Ronan Palliser Photography

New date for my one-day flash photography workshop – FULL

Mar 172013

UPDATE: The course is now fully booked.

I’m pleased to be able to announce the next date for my one-day workshop on flash photography. I’ll be running in at the RUA RED South Dublin Arts Centre in Tallaght, Dublin on Saturday 27th April, 2013. RUA RED is a great location for lots of reasons, not least because of how accessible it is by public transport with a good bus service and the Luas (red line) stopping literally outside the door. There is free all-day parking available nearby too, and the venue has a cafe which means that I can include lunch for all participants on the day in the cost.

(null)

Lisa & Daniel (Part 2)

Wedding 1 Response »

Mar 162013

Lisa and Daniel’s wedding reception was being held in the Claregalway Hotel in that town just north of Galway city which is well known for, amongst other things of course, being a bit of a traffic black spot. The hotel has no grounds other than a fairly extensive car park, and so there was half a plan to stop off en route from the church in Belclare at Claregalway Abbey, an old ruin which sits alongside the hotel and is popular with couples having wedding receptions at the hotel as a location for photographs. It being half a plan, myself and Lisa discussed it on the morning when I reached her house and it turned out that she didn’t have much of an inclination to stop there, and neither did I. Her motivation was really just to get the hotel asap, which is understandable. Mine was, having visited the abbey that morning and observed that there was a lot of graveyard to be walked through before getting anywhere photogenic, that it wasn’t ideally suited to the task. Furthermore, with light that wasn’t what you’d call stunning and a sky that was drab, what photos it did offer up might well have proven to be a bit, well, bland. So we ditched the idea before anyone was even dressed that morning and planned instead to head straight for the hotel and do all the bridal party photography indoors. Logistically that made things easy. In terms of light, I would be entirely in control. But in terms of locations, I was at the mercy of what the hotel had to offer. Thankfully, the hotel came up trumps, and we were quickly and easily able to dispense with the formals, getting some unusual perspectives along the way, and Lisa and Daniel got to mingle with their guests. Win win! Here’s just a sample of what the hotel had to offer photographically speaking.

Read the rest of this post »

A super cute flowergirl-to-be

Portrait No Responses »

Mar 122013

Caoimhe, above, aged 18 months, will be walking up the aisle for her Mummy and Daddy’s wedding in May and when I called out to chat to them about their wedding at the weekend I brought along my camera, a softbox and a 4 foot roll of black paper to capture a few photos of her. It’s not necessarily easy to photograph children at this age, so I thought I’d post a little bit about the process of lighting and taking images such as these.

Read the rest of this post »

Lisa & Daniel (Part 1)

Wedding 1 Response »

Mar 072013

It’s probably not wise to confess to having favourites in this game, but I can say that on a short list of my favourite weddings that I’ve photographed, Lisa and Daniel’s wedding would most certainly feature. What’s funny is that in some ways it was one of those that could have been a difficult gig – it rained, it was late in the year with the day short and the light levels low, their hotel didn’t have any grounds whatsoever, and wasn’t of the castle or country house variety that often photograph well indoors. And the family home where Lisa was getting ready is so in the middle of nowhere that there was a real chance of me getting lost in the back roads of Galway never to emerge! So just even the photographs going smoothly would make me happy, but Lisa and Daniel’s wedding had much more going for it than just the photos going smoothly. It had style, attention to detail, two lovely families, the prettiest bride you could imagine, lots of red, and the coolest wedding ~~car~~ vehicle ever. And the best part? This was one of three occasions over the last five months in which I would get to photograph many of the people involved.

Read the rest of this post »

A wedding card you’ll want to look at again and again

Off Topic, Wedding 1 Response »

Feb 272013

I’m excited about this. Up to now I’ve provided brides and grooms with discs containing all the post-processed high resolution photographs from their wedding day. Getting printable JPEGs from our photographer something my wife and I felt was important as a deliverable when we got married, and something I believe all couples should be facilitated with as part of any wedding photography package that they pay for. But discs are, in some ways, a ticking time bomb. No more than floppy discs or mini discs before them, CDs, DVDs and even BluRay discs will some day bite the dust as a format. Even now many laptops and netbooks don’t ship with CD or DVD drives. They are a headache for the photographer too – they are time consuming to burn, require labels to be printed, and ink and paper to be bought, cases to be purchased, case covers to be printed, and with 4.7 GB of storage and the size of high resolution JPEGs these days, typically mean two discs need to be burnt for each wedding. So it’s bye bye discs, hello the USB Wedding Card. Or should that be the “Ronan Palliser Photography USB Wedding Card”?!

