Here we are with the second part of my Best Of, and in this post will be loaded of landscapes, taken around here in Ireland, and a few from Creete, and some from home, in Italy. There are even a few from Connemara that I never published on the blog, alonside from cityscapes / street photography, something I really enjoy to do, even if most of the people I meet on the streets things I'm a weirdo or I'm trying to steal their souls. So, I hope you will enjoy them and if you want to give your opinion, please leave a message in the comments box at the bottom of the page ;-)

Dublin

Now that I have a week of break from gigs I think it's better if I talk about some stuff I left behind, like the 2 days trip in Connemara I did this summer, or the photo shoot I did a couple of months ago for the band Fallen Rule, and I have also a couple of reviews to write about some of my gear, but before all of that, I just wanted to post some photos I took in late october and november around here, in Dublin, photos that are kinda lost in between the billion of photos of gigs, and I think they deserve a bit more attention, specially from me, like these ones I took between Townsend St / College Green, and Westland Row (where Pearse Station is):

(Buy it on RedBubble)

Tomorrow I'll have to take some promo shots for a local band, and as the band thought it was a great idea to take some photos on the Dublin Docklands, even if I already know that area quite well, I decided to go for a walk and to scout for some interesting places for tomorrow, as it's always a good idea to decide in advance where to shoot rather than wonder around until you find something. The place is quite interesting, and thankfully one of my favourite buildings, with related graffiti, is still there, and I'm talking about this one:

I love that wall. I know, it's a very simple graffiti, but the I love the mix of colours with the red of the wall, and hopefully I'll use it tomorrow as well!
Here some of the pictures I took today, for the long exposure ones I spent some time, while for the other ones not that much, it was just for me to photograph the places I'm going to use tomorrow, but at the end they are not bad shots.

This bank holiday has been pretty productive to me, as my girlfriend was working for the whole weekend, I have plenty of time to spend with my other love: photography. But going back a couple of days, on thursday I tried, again, to photograph a thing, that's the best word I can come up. It's a wall on the beach, in Sydney Parade (which it sounds like a place in Australia, but, big surprise, it's here in Dublin), and I dunno why they build it, for what reason, or who did it, but for me it's just a cool wall in the water.
If you want to go to see this place, here is the map:

View Larger Map

I tried to photograph it plenty of times, and I always got there with the low tide, all the fuckin times, and with the low tide that thing is pointless to photograph for me, even this time I tried, but it just doesn't work, it's not more than a "meh", so at the end the result, apart one single shot, was to photograph everything else but that wall.

This morning I woke up, and I saw something amazing: Dublin under snow! While most of dubliners will probably fall in pure terror, as most of irish people don't really handle snow very well (no offence my irish friends, but that's the truth). So in my mind I was already thinking to do some street photography before going to work, dreaming of a desaturated city under a snow storm (yes, I have photoshop in my mind as well), thinking what could be a good exposure to have the right effect, but then I realized that we are on the coast, and snow doesn't really last long here. In fact after 20 minutes, the snow disappear. Big disappointment.
But then I thought: "maybe it will snow again?! Let's bring my camera, with lenses, filters, memories, tripod, lunch in case".
It did snow, but it didn't really stick to the ground. Second big disappointment of the day.
So the day turned from "let's hunt a good shot!" to "fuck off life".
But thank to the crazy irish weather, after some pointless and useless snowfalls, around 6 the sun came out, so I tried to turn what became an useless day to photograph to something interesting, and I went straight to a building that I was thinking to photograph from a while, which is the one with the big Heineken logo in front. I don't think it's owned by Heineken, I think they just paid shit load of money to put their logo on that building, but who cares?
So at the end I brought home 3 shoots, a good one, a quite good one, and one that it's okay, but still better than nothing no?!