East Pier, Dun Laoghaire

Every now and then I’ll decide to take my camera bag and head off for a couple of hours with no particular destination in mind to take some photographs.  Last time I did this I ended up in Sandycove, and previous destinations have included the Dublin mountains or Sandymount strand.  A few years ago I wasn’t as inclined to vary my destination as much on the rare occasions I did this, and I inevitably ended up in Dun Laoghaire.

This was before I was consciously spending more time on my photography – illustrated by the fact that the image above was not taken with a digital SLR, but with a compact Fuji camera.  I was attracted to Dun Laoghaire for photographs because of it’s sea-front location, the yachts in its marina, the expanses of water, the seals and the seagulls.  More often than not though I would come away with very few photographs that I was happy with.   The problem was that I tended to visit in the evening time, and Dun Laoghaire, being on the east coast, is more of a morning-time place.  By the time I’d get there, the sun would have dipped below the hills to its west, casting most of the town in shade.

On the occasion that I took this photograph I was just early enough to catch the last rays of the setting sun falling on the west-facing wall of the east pier, and the light has that nice golden glow of a sun that is low in the sky.  Similarly the haze beyond the pier has a nice warm feel to it.

I clearly had one of thye first rules of composition – the rule of thirds – in my head when I took this shot, and you can see that the framing is careful to have the horizon one third of the way down from the top of the frame.  In hindsight this was probably better than having it one third of the way up from the bottom, as there is probably more interest in the water than the sky in this shot, but I wonder would a landscape format shot have been better.

On the same visit, for the first time I took a shot with the aim of converting it to black and white rather than leaving it in colour, as I tried to develop an eye for tone and shape, rather than being distracted by colour.  I’ll show you how that worked out (or not, as the case may be) tomorrow.