My final VOR-related post coincides with the publication of 8 of my images from last weekend in today’s Galway Advertiser, and I was glad to see that this photograph has been printed quite large alongside a story which suggests there is some hope that the race will return to Galway in the future. If one of 70,000 copies of the Galway Advertiser has brought you to my blog today, make yourself at home and have a look around! In the meantime, some more detail on this photograph follows.
That the Volvo Ocean Race may return to Galway is due entirely to the atmosphere that surrounded it on its stopover, and that atmosphere is due in no small part to the tented race village which was set up at the docks, and which will be missed when it is taken away next week.
Each night in the race village there were free open air concerts on the stage you see in this image. Last Saturday’s concert featured Sharon Shannon, and both it and the good weather attracted the biggest crowd yet into the city. I took the opportunity to go to the top of the Merchants Road carpark (from where I had managed to miss most of the Red Arrows display earlier that day) in the hope of getting a good perspective of the race village.
As I reached the top of the car park the gardai were clearing the area out – it had become a popular drinking spot – but I showed them my pass and they allowed me to stay to take photographs. Down below Sharon Shannon had just introduced the lead singer from the Saw Doctors for a rendition of Galway Girl and N17 so the crowd was packed in all around the stage. I took a couple of shots with my 17-50mm lens and some close-in shots with the 70-200mm, but before I left I thought the fisheye might take a good shot and capture the atmosphere of the area well.
I was hand-holding all the shots and so had the ISO bumped right up to 1600 and the aperture as wide open as it would go to help with the shutter speed. For the other lenses there was still an element of blur, but the fisheye’s 10.5mm lens is more tolerant. I took a few shots, adjusting the exposure compensation slightly to get a nice balance and not have the light sources be too overpowering. I framed so that the masts of the boats and the edge of the docks would stay relatively straight, running through the centre of the frame, and allowed the rest to distort.
It makes for an eye-catching shot, and shows the docks area of Galway as it has rarely been seen before, but hopefully in three years time will be again.
Note: a larger selection of my images from the Galway stop-over is available here
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