Clare Glens

Lisa Hannigan

After my recent dearth of photography, I have thankfully picked it up again in earnest. Coinciding with the first decent weather of the year, I and fifteen members of the University Photo Society took a trip to a part-animal-sanctuary-part-business called Animal Magic. I took a record breaking and hard-drive-busting 1,036 photos. I haven't had so much fun, in both photographic and everyday terms, in quite a long time. Animal Magic contains a veritable menagerie of animals: falcons, kestrels, doves, owls, spiders, snakes, dogs, skunks and hedgehogs can be counted amongst its lucky inhabitants. I say lucky because although many of the animals were rescued from bad injuries and awful circumstances, they now have the pleasure of being in the care of two of the most passionate and enthusiastic animal lovers I've ever met. I've never had much of an affinity for animals, but after this outing that has definitely changed somewhat. I've rediscovered a portion of that child-like wonder for animals that one gets from a first visit to a zoo.

On to the photography side of things: We were extremely lucky as we were able to walk around and take photos of these amazing birds of prey, and the various other animals pretty much uninhibited. Thanks to this, I came away with some decent static images of the birds. After this, they flew some of the birds of prey for us. Wildlife photography is hard. I mean really hard. I've never done anything like this before, and found it utterly impossible to focus on the birds fast enough to get any post-worthy shots.

Still, even with this, I took many photos that I am extremely happy with. It was like a month of photographic opportunities compressed into one day. Anyway, here are the results:

Spider Web

Another from yesterday, in Lough Gur.

Lough Gur

I haven't felt very motivated this summer - the rain is my excuse. I don't know how much that is actually true, and whether I've just been lazy, but for the kind of photography I usually do - landscape in particular - wet weather just makes things unpleasant and unproductive. Today was one of the first nice days in the last few months, so off I went... I feel very out of practice, which is something I wasn't really expecting. My 'eye' is definitely not working as well as it was a few months ago or last year. Still, it was nice to do something again.

This photo is my first attempt at using the localised corrections in Lightroom 2. I've never used photoshop or any other localised correction programme before, so this was all new to me. I like the results, but not the extra time needed. This will probably look awful to me in a few months anyway.