Despite being a Cork man, albeit one who lives in Dublin, the number of photographs I have of Cork is very small. In fact, recently my sister asked me if I had any that she could put up on her wall in London and when I went looking I didn’t really have much to offer. I did stumble across an unprocessed set of four images that I had taken, and subsequently forgotten, in Ballincollig earlier this year.
There’s a nice park in Ballincollig, with a walk that people do, and along that walk you pass by the river and this weir. It was my first time around this part of Ballincollig, and I was there with my in-laws as we took advantage of a nice day to walk off lunch.
As I often do, I brought my camera with me, and when we came to the weir I stopped for a couple of minutes to try to get a photograph of it. Some rocks just alongside the water provided me with a platform to steady the camera on, and I opted to photograph the scene with a slow shutter speed to get a nice smooth effect on the water coming over the drop.
There are two ways to photograph moving water - with an extremely fast shutter speed to freeze movement, and with a slow shutter speed to give a nice blur to the movement. Anything in between (for instance a shutter speed of 1/100s) will more than likely not give a great image of moving water, and is best avoided.
A slow shutter speed here was achieved by closing my aperture right down to f/25, which gave me a 1/8th of a second exposure. That small aperture suited the landscape scene also, keeping a large portion of it in focus.
The light is nice in half this image, and horrible in the other half, as by the time I was taking it the water was in shade, whereas the hill behind is being lit by a low sun. I must go back sometime and try to photograph it in better light, where the water is also being lit.
But at least for now this shot helps boost Cork’s representation on the blog.
How about difraction with f25 ?