination here is from the fake stage candles that are extremely dim to say the least but provide a lovely soft glow to this chorister’s face.

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Thriller, Balla Community School

Another favorite from the other end of the peaceful scale, as a member of Thriller from Balla Community College puts in a great performance as a zombie dancer.

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Unrelated picture! Matthew watches Titanic Exploration Film.

Opening night details below;

RHINOCEROS by Eugene Ionesco @ The Factory Performance Space, Sligo. October 26th – November 6th. Nightly at 8pm sharp. No shows Sunday 31st or Monday 1st. Booking 00353 (0)7191 70431

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Here’s Jessie.

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Hope ye like the pictures!

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5 nil up at halftime, final score 8 nil.

Well done lads, keep up the great teamwork.

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Fair play to him he accosted me with the line “is their anyone in your family who might enjoy a suspense novel”, I could not give an outright denial that this could indeed be the the case so he had me hooked.

more about Timothy here; http://www.timsheard.com/index.html

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Great to meet you all on the day. Pity I shattered an arrow but my lost one returned so not so bad after all!

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Here is Matthew my son and member of the school, helping test my lighting settings icon_smile

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Matthew helps set up for school portraits.

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As it turned out all the arrangements I had been commissioned to photograph had been designated as raffle prizes. This provided considerable time pressure on the photo creation exercise as the winners rushed the stage to collect their winnings! it was quickly explained that I would take a few minutes to photograph the creations before they good be taken by their new owners.

Luckily I had arrived armed in typical strobist style with a good ole Metz CT45 wirelessly triggered into a large white brolly on a tall lighting stand with another loose flash optically slaved of that for a bit of extra rim or fill as required. This allowed for fairly fast operation so saving me from the wrath of the Killybegs brigade! (who in fairness had a long drive home).

Here’s a link to Williams website http://www.reverendmac.com/ in case I have piqued your curiosity.

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Warning no exceptional photography here so unless you know the people involved or were there it could be really boring! Don’t say you weren’t warned.

“The Happy Archer” by Billy McLoughlin is featured as a soundtrack. Hope you like it.

A still picture gallery is available on my Facebook Page here http://bit.ly/9iXpir

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Here’s a few photographs from the night before I left, I missed the fourth quarter final but look forward to the first semi-final on Monday night.

Some good performers have been lost along the way but we should still have some great shows coming up.

As always prints can be purchased here.

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All event pictures available to purchase from here.

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Still Picture Gallery available  on my facebook page .

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aerture-3

This is for any photographers out there considering upgrading from Aperture 2 to Aperture 3.

It is an excellent upgrade;

• bringing a basic slideshow generator into aperture, not as good as fotomagico but great for quick projects.
• ‘faces’ could be useful when coupled with smart albums, a quick way to find all pictures containing a particular person within a library of pics.
• ‘places’ of no interest to me cause I don’t geo-tag pictures, but could be handy for a travel photog.
• direct facebook publication, but be warned it won’t export to a business page but will only make a new gallery on your personal page- pain.
• email export plugin still won’t recognise Thunderbird as mail handler, might have to move to apple mail after all-not!
• delete now moves items into a new Aperture trash can visible in aperture making accidental deletions much easier to rescue.
• new preset handling is a mixed blessing, all your existing presets are now available but at the top of the adjustment screen not beside the relevant control sliders as dropdown menus as they were previously. All in one place but will take a bit of getting used to. Some useful image adjustment presets now available to give different film effects etc.
• 64 bit processing means faster data crunching so less hanging around, tips are available elsewhere to enable booting your whloe mac into this mode for even faster processing but beware this will require all your apps to be 64bit compatible, or at least those you intend to use while in this mode. Most apps are not there yet, for example all my Nik Plugins are still all 32 bit.
• Library switching without an app reboot, this is a real improvement for those of us with more than one image library.

Those are just my positive insights after a couple of days faily solid use. Now for a few warnings and tips;

• Do not turn on face recognition when importing an old library, it takes a lot of processing to upgrade the library from version 2 to 3, adding the processing required for face recognition at the same time will almost certainly cause system freezes. If you intend to use (or simply want to play) with face recognition, then allow the upgrade process to complete first.
• on a large library switch on face recognition before going to bed, it will be ready in the morning for you to start naming the faces.
• when in faces mode name your first face then stop! click on the i next to the face on the corkboard. This will bring up all faces that may belong to the same person. You can then confirm or reject each possible match.
• Books, I tried this in Aperture 2 but for some reason could not get into it, seems a bit clearer in 3, but more importantly you can now use Album makers export plugins such as Graphisoft etc, this loads their layouts in the Aperture window-excellent!
• If the books are still opaque to you then consider buying a really good quick guide from here (of no financial interest to me).
• Back up all your libraries before upgrading, obvious but easy to forget when that nice shiny Aperture 3 box arrives from the Applestore!

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Sligo Bay Evening. Photograph by Dickon Whitehead 2009

Free  to download for personal use.

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Caroline Clancy, Videographer Pink Lime Productions. Photograph Dickon Whitehead.

Ok sorry I’ve been a bit busy so this is a delayed posting, there’s a few more in the queue too!

Had a good morning with Caroline creating a few portraits for use on her Linked-In page, we did a few alternatives pictures of which the above is one we both liked.

