Damien Mulley

Ryan from Rymus.net is one of the first Photobloggers I encountered and I really like his photos. He is the Official Photographer for the Irish Blog Awards, long may he do that and I still must get round to booking him to do my family photo which I was meant to do months back. Please do visit his site and subscribe.

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First and foremost, Kudos to Damien for his continued drive to get Irish photobloggers noticed. I can’t help but think that without his seemingly tireless efforts, I for one would not have gotten far beyond filling flickr with my own special brand of ‘shoot and hope for the best’.

So needless to say I was delighted when he contacted me about being a guest photoblogger. It’s just not something you shy away from! Of the many thousands of photos I have uploaded on the web so far, picking just two seemed like a bewildering task. As usual, instead of trying to please the masses and choosing what the public seem to like, I’ll give you two that I like. Hopefully the public will approve…

Taken back when my first DSLR was in it’s infancy, when I’d just taken the plunge and spent my hard earned money I was all too green and needed to get back to using SLR’s after languishing so long in the territory of compact cameras. I went to Inniscarra Dam, just west of Cork city beyond Ballincollig with the intention of practising on the fly fishermen that regularly visit the area. After arriving and finding the river without a single fisherman, I turned my cheap, second hand zoom lens on the water falling from the top of the dam. Shooting through the railings which prevented me from getting any closer to the action, I managed to catch this heron almost posing in front of the cascading water.

I’m often accused of photoshopping the hell out of this image to get the ‘pint of Guinness’ look (as some people have put it). The simple truth is that there is practically no work done on it. Not because I was supremely confident of the image’s quality, but because I didn’t have photoshop at that stage, let alone did I know how to use it! I’ll also have to thank the fence I was leaning against while taking the photo for the effect on the edges of the photo.

I still haven’t managed to get any photos of anyone fly fishing…

The second photo would have to be this one;

After a seemingly endless morning of floating around the city trying to get photos for the TodayFM ‘Us’ project (and having met Donncha who was doing the exact same thing), I made the decision to leave the masses behind and head to the beach. In what seemed afterward like divine intervention, that October 1st saw a huge surfing competition take place on Garrettstown beach near Kinsale. After sitting on the sand taking many hundreds of action shots, I grabbed a sequence of a windsurfer moving at speed across the very top of a breaking wave with the same cheap lens (I did only have three lenses in my bag back then) as the first shot.

I love this shot for several reasons. Two of the main reasons would be because it inspired me to spend more time at the beach taking surfing photography and because it represents the first sale I ever made. Before leaving the beach, I was approached by one of the surfers who asked for my contact details. I gave him my flickr address and some weeks later I was contacted by the very man in the photo. We arranged a huge print, he had it professionally mounted & framed and I can only presume it’s hanging on someone’s wall right now.

I was hooked. The buzz of a single sale turned what was up to then a passive hobby into an obsession. It’s more the knowledge that what I’ve created is appreciated by an audience wider than me and my family rather than the financial gain. Not saying that the money doesn’t help… but it’s not what drives me.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 12:45 pm and is filed under blogs, irishblogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.