South-West - Truely Gorgeous

Following up on my traveling around Ireland series, this time we went to the South-West of Ireland. To read about previous road trips, check posts To The West and To North-West. The maps of our drive was as follows:

We first went to Limerick on the way to Dingle Peninsula, drove around peninsula, back to Dingle, towards Kilkee crossing river, following day to Cliffs of Moher and finally Galway and back to Dublin.

As I have said it in previous posts also, my love for Ireland just keeps growing everytime I visit anything outside Dublin :)

Some highlights of trip, if someone wanna do similar.

• Limerick was great, but it was raining so we cudn't manage to see much but still in between sun n rain patches, we managed to see the castle and church. The best part, food was way cheaper than Dublin and we enjoyed a wonderful cup of coffee and home made scones for less than 12 euros for 3 people.
• Normally, people go to Ring of Kerry. But we decided to go to Dingle Peninsula. The only thing I knew of it was the famous Dolphin called Fungie, which we off-course saw the next day.
• Dingle is just gorgeous, no words can explain it. It was not the best weather, but atleast it was not raining with some sun shining once in a while and we drove all along the peninsula, its probably one of the most beautiful drive in Ireland I have taken. Also lots of prehistoric sites to see, the landscape is out of world :) and also visited the west most point of Ireland, "The Basket Islands", which comprises of 7 islands. We went to the edge of one of the islands and it was soo soo coool. Unmissable.
• We then drove back to Dingle and passed Connor Pass, it was bit overcast by then, so we didn't stop but it looked very tempting to have a walk. But we needed to cross the river by ferry to go across and didn't wanted to take the long road route. So we had to hurry up and we drove to Tarbert and got the ferry to Woodview (see map here for more close up route)
• And drove to a small town of Kilkee.
• Following day, we had nice breakfast in Kilkee, nice sunny day, drove to Cliffs to Moher (second of the many time probably I will visit this spot).
  
• The last stop was Galway city, which was much much better than I expected. Nice, small town city like feeling. Def. not to miss.

And ah, don't worry about accommodation, there are so many B&B's and non-breakfast places, we never had to book anything, just go to one n spend the night.

I would be posting the pictures slowly on flickr, Have a look here.

Some collage shots:

Limerick n Irish Highways

Fungie, Dingle Peninsula

Drive along Dingle peninsula, Landscape

Flying High on the west most point in Ireland, The Basket Islands

Kilkee, Cliffs of Moher n Galway City

Dummies Guide to US Elections - Part 8

Its been a while since I posted on my previous series "Dummies Guide to US Elections" (Part 6 n older) and since then lot has happened, ah not really. Thou' Mrs. Clinton is out of the race, it was getting just too confusing for everyone (Americans / International community alike). So now we down to final two - the very very old man "the-white-hair-dude" and the-man-who-is-gonna-bring-change.

This is not what caught my attention, but someone else bought back the good feeling of "drama" the US elections gives to us and am totally back on track to track. And that someone else is Paris Hilton. And this is the best campaign you will ever see and it has given an entirely new dimension to the ever-so dramatic US elections. Check it out:

See more Paris Hilton videos at Funny or Die

Finally, a worthwhile 3rd candidate has arrived. Vote for Paris Hilton.



Paris Hilton quotes:
"he is oldest celebrity in the world, like super old"
"i'm just hot"
"totally ready to lead"
"dancing was sin, n beer was served in a bucket"
"I'll see you at the debate bitches"
"Vice President - Rihana"
"Paint it Pink"

This was in response to this Mc Cain ad (which is btw just awful)


And I can't even comprehend this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mopkn0lPzM8

Flickr Fav Dump

Dublin Metblogs Wants MOAR

Metblogs Recruiting Poster, originally uploaded by seanbonner.