Caroline is a videographer with over ten years experience producing short films and documentaries, promotional DVDs, event documentations, and unique and stylish wedding DVDs. If you are in the market for a videographer then check out Pink Lime Video Productions.

Her wedding DVDs have been described as delightfully original, innovative in style, and very relaxed in their approach. Here’s a couple of customer recommendations for Caroline;

“Caroline has worked on several arts documentary projects with us. Her creative thinking,…..enabled beautiful work to emerge. In several years of creative work, I have not come across another film-maker in this region with her particular skills” – Maura Gilligan, Writer/ Bealtaine Festival Co-ordinator, Sligo, July 09

We are delighted we asked Caroline to do the recording and hand on heart, feel it was the best money spent on our wedding! “  – Carol & Patrick Carty, June 09

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Caroline Clancy, Videographer Pink Lime Productions. Photograph Dickon Whitehead.

I liked this portrait; it shows off a little of Caroline’s fun side and a great pair of Nikes!

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Try this to brighten up your computer! click on image, wait for it to load full size then right click on it to save to your computer, easy!

Free to use or republish for non-commercial use provided the watermark is retained. Available to license for commercial use.

To use as a desktop picture or screensaver on your mac;

1) store file in a sensible place (such as in a folder called desktop images perhaps in your pictures folder).

2) open system preferences.

3) open desktop/screensaver preferences.

4) click on + below left pane “screensavers”

5) navigate to and select the folder you created to store your new desktop pictures in.

6) set options (under pane “preview”) as required, these include panning and zooming effects and time of inactivity until start of screensaver.

7) close window.

On windows……er sorry……. if you can’t figure it out leave me a comment and I will get back to you.

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Kellie Hughes as The Good Fairy in At Swim Two Birds

I have spent some hours with The Blue Raincoat Theatre company during recent rehearsals for At Swim Two birds, here are some of the images I captured in that time.

I have presented these as a HD video slideshow, there is no soundtrack so don’t go looking for it!

Unless you have a fast internet connection watching in fullscreen with HD turned on is probably not a good idea….it could take a while.

This production will run from Nov 3rd – Saturday 15th, 2009. (Excl 8th & 9th) at The Factory, Sligo

Check out the details at http://www.blueraincoat.com/AS2B.html

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Here are a few of my favorites from the day.

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I met Anne Louise at an open coffee event here in Sligo, where she was giving a presentation – ‘October 31st Tax Deadline - Removing the Annual Dread (Tax tips for self employed and PAYE workers – removing the “fear”, getting organised, reducing your tax bill)’, despite being fairly well experienced in this area I still came away with some useful information which will save some money this year. My experience with accountants has not always been this good!

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Business Portrait of Anne-Louise O'Donovan.

Anne Louise is currently working on a new business plan to be launched in January. A Chartered Accountant and Qualified Tax Adviser by trade, she will offer Finance, Accounting and Taxation Advice, Mentoring and Training to clients with a specific focus on the Creative sector and Start Up businesses.

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A place to forget all problems.

I still have to work out the technicalities* for this one, so this is a statement of intent not delivery.

If this idea works out you should soon be able to download a free desktop picture once a week or so to brighten up your computer screens.

If you happen to know the best way to do this do let me know via the comments.

*(we are pretty good at technicalities here so don’t worry it will happen, at this very moment a phalanx of our best engineering staff are working 24/7 to solve this thorny dilemma)

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Michael and studio, 2009

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to work with Michael Wann, an artist who lives in our locality. Michael needed his work photographically documented for inclusion in promotional media and as a personal record. I also took the opportunity to produce a portrait of Michael in his working environment.

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cruder forms exist from the outcrop series

Michael Wann 2008, pencil and wash on canvas on mdf. 40.5 by 43 cm.

Michael has been good enough to allow me to reproduce his pictures on this site, but remember this medium gives only a small hint of the original artwork . To experience the originals you will be well advised to view his forthcoming exhibition at Sligo Art Gallery, opening on Friday the 9th of October and continuing until the 31st of October. The artworks are largely pencil and charcoal on canvas.

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Michael Wann 2008, charcoal and wash on canvas, 101.5 by 91.5 cm

The address labels? Michael originally came to me for assistance with printing a mailing list (successfully) and that led onto photography. Odd how these things work.

Michael Wann

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I really enjoyed the night as you can see when I am inspecting the lemon tart!

Like it or not?, Please leave a comment! Really Like it?…..book me to take some photographs!

If you would like to see any of the pictures in the slideshow posted individually send me a message through the comments (or give me a ring!).

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It was not a sold out gig so I had some empty seats allowing me to get a few pictures without disturbing anyone, nothing worse than sitting behind a photo eejit who spends an entire gig taking pictures! the music is there for listening too after all.

It was a great gig, with a nice balance of songs shared between Nick and Ry. The kind of shrug from Ry is his impression of Richard Nixon.

Now back to work on my new studio (more about this later).

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Taking a break between flying lessons!

Our young wrens are learning to fly and are pretty tame so far, it seems to take them a while to learn to fear humans. Two years ago I had a family of them nesting in my wood workshop, seemingly undisturbed by the sound of the machinery.

I took quite a few pictures of them but picked this one for the blog cos of the lovely background colours. Hope you like it.

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