Street » Ronan Palliser Photography

Dublin Simon Annual Review

Dec 172011

Probably the most eye-opening experience I had behind the camera this year was the few hours I spent with one of the Soup Run teams from Dublin Simon as they walked their regular route around Dublin city to supply soup, sandwiches, snacks and socks to the city’s homeless community and, perhaps just as important, to chat with them. I saw a different side to the city over that few hours, and given that it was the end of July that night, I can barely begin to imagine what it life on the streets must be like in the depths of winter. The purpose of the exercise was to capture a series of images for use by Dublin Simon on their website, in their Annual Review for 2010, and to raise awareness for their services. The Soup Run was one of three visits I made to the charity to fulfill the brief. On Friday a page-wide ad in the Metro Herald newspaper ran another of the images, as you can see above, and I noticed that the Annual Review has been published on the website. Below are snippets from that which include more of the images I captured over the few weeks of that summer project.

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Unsung Heroes

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Aug 042011

I had a teacher in primary school – Mr. Donovan – who taught me in 2nd class, 3rd class and 5th class. One of those years he taught my class the words and tune of a song called The Streets of London, and I’ve never forgotten it. The words came into my head as I wandered around Dublin city centre last week with a team of three people who give up their Thursday evenings every single week for the most charitable of causes. They are part of a wider group of people – the Dublin Simon Community Soup Run team – who ensure that every single night of the week, 365 days a year, rain or shine, sun or snow, the homeless people on the streets of Dublin are offered soup, a sandwich, a cup of tea, a bar of chocolate, and a pair of socks. They allowed me to accompany them on the soup run last Thursday, and it was an eye-opening experience.

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On post-processing…

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Jun 212011

Sometimes I take photos for a specific purpose, but more often than not – at least when I’m taking photos for myself rather than for others – I’m not really sure what will become of the shots, or what I will do with them. But over the last couple of years I’ve developed a set pattern of how I treat images regardless of their use (or lack of). As a matter of course, images get transferred to an appropriate folder on my laptop, get imported into Aperture, are batch processed with a custom-written preset which performs the basic (and minimum) post processing steps that I have figured out that I like, and get backed up to an external RAID array, as well as to a backup drive which mirrors the laptop contents on an hourly, daily and weekly basis. Note that no where along the line do I delete shots. Ever. More often than not, I look at images with a view to putting them on the blog, and then I might take a closer look at the post-processing and tweak the image a little further, but this is almost always within Aperture, rarely Photoshop. And so it goes for image after image, with the odd exception along the way. Lately, thanks to a new camera, I’ve started to reevaluate the batch post-processing step and wondering if maybe what I like in this respect is changing. All of which explains why the photo above looks a little, well, odd…

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Google Secret Garden party

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Jun 182011

If you’ve ever wondered what sort of a summer barbeque a $30,000,000,000 company might hold, well wonder no more. Last Friday, Fitzwilliam Square was taken over by Google Ireland for its summer barbeque. It didn’t look like a low-cost affair. The music was by Royseven, whose music you’ll probably have heard on the radio (they’ve previously played Oxegen) and the whole square looked not unlike the Electric Picnic with teepees, marquees, bouncy castles for kids and what looked like chill-out zones hidden under the trees around the perimeter. How do I know all that? Well, I googled it, of course…

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Checking out the checkout

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Jun 152011

Before sitting down to enjoy a hot chocolate in Dundrum last Sunday, and while I waited for said hot chocolate to be prepared, I found myself looking across at the checkout lanes of Tesco, and with the thought of “why not?” captured a single frame with my new always-in-my-pocket camera. This shot, and these scenes in general, aren’t particularly interesting as such, but I find the capturing of the mundane to be strangely appealing. The fact that there’s nothing obviously interesting going on in the shot will do one of two things – it’ll either cause the viewer to pass over it immediately, or it’ll force you to look a bit harder to find points of interest. This is a gamble that will usually not pay off, but I’m drawn to that type of image for some reason and, if nothing else, it serves as a record shot of a moment in time. There are a couple of things in this particular image that catch my eye when I look a bit closer.

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