Antrim's Dark Hedges are famous for mature beech trees but each year sees several fewer making the iconic road feel less like an avenue.

After scheduled maintenance saw six trees of the famous Dark Hedges removed in late 2023, Storm Isha in January 2024 brought down another three of the beeches.

Large gaps have appeared now in sections of the avenue, and whilst new trees have been planted it seems that the Dark Hedges will disappear for the best part of a century until the replacement beech trees have matured. 

Here, images from April 2024 on a wet and windy day on Ireland's most photographed road. 

Join me, Panoramic Ireland, to photograph on Ireland's Antrim Coast or Wicklow.

It was a warm evening in the west of Ireland last summer when we stopped to photograph at the famous Pine Island in Connemara, the western part of Galway.

There wasn't much sunlight left as clouds rolled in for a wet and windy finish to the day but the calm conditions we encountered here made the day's photography more than worthwhile.

An almost perfect reflection, low cloud wisping across the mountains and colourful sunset skies created an image that many say remind them of other places, not so much Ireland.

Even from those who have been here, the scenery is more reminiscent of tropical locales such as the Serengeti in Tanzania.

Pine Island is a place I visit often, join me to improve your photography in Ireland this year - places available throughout 2024.

Dublin's Portobello is a large block of the south inner city stretching from the Grand Canal in the south to Kevin Street at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in the north and from Clanbrassil Street in the west to the eastern boundary at Wexford/Camden/Richmond Streets.

Comprising the leafy canal, leafy parks and leafy avenues this is one of Dublin's most desirable neighbourhoods.

Portobello lies within easy walking distance of the city centre, the Luas runs close by at Charlemont and buses head in and out along the south circular road.

Griffith College sits close by and anyone familar with the area will know of the area's regeneration over recent years.

Parts of Portobello have seen new developments, particularly in the east close to Richmond Street.

Portobello is definitely a sought after place to live.

Here's a fine property that I recently had the privilege of viewing, up for sale currently - but I'm sure not for long.

The beautifully proportioned front room is a perfect cube, looking out onto a quiet residential street with plenty of parking for residents.

This three bedroom, three bath villa-style house is on the market for €775,000 with Owen Reilly, find out more here: https://www.myhome.ie/residential/brochure/25-ovoca-road-portobello-dublin/4735851

Located just steps away from renowned eatery Bibi's, 25 Ovoca Road is a perfect location for those who want to be close to the action but live in a quiet, residential area.

Ireland's fine scenery, as in a recent post looks as good in grey and cloudy weather as in sunshine and blue skies.

A case in point, here in the northwest, in County Donegal this landscape of granite mountains covered in a soft, boggy carpet with just delicate highlights and shadows across the empty scene.

This, a glaciated valley features steep sides hundreds of metres in height.

Join me, Panoramic Ireland, to photograph landscapes like these.

I don't use my mobile phone for serious photography but I do often take personal images, videos and quick overviews of landscape scenes when making long exposures for instance.

But I know that so many do use mobiles for photography, often it's their main or only camera, but the file formats being used now can pose problems for some computers and programs.

One in particular is the HEIC or HEIF format.

HEIC, or High Efficiency Image Container, is a relatively new image file format that was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It's also known as HEIF (High Efficiency Image Format), and HEIC is the file extension for image files stored in HEIF.

HEIC was introduced in 2015 by the MPEG. It's a part of MPEG-H Part 12 (ISO/IEC 23008-12) and was largely popularised by Apple, who started using it as the default format for photos on iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra in 2017, replacing the JPEG format.

Advantages of HEIC Over JPEG:

1.  Size Efficiency: The most significant advantage of HEIC over JPG is its superior compression. HEIC images are typically half the file size of JPG images at the same quality level. This means you can store twice as many photos in the same amount of space.
2.  Support for More Features: Unlike JPEG, the HEIC format supports 16-bit color depth, as compared to JPEG's 8-bit. This results in a wider range of colors and greater color accuracy. HEIC also supports transparency like PNGs and can store image sequences, similar to GIFs. Furthermore, it can store additional data like burst photos, live photos, or image editing settings within the same file.
3.  Lossless Compression: HEIC also supports lossless image compression, meaning no image quality is lost when the image is compressed.

