Wildlife » Ronan Palliser Photography

Whiskey and friends

Aug 172011

I first met Whiskey four weeks ago during my first ever visit to Termonfeckin. I was there to chat to bride-to-be Rosie, whose wedding I would be photographing a few weeks later. As I arrived Whiskey was being christened and the Lynch family were toasting her good health with, suitably, a glass of whiskey. There was a little bit of a discussion about whether she was to have an ‘e’ in her name or not, but Rosie’s father was adamant that it was the Irish version, and not the Scotch version, so Whiskey it was. I don’t own a dog, though I do love dogs (I must teach Síofra to start asking for one for Christmas in a few years time!) so when I left Termonfeckin that evening I looked forward to returning for two reasons. Obviously I was excited about photographing the upcoming wedding – that excitement would prove to be well-founded, as my next couple of posts will make clear. But also I was looking forward to meeting Whiskey again. So it was nice that when we did next meet, not only was she a willing subject for some photographs, but she dressed for the occasion too.

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X100 week: Dublin Zoo

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Jun 122011

To round out so-called “X100 week” here on the blog – featuring photographs taken on my Fuji X100 (and resized straight-out-of-camera images of each) I thought I’d post a few photos taken in Dublin Zoo yesterday. On previous visits to the zoo I’ve taken at least one DSLR and a bagful of lenses – in fact I’ve been known to bring two different camera bodies – so it was a change, and a pleasant one at that, for me to just bring one pocketable fixed lens camera. As well as my new photographic baby, the trip was the first outing to the zoo for Síofra, and so it’s a little bit fitting that one of my favourite shots from the day features the zoo’s newest baby – the as yet unnamed giraffe, born as Queen Elizabeth arrived in Dublin a few weeks ago.

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Staying focused

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Jan 132011

Last November I posted a few photographs of some garden birds, captured in my parents’ back garden in Cork. I used off-camera flash to light those photographs and relied on high-speed sync to allow me to use flash and a high shutter speed to counter the relatively bright daylight at the time. In short, it was quite a technical shoot and the blog posts were equally technical in their discussion of the lighting setups used. Subsequently I entered one of the photographs into the camera club monthly league, where it did OK, but only OK, because the judge thought it was a tad soft. He was right. The photo I entered is soft. While I had fussed over composition and exposure and lighting, I had left the camera to worry about focusing the shots. And it transpired that, for subjects like garden birds, even when they are being captured on a bird feeder, auto focus isn’t good enough. So I needed to try again, but this time manually focus to improve the sharpness of the subject. There was only one problem, and it wasn’t an insignificant one…

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Penguin watching

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Nov 262010

Both Aoife and I are fans of penguins, in the “would love to have one as a pet” kind of way, so when we visited SeaWorld in Orlando last week, the penguin exhibit was pretty much our first port of call. And unlike the penguin exhibit in, say, Dublin zoo, this exhibit is climate controlled, and very well populated with a variety of breeds of penguins. A good place to be, then, if you’re a penguin fan.

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For the birds (Part 2)

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Nov 102010

Yesterday I outlined (in a fair bit of detail) a setup I worked through last Sunday as I attempted to photograph some garden birds feeding, lighting them using three strobes, two of them off-camera. And while I got some shots, they weren’t really what I had hoped for, and so I changed everything. Well not quite everything, but I did, for starters, move to another bird feeder. And I made some adjustments to my lighting which would affect the colour palette of my images. The shot above is the result of the change, and comes with this warning: it is photoshopped… but probably not as much as you might think. Full disclosure, including shots straight out of the camera, below.

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