View from Rome

Experimenting with photoshop

The lovely Donna.

DCU rag week ball

Last night at the DCU rag week ball, among other great bands, were The Walls, formerly known as The Stunning.

Shooting in a small room

One of the biggest issues with shoots in your subjects' home is never knowing how much space you will have to work with. This shot shows just what it's like to do a shoot in a small bedroom.

New Zealand Pacific Salsa Congress

Last year I attended the best event probably of my entire life. The NZ Pacific Salsa congress. It was the first of it's kind in NZ. And although I was mainly there to soak up the atmosphere, be entertained and dance till me feet fell off, I couldn't resist taking a million photos. I never go anywhere without my camera it's become an extension of my arm. Well, now it's 2008, they are following it up with another congress, bound to be heaps of fun and with many more performers and teachers than before. I'm gutted I won't make it, as I'm in Ireland now, but I've been watching there site for updates all the same. I noticed they didn't have any photos of the event on the site, so I offered mine. They are located on my website but they've added a link to it from the official congress website http://www.nzpacificsalsacongress.co.nz. This years event is taking place from 21st to 23rd March. I'm busy still editing and adding photos to my site. Above is my boyfriends favorite shot of the event.

The town where I live

This is Balbriggan. If I was still Down under living this close to the beach would have cost me a fortune in rent. However, because this is Ireland and we rarely get beach weather this area was the cheapest rent close to Dublin. Not a bad place if you can get a fine day to go for a walk.

Website temporarily down

Be U Photography www.beuphotography.com Is temporarily off-line due to an issue at hosting 365.
Hosting 365 Status blog
http://hosting365status.com/2008/02/06/cooling-issues-parkwest-data-centre/

Old days

Thinking of putting together a little clip of old photos of me growing up. Just an idea a friend gave me to add to my bio page on my website. I've seen this done on another photographers site and I think it adds a nice personal touch. I searched through the biscuit tin's of old photographs at home and brought a handful back with me. looking at them now, It's obvious I was not the glamorous kid. Anyway... bring on the laughter. This is me, a rather large baby who my mother rarely found the impulse to take a photo of. In fairness she had her hands full, with only a year and a half between me and the eldest boy and then my wee sister coming along a mer year and a week after me. What!? So I enjoyed my food :P

Fixed!

There seems to be many ways to calibrate your screen color to match your prints. Vista has a highly complex color management section with no clear way of how to use it. Many long winded documents, if your interested in reading to put you to sleep (Windows Image Color Management - http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/display/color/default.mspx ). There are plug-in devices you can buy to calibrate the screen colour. Very accurate, but an expense I don't need. You can download free colour profiles from the printer companies to match the paper you are printing on. These profiles can then be added to your image editing software. My printers advised against this. They provide a special colour-chart print to compare with the screen colour. The advised method for adjusting the screen colour was to change the brightness and contrast buttons on the front of the screen. However, Laptops don't have these. My supplier advised I change the contrast using the Fn key with the F7 and F8 keys on my Advent laptop. These didn't provide enough flexibility to get the required colours. Next step, find your graphics card control panel. If you have a graphics card, there should be a small icon in the bottom right corner of the desktop that when you mouse-over says SiSTray. Right clicking on this and then clicking on Control Center will bring up the options that this will allow. Be warned it may be limited, depending on the graphics card you have. Then adjust the colour and saturation comparing the on screen colour chart to that of the printed version till they match. Magic.