Disadvantages of HEIC Over JPEG:

1.  Compatibility: Not all operating systems, applications, or devices support HEIC natively. For example, older versions of Windows or Android do not support it without additional software. However, newer versions of these platforms and many modern web browsers have begun to include native support.
2.  Conversion Issues: Because of the lack of universal support, you may frequently need to convert HEIC images to JPEGs or other formats, which can be an additional hassle.
3.  Processing Power: The better compression algorithms in HEIC require more processing power to encode and decode. This might result in slower performance on older hardware.

It's worth noting that, despite its disadvantages, the adoption of the HEIC format is growing due to its advantages, particularly in the era of high-resolution cameras and limited storage space on devices.

So how easy it is to make use of the images depends on your system, but using Photoshop it is easy to process and convert HEIC to JPG, TIFF or PSD; here's how using Image Processor in Adobe Photoshop:

1. Open Photoshop 2023
2. Click on File > Scripts > Image Processor

A window will open with lots of options, for this we simply:

1. Choose the location of your source images, it could be files already open in Photoshop or it could be a folder, here my source images are in Q:\Photos-001 (2) and I don't want to include any sub-folders this time
2. Choose the destination of your processed images, it could be the same location, like I have chosen or select another location on a different drive for instance
3. Choose the output file types, here I have chosen both JPEG and TIFF but you can choose one or both as well as adding PSD output. There are some options here, JPEG Quality, Convert Profile to sRGB etc. I didn't want to resize to specific dimensions
4. Here you can choose to run an action from your default and saved Photoshop actions, you can also add copyright information and add the ICC profile.
5. Hit Run at the top right

That's it, Photoshop will run, process the images and create the folders such as JPEG / TIFF / PSD with those files added.

You now have your HEIC images converted to other formats.

Join me in 2023, 2024 and beyond to learn how to make better images in Ireland from photographing to post-processing using Photoshop.

There is little more enjoyable in spring than walking through a woodland filled with bluebells.

Here, a path leading through the scene deeper into the forest.

Bluebells Hyacinthoides non-scripta carpet hillsides and woodlands in April and May each year in Ireland.

And here on the photography workshop in the Irish countryside saw us photograph in ideal conditions with sidelighting that wasn't too strong, little wind and we moved on to some of the area's rivers afterwards.

Join me in Ireland to photograph scenes like this, bluebells are gone now for the year but Ireland has something of interest to photograph all year round.

Sidelighting, sunshine and shadow in the mountains from this week's visit to the wild landscapes of the West of Ireland.

We have had very fine weather this week in Ireland, with Sunday being the hottest day of 2023 so far.

I headed through the wide open spaces of Connemara to meet ES and JS who had arrived from the US, we met on location for an early morning photography workshop on photographing panoramic images.

And where better to photograph panoramas than here in the wide, wild west.

Both ES and JS are keen photographers although neither had made panoramas before. So for the morning here we made panorama after panorama.

First off the warm morning sidelighting and shadows on craggy mountains.

To learn how to photograph panoramas using your current camera including how to choose a location, camera settings and post-processing using multiple software contact me here at Panoramic Ireland.

Sidelighting in Ireland's Wicklow Mountains.

The scenic wilderness of the Wicklow mountain landscape is quite unlike anywhere else in Ireland, especially when combined with unusual cloud and weather patterns.

Here, sidelighting from late evening sunshine breaks through high cloud and illuminates the remote valleys.

2023 is a good year to visit Ireland, join Panoramic Ireland to photograph in Wicklow as well as Connemara, Dingle and Antrim's Giant's Causeway.

Sometimes, particularly when moving folders between drives, Lightroom will show only the folder with images in the left hand pane without regard to actual folder hierarchy on the drive.

Read on for more on how to keep Lightroom tidy as you like it.

See the image here, the folders 2008-01-28, 2017-08-29 and 2018-01-07 are all located in folders based on year, so 2008, 2017 and 2018 respectively.

Panoramic Ireland's Dublin Photo Tours don't stop during the winter, we enjoy photographing all year round in Dublin and throughout Ireland.

Just have a look through the Blog section for more.

Here from one of our photography workshops in Dublin this week, the colours of the Convention Centre set to those of the Irish Tricolour - Green, White and Orange.

And of course, this time of year is a good point to think about buying a voucher for friends and family to use throughout the year.