View From The Roadside

Rocky Bay Waves
Originally uploaded by Liam O’Neill.

Things have been very quiet on the photography front these past few weeks, for a number of reasons. Work was one reason, with a fair bit of it to do before Christmas. The car which I regard as a vital photographic tool (well, the blogs name does refer to the roadside after all) is also very sick right now. It’s biggest, though not only, problem is it’s blown head gasket. It was showing signs of trouble well before Christmas, and is now in need of serious repair. I’ve been very reluctant to do much driving in it, which has limited the chances to take pictures. Not that there were all that many chances anyway. The weather, especially back home in Ireland, was a horrible overcast, wet grey that was just not inspiring at all. I’m sure I could have used it better, but coupled with the broken car, I wasn’t suited to trying.
I did find myself in breathtaking scenery with lovely sunny weather for a whole week, and I had the camera with me, and I wouldn’t have needed a car to get around and take plenty of pictures. That was in St. Anton am Arlberg in Austria. It was my first time skiing, and I was there to ski. The camera was strictly a back-up plan in case the skiing didn’t work out. I (thankfully) didn’t need the backup plan, and was not going to skip an hour of skiing to take some pictures, especially when an hour of pictures could not do justice to the place anyway. Looking back it seems funny that I didn’t take even a single picture, but I know that during the week I didn’t even think about the camera even being there.
The car goes in for repairs next week, after which I should be able to go back to my little drives in search of pictures to take, but for now, I’ve put one of the three half-decent shots from the holidays back home. It’s some waves from the heavy sea crashing on Rocky Bay, the little beach I love to visit when I’m home. I’m sure I’ve said it before, but it’s little coves like Rocky Bay that I sorely miss along the Solent coastline.

I spent last week on a bit of a photographic holiday in the Durham/Newcastle/Northumberland area. I’d never ventured quite that far north before, though I got close at my last race, at Croft. I went up with James Hodgson whos parents live near Durham and so could guide me around the interesting places.
We had wonderfull weather for the trip, lovely sunny days most of the time. We packed quite a lot into our week, from Newcastle city center to Hadrians Wall to Holy Island and almost everything in between. Over the next few days I’ll be going through the many photographs I took and adding posts here about them as I do. I was lucky I had a Bank Holiday to recover from it all!

The voting on our little 2 hour challenge event is over, and my picture, Muddy Boots, won!
The point of the exercise was more to see what others saw worthy of a picture rather than the competition, but it’s still nice to win. I’ve since had the picture printed, and it looks very nice on paper. It’s currently at a local framers being framed. You’d think a simple frame for a black and white photo (black frame, single plain white matt) would be easy to find in the various home furnishing shops, but it seems not.

This is the (new) companion blog to my Flickr gallery (http://www.flickr.com/photos/viewfromtheroadside/).

As I take pictures and add them to Flickr, I will pick out some of them and write a little more about them here. The reasons for picking an image could be anything from an interesting story about how I came to take that picture, to a new technique I’ve tried in Photoshop. I will go back over the existing pictures from time to time as well.

While a picture should be able to stand all on it’s own, I often find the story about how that picture came about, both in a technical and anecdotal sense, can be just as fascinating, and can sometimes even help appreciate the picture more.