Isn't this the best recruiting poster you have ever seen :), atleast for me. So, I also write/blog/rant/manage for Dublin Metblogs, which is part of the global network of cities "Metroblogging". And Sean (n HQ team) created this awesome recruiting poster; so if you live in Dublin and would like to be part of our team, Check this Come Blog With Us.

Spread my wings n Fly away

Spread my wings, originally uploaded by Mohan S.

Last weekend, we went to see Rose festival in Raheny. Here is a shot of one of most beautiful flower :)

The Golden Rule?

Jay-Z performing Mundian Tu Bach Ke @ Glastonbury 08

Very cool, finally I liked something Jay-Z has done :)

The 7x7 Journey (photo-book)

I have been meaning to get some of my photos in a book / printed form for sometime now, not that I have pro photos or anything but more of a collection of some good shots taken over the years (mostly in 2007-2008). So today I finally self published a photo collection in a book form titled "The 7x7 Journey" at blurb.com; you can find the link and preview of the book on the right hand column. The cover looks as -

Its a collection of photos (20 pages - 40 photos) in 7x7 format.

Hope you like. And yeah you can buy it also from the link above or link on right hand side. Its reasonably priced at Euro 10 for a softcover version.

Is he gonna flip a lot more?

hopefully not, but

His Switch on Telecom Immunity (NY Times)

And Iraq

Everybody Dance Now

Sunset HDR Again

Just playing around with some more RAW images for HDR processing in Photomatix and Photoshop.

I like this with not much color in sky but the you can see the shades of sunset sun in water.


Here's with more sunset colors in sky


And ya, this is the original jpeg shot

Fantasy Football WIN

It was my first fantasy football competition. And I WON :) and so did Spain after a long long time and their second big international cup.

I was surprised how addictive it can be. At some point, I was more interested in getting points from my selected players in here rather than who wins.

Final Tally

Winning Team (as you see, I was supporting both teams equally :))

Second HDR Try

Did some HDR processing for RAW images, taken during the bundoran trip.

Flickr Fav. Dump

NEWS

Google news was welcome change in online news with aggregated news from all over but there was something missing always, no interactivity n no videos (some youtube ones but not enough), and then I saw this one. Piclens, its a plugin for firefox and initially I installed it for flickr and over the months, its has improved a lot with news, videos, immersive environment. Just flick thru' news n images in the morning for a quick glance, or see images n videos of news with headlines. Still of things missing (some sort of personalization aspect would be very interesting) but going in right direction. Check it out!!

Serious Hot Dancing

:D

40 Million Paper Cups

This is a shot by Chris Jordan (via his TED talk) of the 40 Million paper cups we use in day in perspective and it equals a 40 story building or as seen with Statue of Liberty and if you watch closely, on the bottom left corner, the 2 dots like things are humans. Amazing, watch the talk for some more interesting facts.

My Celebrity Collage

I was reading a research proposal and came across MyHeritage.com in it and their celebrity lookalike face recognition tool. So I gave it a shot, no harm :D .. It has interesting results, what do you say :) .. I don't know half of them but other half are quite interesting.



back to work!!

Sunset Dancing

Sunset Dancing, originally uploaded by Mohan S.

Been a busy week and the upcoming week is quite busy also. Can't leave my blog behind also :)

So here is one of my favourite shot [shot by myself :D] taken on the North-West coast of Ireland in a town called Bundoran.

It was one of most beautiful sunsets I have ever seen.

On the Other Side

Thru' a ...., originally uploaded by Mohan S.

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

Baile Átha Cliath - Dublin - Town of the Hurdled Ford

To North-West

We did another road trip (basically all trips in Ireland are road trips :D) to north-west of Ireland and Northern Ireland for the june bank holiday weekend. I like that in Ireland, pick the car, drive and we are on the other side of the country in few hours. We went to a surfing town called Bundoran (map below), unfortunately I didn't do surfing (next time), but it was still quite good for several other reasons ;) and also for the Rory Gallagher music festival in Ballyshannon and some site-seeing in North Ireland.

