New Photo editor. Adobe and the 2nd Affinity

God rays on Christmas Day 2016, on Slievenamon

The difference between a phone cam and a SLR 'Real' beast.

Christmas morning on Slievenamon, other lunatics were there too. 15 degrees C !

Happy Christmas

The Wexford Carol.

Ó, tagaig' uile is adhraigí

An leanbh cneasta sa chró 'na luí

Is cuimhnígí ar ghrá an Rí

A thug dár saoradh anocht an Naí.

 

Good people all, this Christmas time,

Consider well and bear in mind

What our good God for us has done

In sending his beloved son

With Mary holy we should pray,

To God with love this Christmas Day

In Bethlehem upon that morn,

There was a blessed Messiah born.

 

Near Bethlehem did shepherds keep

Their flocks of lambs and feeding sheep

To whom God's angel did appear

Which put the shepherds in great fear

Arise and go, the angels said

To Bethlehem, be not afraid

For there you'll find, this happy morn

A princely babe, sweet Jesus, born.

 

With thankful heart and joyful mind

The shepherds went the babe to find

And as God's angel had foretold

They did our Saviour Christ behold

Within a manger he was laid

And by his side a virgin maid

Attending on the Lord of Life

Who came on earth to end all strife.

 

 

 

Knockroe Megalithic Tomb on the 21th of Dec 2016

There was about 50 people standing awaiting a visible sunrise that never arrived.
I could've gone the day before, I could even have gone this morning, and found a clear as crystal sky's. In truth, the mid winter or mid summer isn't, nor wasn't a spot on precise day, but a bracketing of 3/4 days either side of the active solstice.
Anywoos, here's a shot of a modern day druid. And the bottom two are of the evening passage tomb.
                                                             Click to embiggen.

To those who want a bit more meat this is the Jstor connection to the The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland
  https://www.jstor.org/stable/25509043?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

 

2016

I'm awaiting the 21st so I can go up to the megalithic tomb and welcome in the next year. Yeah-yeah, I know the Celtic new year began at Halloween. But no matter how dedicated I tell myself I am I can't get that one hooked and sunk in my head.
Anyhoos, 2016 was shit !. I could pussyfoot about with euphemisms, but that is simply beyond what I'm capable of caring about quite frankly. It was as bad as 2011, but different.
It was the kind of year if you were walking down an otherwise dry road and at one spot, rain gathered, and formed a pool. It is exactly at that instant in time a car would come and soak you.


P.S. OK, Christmas lights are up and all those bits I bought after Christmas last year. And I totally forgot I had one of those flashing optic fiber trees. Not a big one only about 3 ft, and maybe a bit, say 40 inches. 
 

Browser issues.

For years I was a Firefox man. But something occurred a few years ago and it became very clunky, and frankly just a tad weird.
Now I've found this to occur with all other browsers after a while. Opera was good for a while there, but it went off the wall. Then awhile back I moved to Googles Chrome and that seemed to do the job adequately.
Then a few weeks back I noticed that my Facebook Ad feed was showing me content that wasn't dealt with on Facebook leading me to wonder if Chrome was aiding Facebook to target my general searches.
Now I'm well aware that facebook uses their algorithms to target Ad's to those using it, and I'm generally fine with that. Where I'm not fine is with them blundering through my system with the goal of selling me to some local business. 

Rose window of IMMA

The figures in the middle of the window are larger than life sized. Just to give an idea of the scale of the thing.

A classic colonnade at IMMA

 I prefer the B&W.

A Symposium, and a visit to a lovely exhibition

I think the best portraitist in the last 80 years was Lucian Freud. And I think he is so important to the Art world that he outshines his grandfather, Sigmund.
He had a very interesting live. Born in '23 in Berlin and moved to UK in '32 just as the hell inflicted on his co-religionists by the Nazis  was about to start.
The first major art exhibition was just before the end of the WW2 and he never really looked back.

I encountered his work quite some time ago, and it was at the time he was being vilified for presenting what was called fat ugly women. But I felt that his work showed the real, in those people, not just the plastic visage they awarded to the public. There is a bluntness to these works, but without coarseness. To give an idea. Today I saw an eye formed with three strokes of a brush, and another with four. Three strokes and three different colours, side by side, and one eye formed. None of your shading, and forming. None of the straight clean line. Nope, just the brush and the paint.

With the symposium I was hoping for something else. It was titled The Artist and the State. But I took it more to mean the Irish State but it really meant the relationship with how Palestinian, and Aboriginal in Australia, reacted to the Israeli and Federal Oz state and how it reacted to them. Some of it quite quite scary truth be told.

All in all there was about 120 people at the event. More or less filling the great chamber of the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham (IMMA).

This was in front of the reception area. I don't know what or who it is, but I really find it amusing. You see it could be a play on Irish mythology's connection to the Hare, or it could had a Beatrix Potter Brer Rabbit (Brother), or even a Star Wars connection with a I cannot remember who it is but there's a clan of them in there someplace.

Slievenamon today.

 This is a crop of the top one using the golden ratio.