Out for Coffee

Last weekend I took a break from the thesis writing I've been doing lately and headed out to Dalkey to meet a friend of mine and of course I took my camera along. We wandered along the coast in search of a seal we had seen earlier in the day and ended up following a yacht which was slowly making its way south.

Yacht and Dalkey Island

It was a typical "soft" day in Ireland with plenty of clouds and the occasional rain shower. During one of these showers we sheltered in a coffee shop called Mugs, which I highly recommend and this gave me a chance to play with my 35mm 1.8 lens again. Shooting wide open allowed me to capture our food and drink with a really shallow depth of field and gave me results I really liked. I'm sure if I had more time to play around before our coffees got cold I could of achieved better but I was just glad to get a few photos for the first time in a while. 

Sold My First License

 

Samuel Beckett Bridge and Convention Centre, Dublin  .

Nearly a year to the day since I started shooting with my DSLR and I sold my first license. It all came about in an unexpected way. I have many photos on flickr and I recieved a flickr mail from a website designer in Cork who was looking for an image of the Samuel Beckett bridge in Dublin. We emailed back and forth for a few days working out a price based on how the image would be used etc. This was a really new thing for me so I consulted websites including Getty (which suprisingly has no images of the Beckett bridge) and Current Photographer and I'm still not sure if I priced appropriately.

Yesterday the cheque arrived and the photo is now up on the 'Franc in the city' website. I was amazed at how easy the whole process was and of course was very chuffed to have my photo selected and used. The whole event really highlighted the importance of keywording all your photos so they can be found. Now I must finished tagging all my smugmug photos.