Enjoy the pics below :) (esp. the sunset shots, it was one of most beautiful sunsets I saw, just gorgeous)

Saudade

Ponte Da Saudade [Bridge of Longing], originally uploaded by Jim Skea.

"Saudade" is a word in Portuguese meaning similar to longing, nostalgia and most importantly missing something; which is how I feel right now. Obv. not sure what else to write in this post.
Excerpt:
I can't be sure that this state of mind, is not of my own design
I wish there was an over the counter test, for this state of mind

Irish Landscape - Panoramic Shots

Cliffs of Moher - Doolin (West Coast)

Surf Beach - Bundoran (North West Coast)

PS: Click Images for Full Size View

Irish Alcohol Free Area

Alcohol Free Area, originally uploaded by Mohan S.

Feeling of the Day

warm, content, peaceful, colorful

Thanks for the wishes everyone.

Robot Mo

Just saw the latest trailer of the upcoming Pixar movie Wall*E (Kitsune Noir). Its def. gonna be the biggest movie of the year.

Check out the Mo Robot (disinfects patented germanprobe technology) in the trailer :)

Brucified - Springsteen @ Dublin 08

Bruce Springsteen, Dublin, RDS, 23.5.08, originally uploaded by scooter.john.

Last weekend, I went to see Bruce Springsteen "Boss", start of the european tour, at RDA Arena in Dublin. We had pitch tickets and were quite close to the stage. And it was one of the best concert I saw, brilliant, songs, music, energy, the band, bruce himself, the whole arena was filled with energy as long as he played.

Some more shots from the show:

The beginning - This particular camera shot was amazing, sun set on background and the boss shadow

he was totally enjoyin the crowd, as u can see :)

great great music, energy

end, but not really, they played loads of songs until drop tried, the band "e street band" were amazing

one of the final songs, so much energy at his age, damn.. we were just tired of jumping :)

Barca - Dump

Barcelona Flickr Dump

Myself - Did I?

I think I have never posted a picture of mine (just myself) on this blog. Time for a change. Here is it, my new look,

not really, its not. Proof of how windy Ireland can be. While we were on the west coast, we went for a walk along the cliffs in evening and it was quite windy and when we arrived back, a friend of mine took this shot and we were totally going nuts /laughing about how crazy I look in it :), I like craziness :D

So, do i look crazy enough :D?

I Like These Dump

I Like These set from my flickr sets

Eye on Dublin Dump

Some of the Dublin shots from last few months.

Hydrogen Atom - Laws of Physics - Next Chapter

Sometimes I miss not continuing on studying Physics (if you don't know, I did my BS in Physics), the derivation of equations, how science helps us in explaining the phenomena's going around us, doing experiments. Anyway, thats not the matter of discussion, I was watching TED again, and saw two very interesting n compelling talks on CERN Hydrogen Collider and String theory.
The first one is by "Rock Star Physicists" (thats how TED introduced) Brian Cox and how LHC at CERN will help us write the next chapter.


This one is by Brian Green (minuscule strands of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions) and has some very interesting visualization for understanding.

First HDR

Following on my first HDR post last week. I played around with the RAW images I took while on the trip to west coast and clifsfs of moher.

To start off, am using the following softwares:

• Windows Live Photo Gallery - browsing images
  
• PhotomatixPro 3.0 - for generating HDR images from single RAW files and for tone mapping (the most imp. step for HDR processing). And mentioned in various tutorials I read, it does a much better job than Photoshop, so if you wanna do HDR, go for PhotomatixPro
• Photoshop CS2 - for some final cleanups, adjustments. If you generate HDR from different exposures shots, you can do much more stuff in photoshop layering 3/4 different versions of the shot and combining with tone mapped version. As I was using single RAW file, i only did few minor adjustments for filtering etc.

Ok, so here are the original 2 images first (not exactly same, but similar):

Final, HDR processed images:

I like the second one better, the cliffs of moher one. The first seems very blue with clear blue sky and blue water. I didn pretty similar processing on both images. I followed this tutorial on youTube.

