Bright golden autumn colour on one of Ireland's many back roads.

While some Irish thoroughfares get all the attention, The Dark Hedges and Grafton Street being two prime examples, the country is accessible from a dense network of small back roads that, in many places, are incredibly scenic.

Just colour here beside a small river, enough to make you want to stop and just take it all in for the few weeks of autumn every year.

The season is changing now and after lots of windy but warm weather recently most of the leaves are off the trees. The bare season of winter is nearly here.

Scenic and Colourful Irish Road in Autumn

Polarising filters are probably the most important filters in photography. 

To understand when to use polarisers, it is important to understand reflectance.

Simply put, reflectance is defined as a "measure of the ability of a surface to reflect light or other electromagnetic radiation". 

While the polariser hasn't changed the amount of light leaving the surface of the an object, in this case bracken on the hillside, it has remained the same - but the polariser has prevented some of that light from reaching the lens and sensor.

In this case, the striking green landscape of Ireland's Wicklow Mountains, we can easily see the difference between the polarised and non-polarised image.

Blue hour and golden hour are the ideal times of day for coastal landscape photography.

Here, a small sea stack and vertical cliffs on Ireland's Atlantic coast catch the end of the evening's direct light, the warmth of which lends its name to the time of day - the golden hour as the light half of the year ends in Ireland.

Panoramic Ireland run seascape and landscape photography classes, workshops and tours all year round and right through the winter in Ireland.

To find out more use the contact page or email me.

There's a magic to be had photographing landscapes, a dependence upon the weather and, at the coast, the tide.

Planning for time of day, to catch the golden hour and the tide at the right time of course takes some of the uncertainty away but the Irish weather can provide interesting challenges.

Users of Serif's Affinity Photo software have something big to look forward to in the coming week. 

The company have announced a major update of some kind coming to the line-up.

"...a next-level creative experience..."

Speculation is that it could be a video editing program that would add to the company's current photography, graphic design and desktop publishing offerings.

Or it could be an Adobe Lightroom style addition to Affinity Photo, a program that really has no competition yet.

As I mentioned in a previous post, in Irish tradition the winter has started with the beginning of the dark half of the year after Halloween.

But that doesn't mean that Ireland is not a destination for off season travel, on the contrary, with fewer crowds and some of the best light the months of November through to March are ideal for seascape photography in Ireland.

Here as well as shooting with the sun, we turned to photograph the sea cliffs with the sun setting behind.

It is a difficult photograph to shoot a landscape like this contre-jour but the movement and colour in the sky, coupled with some good post-processing has resulted in a fine image that is in contrast to shooting with the sun and its clear light (image coming soon in a subsequent post).

Making use of the texture and feeling of this deserted Irish beach at sunset.

I will be regularly running seascape photography workshops throughout the winter in Ireland, for more information contact me through the contact page or send me an email (up at the top of the page).

It was high summer. the start of August and after photographing a river woodland I stopped to photograph this scene.

In front of me, on this hot day in the Irish countryside, a long scene of distant heather-clad mountains with green lower slopes and a vast field of golden barley.

A big sky filled with clouds allowed a little blue to show.

At the same time I photographed bees and thistles.

A few weeks later I saw a tweet, of an Irish painter that I had not heard of before, referencing a landscape from County Mayo in Ireland's west. It was Across the Bog, Mayo by Jeremiah Hoad.

And I was struck by the similarities between this fine oil painting of an Irish bogland scene and my own recent image of the barley field with mountains.

Summer, or the light half of the year, ends at Halloween or more accurately, Samhain, in the Irish tradition.

Here, a sunset seascape from the Irish coast as the light half of the year ends, the Celtic new year begins and although this will be the dark half of the year, the light will be fantastic.

While daylength shortens now until the winter solstice on December 21st, what light we do get is often bright, clear and colourful. 

On those rainy, cloudy days where the sun really doesn't make an appearance the light is still great for photography.

Autumn, winter and spring are perfect seasons for photography and with the added bonus of fewer tourists, Ireland in winter should be a photographer's preference.

Join me, Panoramic Ireland, to learn how to photograph and to see Ireland. Tours and workshops available all year round.

If you are travelling through the streets of Galway you may well spot this unusual house with its horseshoe-shaped windows.

The quirky building was owned by horse-mad local man Michael Cunniss who spoke with Ireland's national broadcaster RTE in 1982.

A man before his time, Michael complained to the RTE reporter about the "...smelly old cars going along the road..." and he even kept a horse in the house that could watch TV through a hatch in to the living room.

It is common enough even today to see old forge buildings with horseshoe shaped doorways but nowhere else have I seen windows in this style.

Have you seen this house, or another similar?

Adobe's Lightroom is a powerful piece of software and sometimes it is necessary to change settings.

Here for example is one use, the standard settings for filenames on export can cause problems. If for example you have an image that has been edited in Photoshop and has the suffix -Edit like I do here then on export the entire filename can sometimes go missing.

Or if you work for different clients or publications then it is nice to apply their naming structure to exported images.

For me, I like to keep the original filename in as part of the export so that it makes finding images easier if a client has a query.

Even if a client has no specific requirements for naming images it is still useful to be able to identify or file away finished images based on the filename.

So I add some custom text based on where the image will be used, keep the original filename and sometimes add other information.

Thankfully Lightroom allows all this to be done quite easily.

Here's how:

1. Export the image using Ctrl+Shift+E or right click the image and choose Export > Export... as described here.

   

2. Here I have chosen to go with Filename and Custom Text (set on the main Export dialog so Insert > Filename and Insert > Custom Text followed by Done.

   

3. Check that the example filename is correct, here in the final image it shows correctly as Filename > Custom Text.

   

 That's it, you can now export your images with filenames that suit.

I hope this short tutorial has been useful, check back regularly for more or sign up for more information. Panoramic Ireland's workshops run all year round, in Ireland and online.

Autumn sunlight and the scenery of a tree tunnel of yew.

Ireland is full of scenic roadways, avenues of fine trees but some are more impressive than others.

Obviously I am talking about the Dark Hedges in County Antrim, and yet as here above there are many other equally beautiful avenues to walk through in Ireland.