Read the rest of this post »

Cheap Camera Challenge

Events, Gear 1 Response »

Feb 202013

Here’s an idea you’re welcome to steal… especially if you, like me, are a member of a camera club or photographic society or whatever else they call themselves around the world. A year and a half ago I ran a challenge for my fellow members of Dublin Camera Club called the Disposable Camera Challenge. I blogged about it at the time (before and after), but in short each participant got a cheap disposable camera, shot the roll of film, returned it to me and then, after I got all the shots developed, picked their favourite shot for enlargement and showcasing to the rest of the club at one of our weekly meetings. It was a great challenge, well enjoyed by all, and one I thought I’d like to run again. The only problem was it came with lots of admin work for me. Ordering cameras, distributing cameras, collecting cameras, ordering prints, collecting prints, meeting photographers to show them their prints, re-ordering enlargements of their favourite, scanning prints for a showcase slideshow, mounting enlarged prints for a showcase of prints and so on. In other words, it was a lot of work. But I wanted to run with the same idea again. So I’ve tweaked it slightly, and next Tuesday at our weekly club meeting this year’s challenge will get under way. It will run for the next 6 months with (I hope) 25 participating photographers, but instead of being a film-based challenge, this time each photographer gets use of a digital camera for a week before passing it onto the next participant. I call it the “Cheap Camera Challenge”, and you could think of it as Top Gear’s “Star in a Reasonably Priced Car”, but for photographers. Because the camera I’ve chosen for the challenge (and yes, it is brand new) cost a whopping €27. It arrived yesterday, and you know what? It’s not half bad…

Read the rest of this post »

Karen & Brian

Wedding 1 Response »

Jan 282013

In my experience all weddings are different – even those that follow the usual “template” of church, drinks, dinner, dancing – but Karen and Brian’s wedding last September at Kilshane House was even more different to any other wedding that I photographed all year. Specifically, it was photographically different, in that they wanted what most couples don’t want, or to be more correct they didn’t want what most couples do want. The photos will hopefully explain, but basically Karen and Brian didn’t want any posed photos at all. Or at least hardly any. Their “list” if you could call it that, asked for three things. A nice photo of the two of them, a nice photo of them with Karen’s family, and a nice photo of them with Brian’s family. After that, I had carte blanche, with the main request being to document the day, create a set of images that would tell the story of the day, and photograph as many of the guests as possible just being, well, guests. In short, the kind of wedding photography I absolutely love not only doing, but seeing too. As part of the day I did capture the usual details – dress, shoes, flowers and so on – but mainly I photographed the people. And so, in this post I’m going to show you some (lots!) of my favourite images of the people who made Karen and Brian’s wedding unique to them, including, of course the happy couple themselves. And in the spirit of not intervening and not posing and not “creating” images that was my mantra on the day, I’m going to let these photos speak for themselves.

Read the rest of this post »

Elaine & John (Part 2)

Wedding No Responses »

Jan 222013

I had worried a little about how much time a trip to Inchydoney beach would take on our way from Barryroe to Dunmore House, given how nice a day it was and how busy that particular beach can be, but – in the spirit of everything going right on that particular day – I needn’t have worried. We got in and out in record time and the sun even obliged the photographs by popping behind a cloud to give some lovely soft light while we were there. Before we got there, of course, there was the minor issue “I do”. They did.

Read the rest of this post »

Elaine & John (Part 1)

Wedding 1 Response »

Jan 202013

There was a lot to look forward to with Elaine and John’s wedding last September. For a start, they chose a photographer’s dream of a church to get married in. Spacious, beautiful, bright. Just look at it! Then again, they got married in West Cork, which is itself spacious and beautiful on even the worst days and which, on this happy sunny day in September, was bright too – if a little windy. Barryroe Church is nestled on a hill, meaning we had to take shelter around the side for the family photos after the ceremony, but its stone walls made for a nice backdrop all the same, and the wind didn’t claim much else by the way of casualties, so all in all we got about as lucky with the weather as you could hope to. Photographing any wedding in West Cork is a treat, but especially so on this occasion as Elaine and John’s reception was bringing me back to the place where I myself celebrated my wedding almost 5 years earlier – the beautiful, highly recommended, Dunmore House. Not only that, but if all went to plan we would get to stop off at the beach en route from Barryroe to Dunmore. As I said – a lot to look forward to. And it delivered on every count.

Read the rest of this post »

T is for… TTL flash

A to Z of Photography No Responses »

Jan 162013

And so, as we roll steadily through the early days of 2013, we come to T, much later than originally planned, but we’re here all the same. There were contenders for the topic that T would represent in this A to Z of Photography – timing, tonal range, telephoto lenses, tripods – but I think it’s most useful to give you an overview of one aspect of photography that is as misunderstood as it is used, that is as frustrating as it is useful, and that is as complicated as it simple. I’m talking about TTL flash. Or, to many of you, simply flash. So grab your camera, pop up (or pop on) your flash, and let’s work our way through this surprisingly complicated area of photography.

Read the rest of this post »