One thing, its an evolving exp.; the more you do it, the more you learn and get better in finding the right tone, texture for the HDR.

What do you think, do the images looks any good?

--

Some people think, its not true HDR becoz of single exposure RAW file and its just tone-mapping. Anyway just mentioning.

Sea Weed

Guess Who's Hand?, originally uploaded by Mohan S.

off-course now thats my hand in the foreground holding a sea weed (weed..*:~*) with irish flag in the background, flying high. I like it!

Does it look like a shot for FIAT ad?

2008-05-03 West Coast 1 041, originally uploaded by Mohan S.

hehe, just wondering. I think so it does :D

the grey-white house background with windows and a car turning in front :D

Eat Better

Interesting TED talk about "What's wrong with what we eat". Its not about vegetarianism, vegan, meat eaters, etc etc, but its about what we are eating & how we are putting entire planet at risk and how we can have better diet by improving our food - "The Real Food". 

Eat Better. We have to choose now!

Nikon RAW & Photoshop CS2 Problems

So last time, I posted about HDR and that I wanted to try it on some pictures of mine. And during my recent trip to the West Coast, I took some RAW pictures.

I own a Nikon D40 DSLR and am using Photoshop CS2. But there seems to be some issues with the plugins used in Photoshop CS2 not being able to read the NEF (Nikon's RAW file format).

There is lot of discussion on forums n on flickr about it and after searching in the forums here is the simplest solution (there are all sort of issues being raised in forums about it, uninstalling nikon softwares, re-installing CS2, for some it just works, for some it doesn't etc etc)

The problem lies in the Camera Raw plugin for Photoshop. But the currently avaliable version of Camera Raw i.e. 4.4.1 (supoprts D40) but doesn't support Photoshop CS2, min. requirement is Photoshop CS3. Great, its not that I am using version 6 or 7 of Photoshop, I have CS2, what now. I tried looking for older version of it, again surprisingly Adobe doesn't have any link on current version page to older versions.

Version 3.7 of Camera RAW is right version for Photoshop CS2. But after trying numerous times, I couldn't download the file from Adobe website, the link just doesn't work. Bit shite on Adobe part that it so complicated for such known problem and finding the correct version of Camera RAW. Everyone doesn't have the latest CS3 and why, no backward compatibilty.

Finally, I found version 3.7 here. Download the one for CS2. After downloading the file, go to

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Plug-Ins\CS2

and replace the older version of Camera Raw plugin with the 3.7 version you just downloaded (oh if the link above doesn't work, send me a message n I'll email the right version to you). Back up the version before replacing it with new one, just in case it doesn't work.

And finally, Photoshop is able to read the NEF files, so I'll post some HDR processed shots over the weekend. 

Why can't we make softwares which just work, didn't expected that from Photoshop (thou mebbe its just novices like myself, who get stuck with it).

I had to - Mr. Bean

As long as we are on topic of Punjabi Music (made famous mostly by UK Asian culture). This was hilarious.. Mr. Bean doing his moves on a Punjabi music :). Thou' am not sure if he actually did it but the music fits so perfectly on his moves.

Surprisingly Super Entertaining

Normally, am not big fan of reality shows and probably who is.. most of the time they are shite. But there is tiny bit something good about such shows also which help giving talented people a platform to perform. One such show is Britain Got Talent n I saw few episodes of "Britain Got Talent" last year and it was quite good (esp. the winner). Thou' in the end, when everyone is just singing (is singing the only talent left??) to win, it was sorta not what I liked about show but anyway its a good show. This year, it started nice, I saw this act n its the best, very enjoyable :) and it has quite a few things I enjoy n like .. Indian or Asian (UK asian cultural) Touch, Dancing, Michael Jackson, n Punjabi Music (remember Punjabi MC). Look at the crowd going crazy .. Enjoy..