A cloudy summer's day in the west of Ireland, 2008, and the crowd enthusiastically await the arrival of the cyclists in the Tour of Ireland.

Salthill, on the edge of Galway City marked the end of stage three of the five stage race and the world's greatest sprinter, Mark Cavendish, was making sure of a third win out of three on the flat sprint finish.

This cyclist, from the Isle of Man, a 35-stage winner of the Tour de France, more than any other in the race's 111-year history has retired after winning his final race in the Tour de France Prudential Singapore Criterium.

The previous day, in Loughrea, County Galway, a pair of excited fans declared "The world's greatest cyclist is racing right here in Loughrea!" And that accolade coming only three years after turning professional, having won four stges at the Tour de France a month before.

I had the privilege of photographing Mark Cavendish, known as the Manx Missile, in 2008 on the Tour of Ireland and again in 2015 on the Tour de France.

The cycling world will miss one of its all time greats.

Here we take a look at a new feature in October 2024's Adobe Lightroom (formerly known as Lightroom CC - I know it's confusing) - How to Edit in third party / external applications in Lightroom so not in one of Adobe's products such as Photoshop.

This process has been made a little easier now, so here are the steps.

As you can see here, I'm interested in editing this image of Ireland's largest sea arch Great Pollet which has strong partial lighting across its face.

Now let's say you're not a Photoshop user but you do use Lightroom, you also use a non-Adobe photo editing application such as Affinity Photo.

In Lightroom, right click on the image and choose Edit in > Browse...

Edit in > Browse..."/>

Then choose your app, here I have chosen Affinity's Photo.exe.

A dialog opens up, showing how to proceed; (1)make your edits in Photo (my chosen app), keeping Lightroom open in background, (2) Save your work in Photo then (3) Return to Lightroom.

Here I make my edits in Affinity Photo, let's say using the healing brish tool to remove dust spots. Then File > Save.

After the application, in this case Affinity Photo, opens, the Lightroom dialog changed to (1) Be sure your photo is saved and (2) Choose Finish and of course there is a Finish button to click to ensure the image is brought back into Lightroom. So I click Finish here after having already saved in Affinity Photo in the previous step.

The file now appears in Adobe Lightroom's filmstrip, seen here alongside the original RAW file, in this case as a TIF.

After having edited in your app, it will now appear as an option in future when you Right Click > Edit in > ...

I usually write about Adobe Lightroom Classic but if you're a regular reader here on Panoramic Ireland you will probably have seen my recent articles on Adobe Bridge, Lightroom and Photoshop.

Why not join me to learn how to photograph, use software and create images and stories that matter in Ireland's fine countryside.

It has been a late night here at Panoramic Ireland HQ (a field on the edge of Ireland) as the full moon, supermoon, harvest moon combo was partially eclipsed by Earth's shadow at 03:44 this morning.

Still processing images in the quiet of the cold night but here is the first from this fine celestial event, that saw clear skies across much of Ireland.

A small portion of the top of the Moon was cast into shadow as it moved partly into Earth's shadow.

There will be a total lunar eclipse visible from Ireland in March 2025.

Why not join me then, or between now and then for some astrophotography adventures in Ireland.

The razorbill is a native seabird to Ireland and to Scotland which is where this image is from, over on Mull just up the coast from my home county of Antrim right in the north east corner of Ireland.

Related to the puffin, the razorbill can often be seen nesting and breeding in colonies that include puffins, as well as fulmars along the Atlantic coasts of Ireland and Scotland.

Unlike the puffin, the razorbill is usually only seen as a plain black and white bird, with its distinctive line running from the bill back to its brown-iris eyes as seen in the image above.

But, when it opens its bill there is a flash of bright, almost golden yellow on the bird's palate.

This pair are engaging in mating behaviour but the bright yellow can also be useful for chicks being fed and razorbills often quarrel with each other with bills wide open in what is known as bill-gaping.

Each pair will only have one egg and both male and female feed the chick for approximately three weeks.

At around twenty days old the chicks follow the male into the ocean, leaping from the cliff and are fed by him until old enough to become self-sufficient.

Like fulmars, razorbills can live to forty years or more.

I have written about the fascinating fulmar before on Panoramic Ireland, here. The seabird is not native to Ireland nor Scotland, where I photographed this one.

Originally confined to a few islands in the Atlantic, off Iceland and Saint Kilda - a remote Scottish island the birds have now spread across Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England. Scotland is still home to 97% of the British population.

Young fulmars spend five years fully at sea, coming back to land to choose a colony after that but even then they won't breed for another few years. They can live for over forty years.

In this image you can see the tube-nose from which the tubenose family get their name, the birds possess a gland which helps to process, store then eject saline through the tube - salty water collected when diving for fish in the north Atlantic.

Fulmar comes from Norse, it means foul gull and relates to the stinking stomach oil that the bird regurgitates in order to deter threats. It matts the feathers of other birds and it covers other animals (humans too) with the stinky non-soluble fluid that can destroy clothes.

You've been warned - keep your distance! Enjoy these majestic fliers from afar.

Chris Shiflett brought his solo tour opener to Ireland last night, March 20th 2024 in the Green Room at The Academy on Abbey Street in Dublin.

Rumour has it the Foo Fighters guitarist was staying in Room 102 at one of Dublin's many fine hotels.

More dates include March 21st in Belfast then Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham and London.

News updates on his website here.

Storm Gerrit has raged across Ireland bringing stormy winds and rain in December 2023.

Here, a flooded landscape with water levels rising rapidly, covering ground passable just the day before as sunset approaches along with crepuscular rays in the colourful but ominous sky.

Storm Gerrit has brought severe winds, flooding and downed trees across Ireland as well as snow across parts of Scotland.

Storm Henk it seems will also be an incredibly windy event happening from Saturday December 30th bringing up to 100mph or 160km/h gusts of wind across the west of Ireland.

This will mark the third named storm, includig Pia, Gerrit and Henk to hit Ireland over Christmas and the New Year.

And expect more flooding.

From a photographic point of view, storms can provide opportunities to photograph amazing and incredible scenes but always with caution, particularly near the coast and watercourses.

Panoramic Ireland photographs in all weather, from the west of Ireland to inner city Dublin. Join me to learn more about landscape, street and architectural photography.

Storm Gerrit rolled in after Christmas this year, but in the calm between the storms with Pia denying Ireland a white Christmas, a break in the weather to give a beautiful Christmas Day sunset here in the west of Ireland.

Colour and cloud combined in the sky over Ireland's wild west as seen here.

2023 saw me photographing sunsets, sunrises and scenery from January to December.

Above, the latest gorgeous sunset and here another two.

One from the start of the year when there was little snow but enough here to be obvious in the landscape even if only at altitude.

And in the middle of the year, a late evening sunset of mountains, lakes and wooded islands.

Panoramic Ireland will of course be photographing throughout 2024 and you can join us on a photography workshop or tour in the Irish countryside.

Lots of colour in places as we head towards the end of October, the recent good spell of warm weather is over and colder, more usual, temperatures have followed.

A proliferation of non-green colours, but actually there is still plenty of green after a summer without extreme heat or an overabundance of sunshine.

It's an incredibly scenic time of year here in Ireland and perfect for photography even if we can't guarantee the weather it's always possible to photograph interesting scenes in the right lighting.

Join Panoramic Ireland to photograph in Ireland, in autumn, winter, spring and summer.

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.